While many Jumbos remained on the Hill yesterday, flooding the campus center to watch inauguration speeches and grumpily sitting through classes, hoping to be released early, some Tufts students braved the snowy highways and traveled to Washington, D.C., to witness President Barack Obama's acceptance speech and absorb the atmosphere of the historic day.
And Tufts students certainly weren't the only enthusiastic Obama supporters to skip school and make the trip. College students from across the country made their way to Washington to help make up the crowd of an estimated 2 million people, according to CNN.com.
Despite inauspicious weather conditions and other obstacles, many students explained that going to the ceremony was worth the effort, to say the least.
"The weather was terrible from Boston. There was snow and fog and traffic everywhere," sophomore Julia Stimeck said. "I think everyone is just so pumped to be here that no one is being rude or pushy. It's a great scene ... [and] it'll be something that I can say I've done for years to come."
Freshman Tim Lesinski agreed that going to Washington was an opportunity he couldn't pass up.
"I decided it would be too important of an event to miss and to just watch from TV because I feel that it will eventually become a timely moment in our generation," he said. "I wouldn't just want to sit home and watch."
Many students who were first-time voters in the last election said that watching the inauguration felt like a personal victory.
"I went up to New Hampshire almost every weekend and made ... calls for Obama," Lesinski said. "It gave me a stake in his election."
Sophomore Julie Bloch shared Lesinski's sentiments. "I've always wanted to go to the inauguration of the first person I vote for, and I also really really like Obama. I've read his books, and I've been following his political career for quite some time now," she said. "I think that if it had been a Republican [that had been elected] I wouldn't have gone."
Although many students attended the ceremony for similar reasons, their experiences varied, especially among those who had tickets to the event and those who did not.
Tufts alumni Liz Yates (LA '08) and Bruce Hamilton (LA '08), who now live in the D.C. area and did not have tickets to the event, said that they enjoyed the atmosphere of the huge non-ticketed crowd. "I think it [would have been] really cool to actually be able to look and see Barack Obama's face the moment he [became] the 44th president ... but I also think that being in the crowd is cool in some ways, because there are so many people who came from so far away who care so much, and there are so many families with kids -- from Oklahoma, from South Carolina -- and most of those people don't get tickets," Yates said.
"I think that part of what makes this whole thing so cool anyway is that there are so many millions of people coming from everywhere, and the idea of opening up the mall really does sort of hold up the ideal that this is something for everybody," Hamilton added. "[On Monday], our friend was in the VIP section and he was really close and saw a lot of stuff, but he said that his section was really subdued. So he [could] see them, but he wasn't living the energy of our section, which was just jumping up and down, screaming and chanting, waving flags -- I mean, that is really cool."
Sophomore Casey Burrows, who is also a copy editor for the Daily, said her experience as a ticketed audience member was hectic but exciting. "It was amazing," Burrows said. "It was stressful getting in, because they had opened the gates before they said they would, so ... we found out we had to sprint four blocks and cut the line, but we ended up getting amazing spots.
"It was a little more stressful than I was expecting," she continued. "But it was overall one of the best experiences of my life. The people were just so genuine and so nice and everyone was just wanting to talk to everyone else and hear each other's stories."
Bloch said that although the day as a whole was remarkable, there were some aspects of the ceremony that she didn't enjoy.
"I didn't really like the religious sermon," Bloch said. "To me that's not what we should be focusing on. But I also understand that it's a tradition in our country ... There was ... a man booing at that point, and I thought that was going a little bit far.
The majority of scheduled classes were still held yesterday -- despite low attendance in some -- but most professors didn't seem to blame students for missing school to attend the event.
"I told all my teachers [that I would not be in class], and nobody had a problem with it," Bloch said. "I think everyone was so excited about it that they wouldn't fault anyone for going."
Yates said that if anything, she would feel guilty about not going herself. "I think I definitely would have come if I lived in Boston or some place close by," she said. "It's events like this that serve as a sort of reminder that the basic issues of race and social change are ongoing. ... When you're in college, you're talking about it all the time ... but it's events like these that inspire you to keep thinking about it, keep discussing it, and keep making it a part of your character."
