I’m Officially A Spelman College Senior: What Earning The Arch Means To Me

There is a version of Spelman womanhood you cannot rush. You can only build toward it, year by year, until the Arch finally recognizes what you have already become. This year, that recognition is mine.

I did not choose Spelman College by accident. My aunt walked through that same Arch years before I did, and her stories about this place shaped me long before I ever set foot on campus. A rising senior from Philadelphia majoring in International Studies, I came here to be shaped by a legacy of Black women who built things for themselves and each other. I just did not know, until I got here, how long that shaping would take, or how much of it would happen quietly, in rooms no one was watching.

The March Through the Alumnae Arch is one of Spelman’s most sacred traditions. During Commencement Weekend, alumnae and graduating seniors gather on the yard dressed in white, organized class by class, and walk together through the Alumnae Arch in order of seniority, oldest classes first, graduating seniors last. It is the moment a student officially becomes an alumna, stepping through a structure that generations of Spelman women have passed through before her. It sounds simple. It is not. It is the physical marking of a transformation that has already been happening for years.

Spelman College Graduates, May 2025. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)

I moved into my apartment for senior year a few weeks ago, and something about signing that lease made the whole thing feel real in a way that syllabi and move in days never quite have.

This is the year. Not the year I arrive, not the year I am still finding my footing, but the year everything I have been quietly building finally comes into full view. The Arch is not really about the structure itself. It is about what it means to have earned the right to walk through it. For four years, Spelman women move around that Arch, past it, near it, always aware of what it represents and always a little too early to claim it. Then spring comes, and something shifts. You are given permission to become fully what you have been working toward the whole time. That is the beauty of it. It is not handed to you at the start. It is earned through every ordinary day that came before it, the early mornings, the group projects, the sisterhood built in dorm hallways and dining hall conversations, the version of yourself you slowly grew into without quite noticing.

Becoming does not happen all at once. Nobody wakes up a Spelman woman. You become one in pieces, in years, through the quiet accumulation of showing up. I have poured myself into this campus for three years, building a platform that gives students a real voice on their own terms, leading a publication that shapes how we tell our own stories, chasing stories that mattered long after the room had emptied out. None of that made me a Spelman woman on its own. But all of it together is what the Arch will finally recognize in the spring.

This is not just a tradition I am walking toward. It is the legacy I have spent three years creating for myself. I did not inherit a blueprint for what this journey should look like. I built one, choice by choice, story by story, until it became something real enough to stand on. That is its own kind of inheritance, one I get to hand forward to whoever comes after me, whether that is a future daughter, a niece, or a young woman on this campus right now who is building something of her own and needs proof that it can be done.

There is something particularly moving about knowing this year is not just another year of college. It is the last full cycle of becoming before the moment of arrival. Every tradition feels different now, weighted in a way it never was as an underclassman, because I know where it is leading. This senior year is not preparation. It is the thing I built with my own hands, finally coming into view.

(Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)

What strikes me most is how personal and how communal this feels at once. I will walk through that Arch alone, on my own steps, in my own moment. But I will also be surrounded by women who have shaped me and been shaped by me in return, women who know exactly what those years cost and what they gave back. That duality, singular and shared, is what makes Spelman womanhood, and the legacy I am building within it, feel like something worth every year it took to earn.

So, this year, I am holding onto the in between. The last first day of classes. The last stretch where everything still feels like preparation instead of arrival. Because when spring comes and I finally walk through that Arch, I want to know I felt every part of the journey that made me ready for it, and I want to know the legacy waiting on the other side is one I built myself.