It's a Small World After All

The first two weeks of the first ACE summer, most conversations are ruled by three topics: where did you go to undergrad, what was your major, and where are you going in ACE? As I happen to have met a lot of people from a lot of different schools during my own four years of undergrad, when I heard a college I was familiar with, I would throw names out to see if there was a common acquaintance. I actually managed to find a pretty big net of odd connections.

I knew all the people on the left in the picture below as many as four years before starting ACE; the people on the right are fellow ACErs who know the left-side folks somehow. Some of the connections aren't too surprising -- if you happen to go to the same school and both go to Mass, odds are you'll know each other at least by name -- but some are really random, like the twins going to grade school with another girl in my VIDES group. All in all, I think it's pretty nifty.

(I think the errors and squiggles make it more amusing, don't you?)

Meanwhile, I have a geographic connection to most of my roommates:

• Andrew is from a town about 40 minutes from my family in California and went to Gonzaga in Spokane, where I spent a good chunk of my childhood.
• Steph is from the Seattle area, where I spent an even bigger chunk of my time.
• Savannah is from Colorado, where I also lived, and lived with her cousin in Seattle for a semester when we were in high school.

It's a small, small world.