Divine Secrets of the Wellesley Sisterhood

Three banners hang at Wellesley College’s entrance at 106 Central Street. The first says, “Women Who Will.” The next says, “Make a Difference.” The last says, “In the World.” I just booked a plane ticket to Logan Airport to attend my 20-year Wellesley class of 2006 reunion this Memorial Day weekend. It will be lovely to catch up with my old friends and classmates, many of whom recently turned 40.

My Wellesley experience felt like an all-girls summer camp, an ivory tower, and a finishing school combined. I was not disappointed once I first toured campus for the Admitted Students Weekend and met several alumnae panelists talking about how Wellesley is the “old girls’ network.” When my little brother visited, he cried and said that he wanted to go to Wellesley because of the unlimited ice cream in the dining halls, made possible by a donation from a wealthy alumna. I knew I wanted to attend a school that had a reputation for shaping strong female leaders, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, Madeleine Korbel Albright, and Diane Sawyer.

I found that Wellesley had plenty of social opportunities in the form of mixers. For one, there was the Tower Court mixer, where young women hosted bachelors in the fall and were expected to meet their future husbands. The gentlemen who attended were undergraduates and graduate students from neighboring universities such as Harvard, Tufts, MIT, and Northeastern. There was a dating service called the MIT Matchup, where singles posted online profiles and corresponded with local matches. There was a joint Wellesley first-years and Harvard Business School freshman mixer, at which I met cheeky, irreverent older guys. There was my summer stint at Phi Delta Theta, an MIT fraternity, where I got to know my roommates and future Silicon Valley coders and entrepreneurs.

I also found that the friendships I nurtured would last for a lifetime. My best friend, Christina Wang Kloster ’05, was someone I knew through Newman Catholic Ministry on campus but reconnected with at St. Joseph’s young adults’ church group at the NYU parish. We were both young adults finding our way through New York City, where she was studying for her Masters in Business Administration at Stern while I was a law student at Cardozo. When I failed the bar exam for the first time, she took me out to a fancy dinner and called it a Resilience Party. When she got married, I served as maid of honor and played a prank on her by getting the guys in our church to serenade her with Carly Rae Jepsen’s song, “Call Me Maybe.” Christina  also encouraged me to get into better health by jogging with her around the Jackie Onassis Reservoir in Central Park doing interval training. She generously allowed me to build up my speed with a combination of running and walking, but she was far faster than me. Without my lifelong Wellesley sister, I would never have found my best shape or my best self.