March 28, 2024

“I look at it as if I’m like an artist, like a person who has a pallet of colors to paint my path with,” senior marketing major DaShawn Glover, ‘16, said in an interview last Friday.
“I feel like we all have a shade, a color, that we can add to our own paths, and when we combine them, it turns into this masterpiece,” Glover said. “But when we refuse to use that, when we refuse to speak up and be our own selves, sometimes we wind up just basically borrowing someone else’s paint brush and using their color.”
This is an experience Glover knows firsthand from his time at Witt in 2012.
As a freshman, Glover said, “Friends were probably the most important. It was to the point where I had let my grades slack a little bit because I enjoyed hanging out with friends more than I prioritized studying.”
But sometimes the enjoyment bled into striving and self-compromise.
“I was trying to fit in freshman and sophomore year with friend groups I had no business trying to fit in with,” Glover said. “I wanted to be accepted by them, even though I didn’t need their acceptance.”
So what changed Glover?
“I was just tired of doing the same thing every single weekend. It was: go to class [Monday and Tuesday], Wednesday — turn up because it’s Witt Wednesday — then go back to class with a hangover until Friday; then, we go to turn up again Friday and Saturday, feeling bad Sunday with all this homework to do. It was a really unproductive cycle,” he said.
Glover’s own experience was formative for his ideas on what he believed the world needs: “honesty” and for “people to be themselves.”
“What the world isn’t really ready for is people who are honest,” Glover said. “It wouldn’t necessarily be individualism, as much as [people] just understanding who they are. If people understood who they were, then they could be themselves and then they could be honest.”
“With honesty, people would be able to see more of the picture,” he said.
Since freshman year, priorities have changed for Glover.
“In a vague way, I would say time [has changed me],” Glover said. “It’s not like friends aren’t as important to me as they were before, but I just can’t give them as much time.”
As a senior transitioning from his Witt-home to his larger world-home, Glover spoke on what he needed from the world in order to feel at home in it.
“I need the world to be more accepting of people who are not like other people — to accept originality, creativity, independence,” he said.
And one step to get there?
“We need to journal,” he said, admitting his bias, given that he’s a writer. “You find out a lot more about yourself when you write stuff down, and it doesn’t have to be super elaborate. The more you open up about who you are, the more you understand.”
Glover is hopeful that we can accomplish this.
“It starts with baby steps, and eventually, we can run in our own path. We can pretty much create our own archetypes by being our own people,” he said.
The world is in our hands for reinventing. This column is for thinking about the world we would make. So come, share your light with the rest of the Witt community. Nothing is forbidden. What does the world need? What do you need to feel at home in the world? And what’s the next step? Podcast coming soon.

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