Sanjana Priyonti, Junior Editor
The first time I heard about Sewanee, I was at home in Bangladesh, scrolling through YouTube and searching for videos of famous American colleges.
I had been rummaging for months through YouTube to find my perfect college. As an international student from the other side of the world, navigating the college application process and finding the right college seemed daunting. Unlike American students, if I wanted to come to a U.S. university, I had to choose something that I had never seen.
Sometimes it’s just hard to find
Sunshine in the darkness of the night…
Each day was a quest, trying to know more about colleges just by looking at the videos, website, and student virtual tours. Blindly trusting whatever was displayed on my laptop was the only thing I could do. Then I had a chance encounter with a video for Sewanee.
If you see
If you see the light…
Stephen Alvarez’s (C ’87) breathtaking time-lapse images, paired with a soulful banjo tune and moving lyrics, captured Sewanee in a way I hadn’t seen anywhere else—rolling fog over the Domain, golden sunlight through the trees, and a campus immersed in nature. This was nothing like anything I’d experienced in my bustling, crowded hometown city of Narayanganj, Bangladesh. It felt like something on that video was personally calling me home.
On either side of me, my 9-year-old twin sisters couldn’t stop staring; smiling open-mouthed as the images and music unfolded, they were just as captivated as I was. I ran to my dad with the laptop in my hand and made him watch the video. I told him I found my college. So I only applied to Sewanee
If you ever do find it keep walking and it will guide you home…
Nearly a year later, it all came back to me in the most unexpected way at Sewaneeroo.
Sewaneeroo’s headlining performer, Boy Named Banjo, was scheduled to perform at 9 p.m., so I wasn’t sure how late I wanted to stay out. This was the first time I would ever be experiencing Sewaneeroo, so I was just thinking of being there for an hour to listen to a band I thought I’d never heard before.
The band started performing and kept pulling off one great song after another from their original lineup. The crowd danced, and I hardly realized when one hour turned into two and a half. My friend began pulling me toward our dorm and we began walking away just as “Light Will Guide You” echoed down Georgia Avenue and across central campus.
I was stunned and couldn’t stop smiling. That exact song was the one that compelled me to come to Sewanee. I kept telling my friend that this is the same song that got me here! I pulled out my phone and showed that Sewanee YouTube video. She was just as amazed as I still am. We couldn’t believe how perfectly things had come full circle.
What came next was even more astonishing. As the band was packing up and getting ready to leave, I walked up to them and told them what a great influence they and their music and that video had on me in choosing Sewanee. As alumni, Barton Davies (C ’16) and William Reames (C ’16), lead singers of Boy Named Banjo, were elated. “She found Sewanee because of us!” Davies told his bandmates. They were so happy to know that their song influenced someone from the other side of the world to find the Mountain. My friend and I went a little nuts, skipping and laughing our way back to our dorm.
I could only think back to what I wrote in the supplemental essay for my college application, “If I ever lose my way, I know there is always Sewanee’s light. ”
This light will guide you places
Only seen in your heart…
… You will see, you will see the light