Leshak 

Michael Comuniello
Moreau First Year Experience
03 December 2021
Brokenness to Belonging: The Power of the Notre Dame Community
As of today, I have officially been a Notre Dame student for 101 days. While this is a relatively short amount of time, each of these days has been filled with knowledge, experience, and excitement. I have already learned a multitude of new and varied skills, from how to design and print a prosthetic device to how to properly analyze a film to how to do a touchdown push-up. More importantly though, I have learned more about myself, who I am, and why I belong here at Notre Dame, through the experiences I have found here on campus and specifically, my Moreau First Year Experience class. It has been extremely beneficial to take a class that is so self-reflective and focused on Notre Dame’s mission of shaping its students into their most authentic selves. At the beginning of the semester, I found myself frequently pondering on one question. How will I let the things I encounter at Notre Dame shape me? In my experience, the best way to answer a question is through experiences and learning from the wisdom of others gained from their own experiences, and that is exactly how I have determined the resolution to this pressing question in my college life.
	Throughout this semester, I have asked an abundance of questions. While many of these questions were related to assignments or directions to a new building, some of the most meaningful ones were asked in response to my weekly Moreau readings. One question that is quite prevalent in my college life is this: why should I feel unworthy of my spot at Notre Dame when I am clearly here for a reason? At the beginning of the school year, I felt as though I did not belong on this campus. I was extremely homesick, I got cut from a musical group I was looking forward to joining, I felt like I had no friends, and for the first time ever, I was failing a class. After years of working towards a spot at Notre Dame, my dream school, I felt as though my acceptance here was a fluke. I loved this school with all my heart, but I felt as though I did not belong here. However, this all changed when I sat down to write my week nine QQC after fall break. I first read the article, “Advice From a Formerly Lonely College Student” by Emery Bergmann, and suddenly, I had found someone who had faced the very same first-year dilemma I was experiencing. Bergmann spoke of the disappointment she felt in her first weeks of college, reflecting on her inability to enjoy parties and make meaningful conversation despite being a social person, as well as the realization that she was not enjoying her time at a school she had worked so hard to get into (“Advice From a Formerly Lonely College Student” by Emery Bergmann- Moreau FYE Week Nine). I then moved on to the video assigned for week nine, “What is Imposter Syndrome?”. In this video, Elizabeth Cox makes a point that changed my perspective completely, saying, “Accomplishments at the level of Angelou’s or Einstein’s are rare, but their feeling of fraudulence is extremely common” (“What is Imposter Syndrome by Elizabeth Cox - Moreau FYE Week Nine). If Albert Einstein, one of the most intelligent humans ever to live, experienced imposter syndrome, then I certainly was not alone in my feelings. This notion that this first semester loneliness and unbelonging was not a solitary experience was further confirmed by my week nine Moreau class, as every person in my group admitted to feeling inadequate and unworthy of their spot here at some point in the first semester. I left class that Monday morning with a new question in mind: how was I going to respond to the feeling of loneliness and imposition I had encountered throughout the rest of the semester? 
	I found the answer to this second question very quickly by getting involved in every event and club I could find on campus. Instead of simply wondering where my place in this campus community was, I decided to actively search for it. I joined the Notre Dame Wishmakers, our university’s branch of the Make-a-Wish organization, was elected as a commissioner-in-training in my residence hall, and became more involved in e-NABLE, a club that 3D prints prosthetic devices and donates them to children in need. For the first time since being rejected from the musical group I auditioned for, I found myself on the stage performing in a cabaret. Finally, something that had been very ambiguous to me had been made clear. “Who am I?” was a question I had been avoiding, but it needed to be asked in order to find the answer. In reading “Holy Cross and Christian Education”, I noticed a quote that directly reflected my college experience. This quote from Constitutions, written by Father James B. King, C.S.C., reads, “We must be men with hope to bring. There is no failure the Lord’s love cannot reverse, 
no humiliation he cannot exchange for blessing, … He has nothing but gifts to offer. It remains 
only for us to find how even the cross can be borne as a gift” (“Hope - Holy Cross and Christian Education” by Father James B. King, C.S.C. - Moreau FYE Week Twelve). In my experience at Notre Dame, I have encountered more failures than I ever had before. I failed a calculus exam, I had my first unsuccessful audition, and I was not elected to a leadership club that I was looking forward to being a part of. I was unsure of who I was, humiliated by this newfound rejection, but then, just as the quote says, I found hope. I was tired of the self-pity I was feeling, and I decided to do something about it. It remained for me to determine how to use my crosses as gifts, and I turned rejection into determination, changing my college experience for the better. I decided to use the gifts that God has given me and share them with the world through service and music. In the Screwtape Letters that I read for week twelve of this course, I noticed that Screwtape advises his nephew that the best way to cause the humans to lose their religion is to discourage them and to throw obstacles their way that will diminish their hope (“The Screwtape Letters”, Chapter 8 by C.S. Lewis - Moreau FYE Week Twelve). However, during our week twelve discussion in Moreau class, many of my classmates offered their definitions of hope. Though each person offered different specific words and phrases, there was one constant theme - that hope is the determination to keep moving forward despite the roadblocks that life throws your way. The obstacles that I have encountered so far at Notre Dame have allowed me to realize that I need to be hopeful and work towards a college experience that allows me to discover who I truly am instead of giving up. Ever since I learned to hope and soul search, I learned many things about myself, some big and some less significant: I love service, my favorite place to be is on the stage, I need to start getting more sleep, I want to be a mechanical engineer when I graduate, I love to write, and I am a huge football fan. I look forward to adding to this list in the coming years by getting involved in new clubs and groups, and I have set a goal for myself to attend a meeting for at least one new club each week, starting with Engineers Without Borders this week.
	As a result of this newfound confidence in my identity, I finally answered another big question I had been asking: do I belong here? The answer was yes, as I have experienced an exponential growth in my feeling of belonging here at Notre Dame in the past few weeks. As I mentioned before, imposter syndrome overtook my first few months of college, but once I broke out of the mindset of being an outsider by finding hope, I was able to see that I was a part of a wonderful community that accepted me for who I was and celebrated that person. I have found friends in my fellow McGlinn Shamrocks, my Moreau classmates, my e-NABLE teammates, and so many more students here on campus, and I have identified wonderful mentors in the upperclassmen on my floor and in many of my professors. I have found that this sense of community revolves around one fundamental principle: love. There is an atmosphere of love of neighbor, love of Notre Dame, love of learning here at Notre Dame, and that is the very thing that makes us a force for good in this world. It is not a coincidence that this place promotes love, as our President, Father John Jenkins, C.S.C. once said, “Love is the greatest commandment - and hatred is at the heart of the greatest sins” (“Wesley Theological Seminary 2012 Commencement Address” by Father John Jenkins, C.S.C. - Moreau FYE Week Ten). In his commencement address, part of the week ten material, Father Jenkins explains that we can change the world for the better when we use love to form convictions. He goes on to say, “It [conviction] is indispensable to every good deed...without conviction, there would be no hope”(“Wesley Theological Seminary 2012 Commencement Address” by Father John Jenkins, C.S.C. - Moreau FYE Week Ten). We live in a broken world, and the love and convictions found in the Notre Dame community have the power to heal it. In truth, we are all broken to some extent, but at this university, we acknowledge and accept our brokenness in order to move forward. One instance of this self-reflection took place in our week ten Moreau class when we wrote down a list of things that made us broken. While this was an individual activity, the fact that everyone had something to write down resulted in a sense of unity, the idea that no one is alone in their struggles, and I think that this exercise was very representative of Notre Dame’s acceptance of all its students regardless of their backgrounds or past experiences. Another example of Notre Dame’s ability to heal brokenness is the Kintsugi workshop that the university offers, featured in the week ten module video. This class, in which women use gold to mend broken glass that they had previously broken, was a physical representation of how the community at Notre Dame can put something that was once broken back together through love (“Women Find Healing Through Kintsugi Workshop” by Grotto - Moreau FYE Week Ten). Brokenness extends far past the borders of Notre Dame’s campus, but I truly believe that this university community extends its love in the same way. The positive convictions and love of others that are instilled in Notre Dame students inspires us to change the world for the better, mending the broken pieces that we encounter. Notre Dame alumni can be found mending brokenness around the globe, healing people as doctors, the environment as scientists, and injustice as politicians in some cases. When I graduate, I hope to follow in the footsteps of these great alumni by designing artificial organs and prosthetic limbs, working to heal at least one form of brokenness in this world. I know now that I belong at Notre Dame due to the love and community that I have encountered here.
	While college has presented me with a greater clarity of who I am and growth in my sense of belonging, there is a question with an answer that was once clear to me that Notre Dame has made more ambiguous: what is my role in my community? In high school, my role was to be a leader. I was captain of two softball teams, the head of student government, senior retreat director, and “the girl who was going to Notre Dame”, a title few people from my town even thought to pursue. I knew exactly who I was in the context of my community, but all of that changed once I arrived in South Bend. I quickly realized that every person here was a leader in high school, and my defining characteristic suddenly transformed into a basic requirement for acceptance to this university. For the first few months of school, I wondered how I would stand out and find a role in which I could lead, and to be honest, I struggled. It was not until I encountered the week eleven materials for this course that I realized that my role as a leader in this community was not going to simply be being in charge of everything I put my time into. In my community at home, all of my classmates and most of my friends had the same socioeconomic status and very similar upbringings. Leading a group of people who all encountered similar struggles and wanted the same changes led to an easy leadership role. There was never mention of injustice or bias, and for the most part, everybody got along quite well. I knew the story of every person around me because I, essentially, had lived it. When I arrived at Notre Dame, I realized that this was no longer true, that the people around me led very different lives from my own and had experienced things I never had, good and bad.  Ever since then, I have viewed the ideal of community in a different light, and upon coming to Notre Dame, I truly feel that my role as a leader has taken on a different shape that I have yet to identify. One quote that specifically brought me to this realization was this: “Community is not a goal to be achieved but a gift to be received” (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Community” by Parker J. Palmer, Center for Courage and Renewal - Moreau FYE Week Eleven). At home, I looked at community as something to be in charge of, something I could control and change for the better. However, here at Notre Dame, I realized that community is something to be a part of, something given to us that we share in. The week eleven “Diversity Matters” video explained that the Congregation of Holy Cross’ mission for this university community is that each of its members acts as both a student and a teacher, regardless of undergraduate, graduate, or faculty status. In reflecting on my experience at Notre Dame, I can certainly see the influence of this notion. I spend much of my time with my peers as a student, learning from conversations about their experiences, and the rest of my time as a teacher, recounting stories of my childhood, describing the Ukrainian and Irish traditions that my family holds, and even teaching people how we say “water” in Philadelphia. One person in particular who I truly feel that I have learned from is my roommate, Lauren, who lives twenty hours from me in Minneapolis, Minnesota and seemingly does not share one common interest with me. She is a finance major, and I am studying engineering. I wake up early, and she stays up all night. I am the oldest sibling, while she is the youngest. She is short and has brown hair, while I am tall and blonde. While even our looks indicate that we are opposites, living with Lauren has taught me more about community than any of my other life experiences have. Despite our differences, she is my best friend, and that has shown me exactly what my role is in the Notre Dame community. I am here to celebrate differences, to learn from every person I can and to teach them something in return, and to respect them even if we disagree. Professor Augustin Fuentes mentions that building community is the very reason that our dormitory communities are organized the way they are and that the random roommate process was created to teach undergraduates how to get along with people different than themselves whom they may not agree with on every matter (“Diversity Matters!” by Professor Agustin Fuentes - Moreau FYE Week Eleven). While I am starting to find my place in this campus community, I am still not completely certain, but I plan to go forward in my search by continuing to encounter new stories. I would like to do this by attending meetings that will make me more aware of the experiences of the people around me, such as Active Minds and Diversity Council. 
	Overall, the feelings, people, and experiences I have encountered in my first semester at Notre Dame have inspired many important questions that require an active response to be answered. In four short months, I have learned who I am and determined that I am worthy of my spot at this university. I have learned to use hope as a tool to overcome stress and failure. While I am still working on determining exactly where my place is, I have found a community full of love to lean on that uses its convictions to inspire change in the world. Notre Dame is truly a unique place, and I am extremely grateful for every moment I spend on this campus.