Abbie is one of those super smart persons who is going change the scholarly world with her intrellect. As a part of this brilliant academic career, she’s managed to snatch the position as the Harvard scholar at Emmanuel Collage. Except for getting to do your Master’s at Cambridge, this honor also entails “having” to live in the Harvard room.
The Harvard room is a replica of the room where John Harvard lived. John Harvard went to Emmanuel Collage, and later went on to cross the Atlantic, settle in New England and donate his extensive book collection to the newly started university in Cambridge, Massachusettes. The university now holds his name, and might be the most famous academic institution in the world.
To honor this connection between Cambridge and Harvard, the Harvard room, situated in a old 16th century building at Emmanuel collage, was decorated in the early 1900’s and dedicated for visiting Harvard graduates doing their Master’s at Cambridge. And this past year, the Harvard scholar at Cambridge was Abbie. I was so impressed.
The room actually consists of three rooms and a tiny kitchen pentry. A bedroom, a guest room and a huge living room, with dark leather couches and dark wooden panellings on the walls. And ever since the first Harvard scholar at Emmanuel Collage, every inhabitant of the room has left one thing in the room. One can find almost anything among all the stuff, guide books to almost any place in the world, old rowing trophies, sepia colored photos of sports teams, board games and charmingly fading maps of the Harvard campus and other places in frames on the walls.
And among all this history, Abbie has lived for the past year. Studying in the days, having friends just drop by in the evenings, slouching on the couches. It is a kind of life that I will never have, and in a way I’m so envious of Abbie for getting this opportunity. But on the other hand, she really deserves it. She is the lovliest of persons, such an energic, excited and open-minded host and guide and previous farm co-worker, that I wish her all the best, from the bottom of my heart.
Hopefully, I’ll get the chance to go visit her in New England in a couple of years, where she’ll soon take the academic world with storm as the superstar scholar that is just waiting to burst into bloom in her.
Katja Malmborg 