The Thrill regularly spotlights a Sexual Misconduct Advisor to raise awareness about the resources available to survivors of sexual assault. Remember, the SMAs are subordinate to the Counseling Center, so anything you tell them is kept confidential. They also have an anonymous hotline you can call if you need assistance: 740-358-1544. Today, we’re featuring Julia Weinberg! Stay safe, and know that there is always someone you can talk to if you need help.

Julia Weinberg ’17. Photo taken by Clara Mooney ’17.

What’s the most exciting thing you’re learning about right now?

I’m taking Meanings of Death with Professor Royal Rhodes, which is a very cool class where we talk about death across cultures, across religions. We’re coming up on the pretty famous assignment in that class where you have to write your own eulogy and also write a eulogy for a family member or someone close to you. So that’s kind of a wild time, and we had a really beautiful class today about eulogies.

What did you think about on your walk to class this morning?

Honestly, I’ve been with Clara Mooney all day, which everyone must know by this point, and we were kind of making fun of ourselves for how much we’ve quoted Vanya in the last 48 hours. Now I sound like a farce of myself, but it’s true. I really quoted the play a lot, so I was vocalizing how stupid that is.

What is the best thing you’ve eaten in the past month?

I’ll just get sappy. So my mom makes spaghetti sauce from scratch, and so when I was at home she made a big pot of it for me. It’s always the best thing I eat whenever I eat it.

If someone were to go to your hometown, Richmond, Virginia, what would you recommend to them?

There’s this place called Belle Isle, which is an island. Not a big island, just a small island in the middle of the James River, which is the river that runs through Richmond. Belle Isle’s been through a lot. It was a prison during the Civil War, it was an iron works factory post-Civil War, now it’s a park for the river system. It’s had its sketchy days, but it’s on the up and up, and it’s a really beautiful spot. I spent most of my summers throughout my childhood there, and I drag everyone who comes to Richmond to Belle Isle.

Why do you love Kenyon?

I really and truly believe, and I’m going to sound sappy and silly, there is no mold of a Kenyon student. I know we make jokes, “Oh, we go to Kenyon, this is how we all are.” But if you take a step back you realize that everyone’s kind of doing their own thing, and there’s no carbon copy you have to adhere to to fit in here. And also, sometimes I hate it but it is like this intellectual village. We really are in this beautiful place, like Ohio is remarkably beautiful, and you’re here to learn, and you’re here with people who also want to learn, and you just get to be. I think it’s remarkable.

Why did you become an SMA?

Where I grew up, we didn’t talk about sex ever, and we certainly didn’t talk about sexual assault. It just wasn’t a thing we even brought up. If you were doing anything of a sexual nature, you were in the wrong. That was kind of the feeling not necessarily in my family but among my peers and the school I went to. So when I came to Kenyon and everyone was talking about sex, I was shocked, I didn’t really know how to handle it, and I didn’t really know how to talk about any of it. So it was really important to me to become someone on this campus who is not only comfortable talking about sex, but also about instances of sexual assault, and just being a resource. It’s such a beautiful thing about a community like Kenyon that there are so many resources that are available to you. I also like providing that narrative when I’m in rooms of freshmen because I don’t know if there are freshmen like me who never talked about sex, and then you get to college and within the first 48 hours it comes up about 30 times.

If you were to be a fruit, which fruit would you be?

I want to say I would want to be like a pineapple, but those are incredibly difficult to deal with. So I don’t know. I think if I actually were a fruit, I would be… A peach keeps coming into my head but, “She’s a peach.” Nothing is good. I’ll go with a kiwi! Kiwis are fun and good. They’re just kind of like bizarre. And to be honest, I can’t remember the last time I ate a kiwi, but I like watching people scoop kiwis out. So for no reason that has to do with anything about my personality or anything about me, if I could choose I would be a kiwi.