On a Monday night in mid-September, when students are finally starting to fall into a routine with their classes and the slowly browning leaves outside are beginning to peel off their branches, a group of residents, teachers, and—most importantly—friends gather inside the dining hall of Shea.
Even before the Open House starts, the program filled with introductions in multiple languages and foods of multiple varieties, the noise is deafening. People who have lived here for years and those who have only called this dorm home for three weeks alike are greeting each other with wide smiles and raised voices, everyone’s excitement overlapping and building into a moving crescendo of camaraderie and affection. Even when being ushered towards the table of their respective language, foreign tongues and unknown words filling the air around them, residents still take the time to cut through with a familiar word and warm greeting to their friends within different pods. Despite the apparent separation of alphabets and grammars and vocabularies, it is instead each and every resident of Shea’s interest in and passion for their respective language that binds us all together, our varying tongues and shifting tones somehow working in the opposite manner and bringing us all closer together rather than further apart.
And this idea cannot be seen better than in this Open House. With a few claps of Frank’s hands, the now filled hall of people quiets down, our heads turning towards each other, listening for what will be said. And as each Language Advisor stands up in turn, it doesn’t matter whether they’re from the German, Chinese, Japanese, ASL, Korean, or Russian pod, because the attentiveness of their audience is the same, each and every one of us genuinely caring about this person that we’re listening to, this person that’s our fellow resident, this person that’s our friend. And, at the end of each speech, we respond with raucous applause, applause that doesn’t need translation, applause that I can feel in my soul.
As the event continues on, the Roots salads, sparkling water, and celebratory “Welcome to Shea House” cake begin making their way around. As I sit with my fellow Japanese residents and eat my own paper plate of food, I listen to my peers and my teachers talking around me, letting the language wash over me in a way that can only happen at Shea. And I bask in the uniqueness of it all, the preciousness of this exact moment in time. There is no other place at UVA where people like this can come together, where these languages can be shared, practiced, enjoyed. But, even though we all are able to speak together now, who knows how many of us will continue with these languages after graduation, how many of us will have another opportunity like this to speak and to be understood. And so we take advantage of these moments while we have them, we speak our languages, we live—and thrive—in Shea.
My mouth spreads itself into a wide grin while my tongue, stained by blue and orange icing, twists around foreign syllables. I would not have it any other way.
Written by Chloe Ross ‘26