My Swat Story: Gidon Kaminer '22

D&D Helped Him Choose Swarthmore

"Someone from my high school went to Swarthmore, and I went to visit him during my junior year. I just remember sitting in Willets with him and all his friends and we played Dungeons and Dragons together. It was a group of strangers that I never met before, but I felt like I fit in and we were on the same wavelength. It was more than just common interests: I think we shared a way of relating and talking to one another. At Swarthmore, you have this ability to jump into a really sort of intense and involved conversation right off the bat."

He Accepts the Mystery

"The class that definitely turned me on to philosophy was a first-year seminar called the “Meaning of Life.” Every week we'd investigate a different topic pertaining to the meaning of life in no particular order, it was finitude, fulfillment, death, morality, religion, just really anything. I didn't come up with a definitive meaning of life, but I definitely ruled out things that I had once thought could be the meaning of life and very quickly realized were not. Professor Bauman definitely was not pushing us in the direction of finding a meaning, of course, because it really is about the questions in the end and not about the answers."

He's Cherishing the Moment

"Things at Swarthmore are so accessible and makes it feel there are a lot more things to do. I'm from New York, and I don't do anything in the city ever, because it's almost so daunting and so out of reach. But at Swarthmore, it is literally so easy to get involved in stuff you just walk into the room and immediately you feel engaged and valued. I don't really know when ever again in my life I'm going to be in a setting like this, which is why it's really special. And so I really want to value it while I have it."