In April, I interviewed Andrew “Andy” Shennan, who was then wrapping up his tenure as provost and Lia Gellen Poorvu ’56 Dean of the College. (See “The View from Green Hall.”) Since Andy became an administrator 25 years ago, a lot has happened at Wellesley and in the world.

But the College is fundamentally the same, Andy told me. “I think if you were here in 1999 and miraculously catapulted forward to [Wellesley in 2024], you wouldn’t feel that that much had changed,” he said. “Even symbolically, I think the way we’ve gone about the renovation of buildings, it’s largely in restoring their essence and their original quality, not tearing everything up and starting again.”

As it happens, my 25th reunion was in May, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how Wellesley has changed since 1999. Earlier this spring, one of my friends asked me to snap some photos of old Wellesley News issues, to print and use to decorate our class’s reunion headquarters.

One of my favorite stories I found in Archives was a primer on how to use email, from the 1995 orientation issue. “Now that all your friends are at school and have access to the world of the Internet, your communication is going to be taken to another level (though not necessarily a higher one),” according to the article. Still basically accurate.

I also took a number of photos of my classmate Michelle Au’s hilarious cartoons for the paper, which made her a bit of a celebrity in our day. The intense campus culture that she gently skewered with her stick figures definitely still exists. Would I have believed in 1999 that Michelle—now an anesthesiologist and Democratic member of the Georgia House of Representatives—would be the College’s commencement speaker one day? (See “Commencement 2024.”) Oh, definitely. (That goes for last year’s speaker, Jocelyn Benson ’99, too.)

Some of the details of being a student have changed (cell phones instead of landlines, Sidechat instead of Public, Lulu instead of Schneider), but the intrinsic Wellesleyness of Wellesley has not changed. Most crucially, the community’s commitment to its motto, Non Ministrari sed Ministrare, remains the same.

“Remember who you are in this moment,” Michelle told the class of 2024 this spring. “You are a Wellesley student on the cusp of doing great things. Some of these great things will be big. The majority of them will be much, much smaller. But make sure they stem from who you are in this moment—someone with the energy, idealism, and work ethic to not just … ‘make a difference in the world,’ … but to make a different world.”