With Love, Gina

Gina Savino, Editor-in-Chief / Sports & News Editor

I would have actually said you were crazy if you had told on the first day of classes my freshman year that I would be where I am right now as a senior. I had always, always wanted to be a Physical Therapist. It was my dream job from the time I first sprained my ankle in a basketball game all the way up until October of my first year at Assumption. I was planning on getting a basketball scholarship to some college where I could play for 4 years and then pursue my doctorate in PT. When none of the schools I had applied to lined up with the schools that had recruited me for basketball, I made a choice that would turn out to be one of the best decisions in my life, followed by a chain reaction of even better choices, all leading me right up until this fall, my last two semesters at Assumption.

I chose Assumption because I thought that I could pursue Physical Therapy here through a Health Sciences major. At orientation over the summer, I met my future roommates, and I loaded up my class schedule with science courses, trying to get ahead of my degree so that I could take more electives my senior year. I moved in, I got settled, and my first few weeks of classes flew by so quickly I realized that I had forgotten to call my parents more than twice a week, even though they had asked me to try to call every single day. Everything was going pretty fine, but I was beginning to realize that while I was struggling through my chemistry course, I was finding more and more joy in my English courses. It took only a few days between this realization and a few phone calls with my parents for me to declare an English major, realizing that while I had continued to tell myself I wanted to be a PT, I was glossing over how much I had always loved to read and to write, and I realized that my passion was sharing that with others. The next week, I’d declared a pre-Education major, and met with the advising staff to plan out where I was going to go from there.

While this was going on, I had been trying to find a pastime that would continue to take up as much time as basketball had taken in my life before I’d moved onto campus. It was a trial and error process, but I found my way into the Women’s Rowing Coach’s office in October. It was not going to be easy, she said, but she told me that the team needed more dedicated athletes, and I was also willing to put in the work to learn an entirely different sport at 18 after playing the same sport for 12 years before that. It was tough, learning to get up before dawn every day to go put out some work, but it was another one of the best decisions of my life. I would not change a single thing, except maybe I would have emailed my coach earlier so I could have rowed as a novice in that first fall, and then I wouldn’t have had to embarrass myself in front of the team when the first time I’d been in a boat was on the spring break trip to Florida.

At the end of my sophomore year, an opportunity opened up for me to apply to be the Sports Editor at Le Provocateur, the student-run newspaper that you are reading right now. I had not had any experience, but I knew that it was the right choice in order to continue to feed my passion for writing. I ended up getting the job, and as you probably noticed, I am able to start my senior year off as the Editor-in-Chief, filling some pretty big shoes. David, if you’re reading this, thank you for every opportunity you gave me. I hope that when I have finished this year, I go down as more than just the Provoc EIC that went through the pandemic.

I hope that if you are a first-year reading this, you take my story as an invitation to go find yourself at Assumption. This is a community that will let you grow as a person into who you want to be. Find your people, find your passions, and chase them. Don’t be afraid to fail. Try something new every month, whether it be a new club, or a club or intramural sport, or go see your roommate’s game and cheer on your classmates. I know that the pandemic is putting some pressure on your first year here, but please, do not let that scare you. You will have time to figure it all out.

With Love, Gina