I am sometimes bombarded when I fill my cup with water. I am in Gordon Commons, also known as the Deece—maybe on a bright morning. Quiet eaters surround me, scooping from bowls of yogurt or oatmeal. Or maybe it is almost midnight, and the paper plate holding up my quesadilla feels dangerously thin. But the smell is unmistakable, rising from the ground like the stink of an underworld: a Deece mat, sopping wet and putrid.
The years we remember Vassar will outnumber the years we spend here, likely more than ten to one. It becomes, rather annoyingly significant, how we remember our time in college. Buildings, faces or seasons can be captured in photos, scrolled through under future spells of boredom, or tacked up on the walls of apartments we have not yet inhabited. We will remember the howl of this semester’s winds, the snow and ice that turned our cheeks ruddy.
But another sense, with its own power to recall memories like the putridness of a dining hall mat, is smack dab in the middle of those ruddy cheeks: our noses.
We smell thousands of scents across the campus’ thousand acres. Some are unimportant or fleeting, like the graphite in a pencil, or new paper. Some are jarring, like the burning smell from our radiators or lacrosse gear left outside a dorm door. While these scents make our guts flip, or our entire body grimace, they might be crucial to our ability to closely remember pivotal people and moments, perhaps more vividly than sight, per Scientific American.
Scents often transport us to our hometowns, to our moms and dads, or to a shockingly fragrant aunt. Because my mom is a devoted Bath and Body Works loyalty member, those transporting smells are my mom’s signature, pinky Champagne Toast, or my dad’s car freshener Midsummer’s Night. Her obsession keeps me well-supplied with a steady supply of hand sanitizers and body spray. My nose feels atrophied often but never wasted. My current favorite from her stock is a Marshmallow Pumpkin Latte spray, almost empty from daily use.
But smells will soon be able to transport us to Vassar too. The effectiveness of olfactory memory has already been explored on campus in detail. In a recent Grey Matters Journal article, Hannah Koolpe ʼ24 explained what happens in the brain to trigger responses to smell. She describes the adventure of the odor molecule, which begins by entering the nasal cavity and ends with electrical signals being examined by the olfactory cortex in the brain and stored in memory through the hippocampus. It is where our brains return to when recalling a scent. But the journey takes another turn, as Koolpe continues: “The interplay between the olfactory system and the hippocampus is not just involved in storing memories, but also works with a brain region called the amygdala to assign an emotional context to odor-related memories.”
This emotional context can be largely positive or negative, a distinction clear in campus smells that will come to shape our time here in our memory. Noyes or Josselyn House residents might familiarly cringe if a waft of sewage catches them off guard in a basement. Hordes of students might be transported to long nights in the ten-person THs after smelling a distinctly foul body odor. They might bring back events that took place beyond the school too. When asked about what was notable in their nose, Freya Braiker ʼ27 immediately recalled the smell of wildfire smoke on campus.
As for other smells that remind them of the school, Braiker names many in rapid succession: the Preserve, snow and the weed around the second floor of Josselyn House. But one, heartwarmingly, reigned above them all: “The smell of spring always reminds me of Vassar.” Josh Jateno ʼ26 also pleasantly knew from the get-go what he associates from Vassar with his nostrils: “Laundry smell!”
While scents to share came quickly to Braiker and Jateno, Ben Remy ʼ24 thinks it is hard to name certain smells, especially when naming them out of the blue. Koolpe’s work agrees with that elusiveness: “Memories associated with a specific odor are often evoked before we are even consciously aware of the smell.” What first came to his mind, after some thought, was a sense of déjà vu he could not place after sniffing coffee in the Retreat. Zayn Cheema ʼ24 brought up the Retreat as well. She described a gripping moment catching a whiff of fries while walking through Main House a few days ago: “It was so visceral.” Cheema and I went on to reminisce about the scent of Deece fish and lattes at the Brew.
Besides food and drinks, one student, wishing to remain anonymous because of campus policy, shared the pleasantness of returning to her room and smelling her secret diffuser. We wondered about the hidden candles and wax warmers that must dot shelves and window sills, spewing vanilla or lavender around desks and beds. The difficulties of having to abandon candles and diffusers for rule-following students. We also talked about this specific winter season, how snowy it has been. This student swears they can smell the cold in classrooms.
As this winter does come to a close, spring will bring back Braiker’s most familiar campus scent. The student body will soon be drawn outside again to capture and file away odors in the hippocampus. To sniff chrysanthemums and warm rain and remember past springs at Vassar. The first day of sunshine will see the routine flocking of friends to blankets on the Quad and Library Lawn. I am most excited by the smell of grass on those lawns, hopefully green and flourishing. Quite unlike one of the earliest Vassar scents I remember: the smell of dead grass, sticking on my knees from our class photo, from the drought in August 2022.