I knew Shana would come to be an important part of my life on the second day of first-year orientation. I was doing the standard Instagram deep-dive of every person on my hall, and I was scrolling through Shana’s (very cool) profile. I noticed we had attended the same Women’s March in 2018, which I was excited about in and of itself, but then I realized that the sign someone in her group was holding was one of which I had taken dozens of pictures. It was such a small, purely coincidental detail, but Shana was just as excited about that sunflower sign as I was. We never talked about it in this way, but to me, that sign felt like, well, a sign of something bigger. Thankfully, I was right.
From then on, Shana and I have done just about everything together. If we didn’t live in the same room, we were right down the hall from each other (besides our separate semester abroad,…