[College Activity Introduction] Conveying, Shaping, and Delivering Thoughts - Farewell Committee Edition

What is Farewell Week?

Every year, about half of the college students at SHIMOKITA COLLEGE change.

The days spent sharing meals, talking, and sometimes struggling together reach their end before we know it.
At the college, we call the period leading up to graduation or moving out "Farewell Week."

It is a time to honestly express gratitude and affection that might be a bit too embarrassing to say otherwise. It is a time for both those who are sending off and those being sent off to reflect once again on the meaning of the time spent in this place.

It is a special period at the end of college life where everyone's individual thoughts intersect.

Table of Contents

What is the Farewell Committee?

The Farewell Committee is responsible for planning and managing this Farewell Week.

It is a very warm committee where you can encounter various emotions such as "gratitude" and "affection," even while feeling "parting" most closely.

To make the graduation experience even better, here are some of the specific activities we do.

1. Creating the Graduation Album

We create a graduation album that records the year at the college.

While the Farewell Committee leads the album production, many pages are created in cooperation with the college students. Therefore, the production involves the entire community, including not only graduates but also current students.

• House Page

Everyone in the house works together to create a single page.

It is a place where the unity of the house built over the year is demonstrated. Through dialogues such as "Isn't this more like House B?" or "This is definitely House D," it also becomes an opportunity to reaffirm the identity of each house.
The process also leads to an increased sense of belonging and attachment to the community.

• Individual Graduate Page

This is a page that each graduate creates with their own originality.

Some people fill their pages with many photos from the two years, while others place more importance on leaving messages; these pages strongly reflect each individual's personality.
Open this page, and you can meet 'you' at any time. It is such a warm page that you will continue to remember even after graduation.

• Message pages

We have prepared message pages behind the front cover and before the back cover.

We hope that after the graduation albums are distributed, you will be able to send messages to each other, and that through the time spent sending them, the reality of graduation will gradually begin to sink in. Because we share our daily lives together, it is difficult to truly feel the separation.

Things that are a bit embarrassing to say in daily life can be expressed in words by using the message pages as an excuse. I believe that the accumulation of such words gradually turns into the realization of parting.

2. Creation of the Graduation Movie

As the final event of college life, we hold a graduation ceremony every year.
The Farewell Committee produces the graduation movie that colors the beginning and end of that ceremony.

Articles regarding the graduation ceremony can be found here.

• Opening Movie

The graduates themselves collect photos and videos from their two years, sometimes asking for cooperation from graduates who spent their first year with them, to produce it. It is a movie where you can look back on two years of memories all at once.

It plays the role of shifting feelings from the everyday to the extraordinary, focusing thoughts toward the upcoming graduation ceremony.

• Ending Movie

Every year, current students are in charge of production. It is a video that delivers messages from current students to the graduates, filled with words that only friends who have lived closely together can share.

Messages received from current students who have spent time close to college life are moving, and during the playback, it becomes a time filled with overflowing emotion.

This time also connects to the lingering emotions after the graduation ceremony, helping to create the atmosphere after returning to the college from the venue, or serving as a trigger for people to pick up a pen to try and convey feelings that could not be fully expressed.

3. Graduation Celebration with Graduates

This is a graduation event hosted by the Farewell Committee.

The title for the 2025 academic year is 'Graduation Celebration with Graduates.' We put our wishes into this title, hoping it would be an opportunity for both graduates and current students to 'gift' each other gratitude and affection.

It is difficult to feel the sense of parting in our daily lives. Events like graduation ceremonies held in places away from the college where we usually live can have a significant impact on creating an atmosphere, but the graduation ceremony is held only a few days before the move-out date. We did not want it to be a hurried farewell. We wanted to create time to slowly cherish the remaining moments and share our thoughts with each other.

Such thoughts led to the holding of this gathering.

1. Dinner "KANPAI"

2. Talent Show "UTAGE"

3. Message Video Project "Omamori"

The gathering was mainly held in these three parts. By planning events of different types—events where everyone could get excited, like the dinner and talent show, and a message video that allowed us to reflect on our college life so far—we designed a time for various emotions to be expressed.

In addition, by distributing graduation albums and graduation anthologies at the end of the event, I think a wonderful lingering feeling was created as we touched upon the words of the graduates and wrote messages to each other.

4. Two-Year Reflection Project

Graduate Blog Relay (2024 Academic Year)

A blog relay where each graduate reflects on their own college life and writes down what they are thinking now. Named after "Tsunagu" (Connection), the theme of the 2024 Farewell Committee, it was conducted in a baton-relay format, connecting the thoughts of about 25 graduates.

(Akari, 2024 Farewell Committee Chair:) We started the blog relay aiming to connect the past and present of the college through the memories of the graduates, to leave behind the thoughts of the graduates to connect to the future, and to connect the graduates with each other through the relay.

The commemorative first article of the '24 blog relay is here

Graduation Anthology (2025 Academic Year)

Inspired by the '24 blog relay, we decided to create a graduation anthology.

The college has a culture of "scrap and build."

Because it is a community that values metabolism, with half of the people changing every year, we have taken a somewhat reserved stance toward "leaving things behind," and there have not been many media outlets that easily preserve the words of college students.

However, after the previous year's blog relay, I felt that the thoughts and words of the graduates remaining is of great value to the place. Also, feeling that it was an opportunity for the graduates themselves to look back on their two years and put them into words, we decided to compile them into a single booklet this year.

Experience Report: Tutor & Committee Chair Dialogue

Tutor & Committee Chair Introduction

Graduation albums, graduation movies, graduation events.

The Farewell Committee operates various projects, but there is a common philosophy that has been cherished at their core.

Through the dialogue between 2025 Farewell Committee Chair Tamami and the assigned tutor Fumika, three keywords emerged: "Expressing thoughts," "Using the end as an excuse," and "Inheriting history."

1. Expressing Thoughts

Fumika: I feel like this year, we really valued the time to share our thoughts together, not just at the Farewell Committee kickoff, but throughout the process as well.

Tamami: As Fumi-chan (Fumika's nickname) often said, compared to other committees, this is a committee where you can really "pour your heart into it." But there was so much to do in a short period, and there were quite a few times when we had to be very rigid and methodical. Balancing those two aspects was probably the hardest part.

Fumika: Of course, it's absolutely necessary to do things strictly according to schedule, and as long as we are holding events or creating and outputting things, that's a required element. But I think this year, we didn't let it become just about that; we made sure to do check-ins, and even when things got busy, we used time to confirm our thoughts on the farewell together. The fact that we decided to value both aspects from the start, and that we kept that in mind and adjusted every time until the end, was something I thought was really great.

Tamami: Everything the Farewell Committee created had someone's thoughts hidden within it. So, for example, when handing out the album, I wanted to deliver the thoughts of the person who did the design along with it, and when planning an event, I wanted a space where the thoughts of the person who organized it could properly reach everyone. When you can feel the presence of someone behind something, you develop a deeper attachment to that "thing."

Fumika: I feel like there was a flow of expressing and receiving thoughts happening in various places, like Tama-chan (Tamami's nickname) sharing her thoughts in the elevator hall, or the committee doing projects to share thoughts using large paper not just within the committee, but with the whole college. Like the "Departure Sky Patterns" (a weekly newsletter reporting on the Farewell Week) that Kei-chan did.

Tamami: That's right, following the flow of the Tairyo Festival (the college festival held in November), we set up many opportunities for overall communication.

2. Using the End as an Excuse

Fumika: I wonder what kind of role the Farewell Committee has within the college, or what its position is?

Tamami: When I went to the committee chair retreat, another chair told me that the Farewell and Welcome committees aren't permanent, and it would be fine if they disappeared. They aren't essential committees. If you hand out welcome packages and hand out diplomas, the entrance and graduation are completed anyway. But they said the important thing is the thoughts put into them, and the reason they remain is because those thoughts are being properly passed down.

Fumika: That's true. It's wonderful that it's not just about the 'things' themselves, but that they are passed down through those thoughts.

Tamami: Farewell is the final time of the two years in college, so everyone is already used to this living space, and because it's a place where everyone has lived their daily lives, sleeping and waking up over and over again, I think it's very possible to reach the day of graduation before you know it.
Therefore, by positioning 'Farewell Week' within the daily routine that flows naturally, it becomes easier to create things like 'things you can convey using this as an excuse,' things you can hand over, new events you can hold, or saying 'it's the end, why don't we do this?' In that sense, I think Farewell Week is important.

Fumika: We used 'using the end as an excuse' as our motto, didn't we? I wonder if the role of Farewell is to create something extraordinary within the ordinary. As we said during the installation, being able to savor the everyday is also important, and it's important to create extraordinary elements without disrupting the daily routine.

Tamami: Yeah, I feel like it relates not just to the period of residence, but also to the relationships and attachment after graduation.

Fumika: That's right. It's true in the sense that the relationships we've built so far will continue from here on, and since everyone decided to spend two years here, maybe it becomes a trigger for people to think, 'It's the end, so let's give it one last push.' I think that because I was on the Farewell Committee, I was able to work hard on a lot of things by using 'it's the end' as an excuse. I myself benefited from the 'Farewell effect'.

3. Inheriting History

Tamami: Also, while I was on the Farewell Committee, I felt the history of the college quite strongly. Albums and movies play a role like a yearbook where everyone can share memories of the two years, so I felt like I was creating a page in history.

Fumika: That's true, because in the process of making the album, we looked back at past photos and referred to things from previous years. I think this year we had a challenge where we tried to think about the previous terms as well.

Tamami: Yeah, for firsts this year, we received messages from alumni at the farewell event for graduates, and we were able to touch upon the display of past photos in the installation.

Fumika: That's right. Even though we didn't actually live together, the installation used photos from the early days of the college when this place was being built. The fact that we can graduate now is also thanks to the power of the people who created the culture of this place and protected it, so it's a valuable opportunity to be able to show our gratitude to them.