When I was little, my mother would take me with her when she went to vote. Inside the blue voting booth, she would lift me up so I could press the tabs she told me to, and then we would pull the lever to open the curtain together. For me, the last four years have been a double countdown- not only to the end of Bush’s second term, but to my first chance to vote in a presidential election.

The actual time spent in the voting booth wasn’t too exciting, but it felt good to pull that lever on my own and know it was my vote being registered, not my mom’s (and of course I got my first long-coveted ‘I Voted’ sticker).

Afterwords, my mom and I went out for breakfast because my only class of the day had been canceled to encourage us all to go vote.

The evening was spent in the A. D. White room of Uris Library, working on a paper for my writing seminar and refreshing the webpages of several news outlets tracking the election. Shortly after word was out that Obama had officially won, I got up to stretch my legs and discovered that everyone outside the silent bubble of the library was talking animatedly into cell phones about the election. Not long after, I began to hear chants of “GO BARACK!” in Ho Plaza beneath the windows of the library, which went on for quite some time as ecstatic students marched through campus. It was one hell of an exciting evening here on campus.