Hey!! My name is Chinazom Onubogu. I'm a first-year from Nigeria. I love watching movies, going to the gym, sending emails and cooking!! I'm excited to have y'all follow me on my journey through Dartmouth.
So I said in my previous post that I was going to do a blog on Ujima… so here it is.
Before I came to Dartmouth, dancing had always been part of my life. It was kind of my way of saying thank you to the world, to my friends, to just being alive. It's my medium for shedding all the tension and stress that come with being a student and just enjoying myself in the moment. I'm such a STEM girlie, like robotics, physics, engineering brain 24/7, so dance has always been one of the only creative things that felt fully mine.
Before college, I only really danced Afrobeats. I was in a group called African Dance in high school, and that was my comfort zone. It felt familiar. It felt like home.
But when I got here, I decided to try something completely different: hip hop.
Ujima at the end of our basketball show
Which is honestly wild because if you knew me before… you'd be like ??? since when??? But yes, I'm now six months into hip hop, and I love it. At first, it was weird, not gonna lie. My body was moving in strange patterns, and I wasn't really in tune with the kind of songs we danced to. But with time, it got so much better. Everyone in Ujima is so helpful and we prioritize growth instead of perfection.
Furthermore, Ujima is a Swahili word that means collective work and responsibility. And that lowkey describes the team perfectly. Being in Ujima feels like being in a family… except for this family, we had to audition. We're serious about what we do, but there's so much love. We push each other. We correct each other. We hype each other up. Like I said before, we prioritize growth instead of perfection!
Winter auditions poster
We usually have 2–3 shows per term, so almost 10 shows a year, which is actually crazy when you think about it. Each dance is about 7 to 12 minutes, but the amount of rehearsal behind that? Insane. Hours and hours. And somehow, we still laugh the entire time.
I think what I love most is that it's collective. When we hit a formation cleanly or the music drops and the crowd screams? That feeling? Unmatched. It's not about one person. It's about everyone moving as one.
And I think that's why I love it so much. I spend so much time thinking, calculating, optimizing. But in Ujima, I just move. I just feel. I just exist in the moment.
I wrote my "Why Dartmouth?" essay a little under two years ago, and I've had a year in-between to fully experience Dartmouth: how I've grown, changed, and how Dartmouth has been a part of all of it.
