Emily Stuckey Weber ’07

This story originally appeared in the Good of Goshen.

I went to Goshen College. I’m from northwest Ohio originally, but my mom and pretty much all of her siblings and parents went to Goshen College, so I always knew that was a place I should at least check out. I moved to Colorado for a couple years. Colorado is great, but it’s very far away from my family in Ohio. And my husband’s family is in Pennsylvania, so the only traveling we did was back to Ohio and Pennsylvania. We were tired of plane travel at the busiest times of the year and decided to move back here.

I’m the teen services coordinator at Goshen Public Library. That means I do programming and services for young adults in sixth through 12 grade. Most of the time I’m leading programs or planning programs. I also do some of our collection development. I do some outreach with our local schools, too. I did a Girls And S.T.E.M. enrichment class at the middle school last fall with a group of eighth-grade girls. We did a little bit of everything. They wanted to make slime, so that was our chemistry lesson, and we did some robotics and coding. We also have an e-resource card program at the library, so all middle school and high school students get a card from GPL that is just for online resources.

Goshen’s just a great place to be outside. I walk on the millrace a lot. Goshen Brewing Company is a place we like to hang out. My husband is a home brewer, and his homebrew club has done some collaborations with GBCo., which is pretty cool. I like to hang out at The Electric Brew. I’m in grad school, so a lot of my ‘for fun’ time is trying to figure out how to make doing my school work palatable. And that involves places like Embassy Coffee and The Brew.

I’ve always just loved the feel of this community. The large Latino community is a big draw, honestly. I’ve always enjoyed working with Latino families. It just adds a vibrancy to this community. I love that I hear people speaking Spanish in public because it helps my poor, sad Spanish get a tiny bit better!

When you go out in public in Denver, the chances of seeing someone you know are pretty low. Here, everywhere I go, I’m going to see people I know. I like that feel of this town. I’m from a super-small town of, like, 1,200 people, and there you literally know everyone. And it still doesn’t have the same feel as Goshen. Goshen feels like a place where you can belong and fit in, but it’s not so small that there aren’t new experiences to be found all the time.