The image below, from the Colby Echo of February 27, 1918, announced Sanderson’s appointment to Swatow under the headline “Recent Colby Graduate Goes as Missionary to China.” It captured the four-year stretch between commencement and sailing in three short paragraphs: the year she had spent teaching at Charlton High School in Massachusetts in 1914–15, the two years at Ricker Classical Institute in Houlton where she had risen to preceptress, the autumn 1917 semester she had just begun at Newton Theological School outside Boston, and finally the cable from China just before Christmas asking the Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society for two missionaries at once. She was becoming an experienced teacher when the cable arrived, with over three classroom years behind her and in the middle of formal theological training, but she did not hesitate. The Echo recorded it plainly: she was offered the position and immediately accepted it. She withdrew from Newton, made her preparations through the winter, and sailed from Vancouver the first week of March 1918, only three months after the offer.
She left for Swatow without ever having been more than a few hundred miles from New England. She had grown up between the Greenville parsonage and Waterville classrooms, taught in two Maine and Massachusetts towns, and studied at two Boston-area seminaries; her March 1918 voyage from Vancouver across the Pacific was her first journey beyond the Northeast and her first sea passage of any kind. She was twenty-four years old.