This past year brought many new adventures. I traveled outside of the country for the first time, I started going on trips without my family, and I traveled all the way to the west coast. This picture is from my trip to Seattle over Christmas. Seattle was a completely different city than I am used to. Normally, I travel to the east coast where all the cities are centuries old, but Seattle is relatively young. The people are also very different than the people on the east coast. I think going to Seattle was a good way for me to become more in tune with the regionalization of our own country and the differences in basic culture between them. Also I got to eat some really good clams!

Unlike many students today, I am paying for my own schooling and supporting myself year round. In order to do this, I found a job before I even stepped foot on campus and, in the process, found Sloopy’s. Sloopy’s is the diner on campus and it is where I have worked since my first day at Ohio State. It is where I have met many friends and learned leadership. At Sloopy’s, I am a Student Lead meaning that I am a trusted employee who takes on some of the more difficult tasks within the restaurant, including training new employees. However, Sloopy’s also helps you build interview experience because every semester you have the opportunity to apply to be a Student Manager and you have to go through a formal resume process. As stressful as working in dining services can be sometimes, I think working within the university has improved my work ethic and leadership skills.

Musicals were a big part of my high school career. For three months of the school year, I spent my free time rehearsing dances, songs, and blocking. The picture above is of my very last musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. I played Mrs. Potiphar and, as a senior, I took on leadership role in picking out, ordering, and organizing props. Through this experience, I have made many friends that I still keep in touch with today. Musical helped increase my confidence in myself and my ability to work with others as a team to pull off a great show. My time management skills, public speaking skills, and personal confidence were all improved by this experience and they helped me become the person I am today. Musical taught me that, despite the often literal blood, sweat, and tears, hard work always pays off and the final result always makes up for the pain you went through to get there.

Recently, I went to the Natural History Museum in Cleveland. At the museum, I saw the Human Origins exhibit that included the famous Lucy skeleton and a reconstruction! Human origins is a big part of my major and something that interests me greatly. Getting to see the skeleton we talk about so often in my classes was amazing and really helped me visualize what Lucy actually was like. You can talk about things like Lucy so much in class, but until I actually stood next to the reconstruction, saw exactly how tall she was compared to me, and the variation in her pelvis compared to ours it didn’t really compute how similar yet different she was. It was hard to visualize a few broken, battered fossils on a table as one of our ancestors until I saw the reconstruction and could literally look into the eyes of one.

This semester, I began volunteering in the archaeology lab on campus to help wash and sort items from a recent dig. This allowed me to begin gaining lab experience in my field. The first picture is a dog’s head that appears to have been sacrificed when the houses being excavated were abandoned. The first two vertebra, the axis and the atlas, are still attached meaning that the head was probably cut off before skeletonization. The second photo is of large pottery sherds with markings carved into them and one has a handle still attached. I discovered these markings while washing artifacts from the dig. The experiences I have had in the lab have helped me grow so much and even though the lab part is not what most people think about when they think of archaeology, I am excited to begin making my own discoveries whether it is in the field or in the lab.

In the summer of 2015, some of my fellow IA members and I left Columbus, Ohio behind to spend two weeks in India, traveling to Delhi, Varanasi, and Agra. On this trip, we saw many wonderful sites like the Taj Mahal, the Ganges River, the cremation ghats, and other religious sites. We visited a farm in rural India and played with children at an after school program. This trip allowed us to see the stark differences that make up India. Whether it was between technology, wealth, or ideology, India was a mix of contradictions that I think helped us step out of the bubble that we are contained in within the United States. This trip allowed me to begin what I hope to be a long life of traveling abroad and interacting with different cultures and I cannot wait to go back someday.