Year in Review

This year was not only my first year of college, first year away from home, but it was also the first year I tried something completely out of my comfort zone. When I first met my roommate, she told me about her own experience as a majorette in high school and how she was about to go to the RPAC to practice. I had no idea that going to watch would lead to a brand new beginning for me. She taught me a few things and jokingly said I should try out for the club team, which I ended up doing just for fun. Even though I was intimidated beyond belief at all these fabulous girls who have twirled for many years, I still mustered up the courage to try and they added me to the team. I learned so many new skills through this team and I am so glad I decided to try instead of sitting in my room only doing homework and watching Netflix. It was so beneficial to make a group of friends outside of my dorm and to get in the extra exercise. Joining this team this year has inspired me to try at least one new thing every year of college. The goal for next year is the Western Equestrian Team.

My original plan when going to college was to get a degree to travel and work with exotic animals, shortly after arriving and beginning my animal science courses, I thought maybe agriculture was the way to go, however, being a part of ENR scholars made me change my mind for a final time and I have been pretty set on some sort of wildlife conservationist since going to the ENR classes. I learned about how much the factory farms are impacting our environment and tons of ways to help the environment instead of harming it. I have limited my meat consumption to only poultry and fish and only have the poultry a few times a week. Making simple changes like this have really affected my outlook on life and decisions I will be making in the future.

Living will a roommate made me realize my lack of patience and enormous amount of self consciousness. I am a completely different person than who I was when I first moved here. I had to learn really quick how to be patient with the person I was living with and learn how to get along even if I didn’t like what they were doing. Fortunately, my changes allowed me to become really close with my roommate and we are very good friends now, and will probably be good friends for a really long time. I eventually got over being self conscious around my roommate as well and no longer care if I happen to get food on my face when eating or if my hair has been in a messy bun for three days straight. It was hard to accept these flaws in myself, even though these types of things happen for everybody, but my roommate made it clear she didn’t mind them and this helped me get over those tiny fears.

My favorite memory from this year was going to the zoo and water park in the OWL program. One of the people from my high school was in this program as well and even though I never hung out with her in high school, we decided to stick together at the zoo. This was an extremely fun day, we started out looking at all the amazing animals and then it started raining. I realize rain doesn’t seem like the best thing to happen when at the zoo, but while everyone else was taking shelter and getting lunch, my old classmate and I ventured over to the water park where there were no longer lines. Some reason, not many people realized you would get wet on the waterslides so the rain wasn’t going to make a difference. This worked out in our favor though, and we had a blast going from ride to ride. This experience at the zoo made us really close friends and we have been hanging out throughout the school year, which I never would have expected since we weren’t exactly friends the year before, but I am so glad everything has worked out.

Next year, I am looking forward to moving in to a new dorm with all new people. When signing up for room assignments, I decided to take a risk and go random. I wasn’t having the best relationship with my roommate at the time and I thought rooming together again the next year would ruin our friendship so I decided to live near, but not with my current roommate. I also figured going random in a suite would be a great way to meet new people and make new friends. I will be on north campus next year, which will be totally different from west campus, and I am excited for the change in scenery.