Throughout this first semester at Ohio State, I have learned a lot. I have met many new people and developed new friendships with many of them. I have grown as a person through the new experiences I have had in college. Over this last semester, I have had new opportunities as well as challenges that have pushed me outside of my comfort zone.

I started off this past fall coming in not knowing what to expect. I moved into my dorm after having only seen pictures of it online. I sat in traffic for 2 hours to go 3 miles on move-in day and when I finally made it to my dorm I introduced myself to my roommate’s brother thinking that he was my new roommate. After clearing that up I began to talk with my new roommate getting to know him just like I would the hundreds of other people that I met this semester.

Then my classes began. Despite having taken classes at 2 other colleges before this through college credit plus I didn’t know what to expect. The lectures at OSU were much bigger than any class that I had taken before. It was all very new to me but I adapted and became used to it. Shortly after classes began in the fall I joined the club swim team without knowing anyone on the team. Fortunately, I quickly met many of the other swimmers and formed close friendships with some of them.

Another challenge occurred part way through the semester in my physics class when we had a midterm that wasn’t graded fairly. Because of this I faced my fear of talking to the professor and went up and confronted him about my grade. He later changed it and I received full credit. The first part of the semester was hard. My engineering class especially had tons of homework. Some nights I stayed up until as late as 3 am trying to finish lab reports that we were given very little guidance on, but as the semester progressed I got better at doing these assignments and it didn’t take as long as I learned better time management.

Now as I finish these last few weeks of classes and begin to prepare for exams, I can say that I have encountered many new experiences through this first semester and from them I have learned and have grown as a person by facing my fears and adapting to college life.

I recently decided to change my major from engineering undeclared to Mechanical Engineering. After doing a lot of research and from what I learned doing the interview assignment I determined that mechanical engineering is what I want to do. From what I learned I found that mechanical engineering suits my interests in learning about how things work along and it allows me to do some hands-on work while learning.