This Year in Review might not end up being very focused, as i will probably ramble, but here goes.

When I started, I just sort of expected to get through the year. I had never roomed for an extended period with a stranger, and wasn’t sure how it would go. I just planned to be done with the year and moving on to the next, possibly getting an internship or a job over the summer.

Coming from a small hometown, I was the smart kid, who always just seemed to fly through classes without a care. Sure sometimes I had to study up to complete certain assignments, but it never became a habit. This has come back to bite me as I have had several periods of being unsure how to study, with little or know strategy for when I had issues. I knew no one coming here, so any form of support network was nonexistent. I found myself unable to maintain perfect grades like I used to. Suddenly I was average, if not below average.

Rooming has been difficult. My roommate is a very extroverted person, who seemed to always be able to argue me down when I had issues, his needs always coming before my own. My headaches caused by an airfreshener? Not his problem. Window open to get fresh air? Closed immediately. Leave the room to fill a water bottle or brush teeth. Door is deadbolted by the time you return. He has too many instruments that take up all of his room? I’m the bad guy for not wanting to rearrange the room to resemble a fire code hazard. Through out this year I’ve just felt like my generally passive nature has been taken advantage of. I just never spoke up because there didn’t seem to be any alternatives. I know I have never been the best roommate myself, but I often felt like I came out in the wrong every time an issue came up. Sorry, rant over now.

As of now, I’m not sure if I should stick with chemical engineering as a major. I have never been the best at math, and that is a surprisingly large amount of the work we would do, as I have since learned. I always preferred reading and science to mathematics. I enjoyed chemistry much more than physics, so that’s what really pushed me to this degree, a course set with seemingly no math, just chem.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ve grown in some ways and shrank in others, I just can’t really seem to bring it into words or context. I feel like water, always taking the path of least resistance, flowing from plan to plan with little to no context as to why. Ironically, I received the “rock” award from the drama department in high school when I was leaving, as I was the stalwart bulwark against the chaos of life’s events, yet now I don’t know where to go from here.