I find it immensely difficult to construct any sort of cohesive narrative for my past year living in Columbus and attending Ohio State. The latter half of 2016 and beginning of 2017 were some of the most difficult times of my academic career and contained some personal hardships to boot. On the flip side, these months held too many memories of joy and laughter to count and they contain the moments I fully realized that my classes and choice of major do not define the direction of my life. I will do my best to condense all the experiences I have had over the past twelve months today, though I know I will not be able to fully capture all that I have learned in a short piece of writing.

The past year will stand as likely the only contiguous 365 days during which I was always a full time student. I took thirteen credit hours over the summer in order to remain on-track for my dual degree. I vastly underestimated the workload that would result from this; compressing a full course load into eight weeks took a toll on my involvment with anything outside of classes. I expected to be able to work a part time job and have plenty of extra time to socialize, but instead found myself most nights alone in my kitchen writing C code until 2:00 AM. Eventually, however, I finished these courses and moved into more traditional semesters in Fall and Spring. As my comptuer science classes have become more intensive and project-focused, I’ve enjoyed developing a more in-depth set of skills that can be applied to projects outside of class (if I ever have the time). My spring semester classes were a bit “dryer” than those I took in the fall and, combined with a growing passion for things I was doing outside of the classroom, I struggled to keep up with my workload over the past few months. After my finals were finally over though, I can look back on three straight semesters of work that I’m proud of. I can’t think of a time in my life where I learned more in just twelve months’ time.

Perhaps the most important throughline of my past year has been my growing passion for comedy. In the fall semester of my freshman year, I auditioned for a student organization called 8th Floor Improv. Three years later, I have been the president of the group for a year and now plan on trying my hardest to make an eventual career in comedy. I had an amazing year with 8th Floor, performing dozens of times around Columbus and getting to travel to New York City, Nashville, Missouri, and other places around Ohio. Additionally, I was heavily involved with the planning of the Bellwether Improv Comedy Festival in September. This event is the country’s largest, free collegiate improv festival and is perhaps my favorite weekend of the year. The more I’ve gotten involved in comedy, the more I have discovered that I have a profound love of it and do not want to leave it behind after I graduate from Ohio State. While I often struggle to work up the motivation to finish up a CSE assignment or to read for a Public Affairs class, I never lack the drive to work on projects related to 8th Floor.

Looking forward, this summer I will be interning at Chemical Abstract Services doing web development on a suite of software products related to providing research institutions with accurate information on a range of chemical products. I still very much intend to obtain a job as a developer after graduation, but I hope to align this position to put me in a good place geographically to further my interest in comedy. Speaking of which, I have big plans for this summer to continue doing improv in and around Columbus and to put some effort toward some video projects that I have in mind. It will certainly be nice to at last not be bogged down with nightly homework.

This past year has certainly been both difficult and formative (these adjectives tend to go together I have found). I am greatly looking forward to my final year at Ohio State and all the things I will learn in and out of the classroom. The primary lesson I have learned during the past year is that your passions will make themselves obvious to you. This does not mean that they will be easy to pursue or that they will align neatly with what you had planned a year ago or what others think that you should do. Nonetheless, they are there and, personally, I am excited to follow where they will lead.