My first week at Ohio State has been exhausting and emotional. For me, the hardest part is the homesickness. I’m very jealous of the people who are from the Columbus area and of my friends who decided to go to school back home. Once I get started with my day and begin to focus on the tasks I need to accomplish, I begin to forget about how much I want to be home. But when my alarm first goes off in the morning it takes me a few seconds to remember where I am and who is sleeping across the room from me. It is also hard to grapple with the idea that I’m not going home. I keep thinking that there is an ending point in the near future where I’ll pack up my bags and the people I’ve met here will wave me off and fade into the dusty recesses of my memory. I keep thinking nothing that happens while I’m here, nothing that I do really matters because I’ll go home and forget this place and this lifestyle. I’m a fairly independent person and most of my time is spent on my schedule, my To-Do List and my usual social events. Here, every single one of those things has been altered and that is difficult to adjust to. My roommate, Katie, is very nice, but we both seem to be something of the self-reliant type and have very busy lives so its not often that we are in the same room together. Baker East is a very beautiful, very old building which lacks air-conditioning but is in high supply of cockroaches. One of the girls on my floor is very into essential oils and has taken to making a potion that supposedly destroys the cockroaches. We keep the it in the bathroom and someone wrote “Go back to Hell” on the clear spray bottle. My hall is very close, we often work on homework sitting in the hallway together and complain about our classes. It also helps that there are older girls in Humanities who have chosen to room in the dorms on my hall. They are very helpful with supplying tips that I would never think of doing. Who would think that waiting a day before hanging things on hooks helps the hooks adjust to the temperature and climate of our dorm rooms? My major is already proving to be a bear, which, I knew it would be. I’m trying to declare neuroscience but adjusting to the different teaching styles of my professors is challenging along with the difficulty of the material and the immense workload. Fortunately, I’m interested in most of the topics I’m learning about. I can’t imagine dealing with the workload, the professors and having a complete lack of interest in neuroscience.
I’ve been a generally healthy person thus far and have tried to carry that over into college. I much prefer the Union and Curl Marketplace over the Traditions Dining and often use the recently implemented $5 meal as one swipe. I was very involved in high school athletics and hope to remain physically active in college, considered I am very afraid of gaining the dreaded Freshman Fifteen. The J.O South Recreation Center is close to Baker East and I have already been there two or three times. I’m not worried about my motivation when it comes to working out, like a lot of people are, more the amount of time (or lack of time) I have in my schedule. In my opinion it was much easier to be involved in sports in high school because it was a structured physical activity with consequences if you did not make room for it in your schedule. But in high school, sports were extracurricular activities. Here at OSU, I hope to make physical fitness more of a lifestyle. That’s mainly what I am most excited for as I face the upcoming semester. I’d like to use the opportunities provided for me by the university to create the best version of myself. In rural southwest Ohio, there weren’t very many opportunities to get involved in community service whereas here, volunteer work practically bangs down your door. I’d like to explore myself, cement beliefs and values and discover new opinions, see the world through different eyes. This is really why I am so excited to be a Humanities Scholar. I’d love to learn about the world through art and history and music. My expectations for the Humanities Scholars is to be educated through discussion and events as part of a group in multiple aspects of humanity and culture. We’ll see how it goes!