Class of 2013: Freshman Blog

After reading Jessica’s entry about building a pile, I’m realizing that I have the opposite problem.  My “back to school pile” is actually a big mess of stuff that was crammed into my desk drawers last year, and I have to go through it all sometime in the next week.  Yayyyyy

And next to the big pile of stuff is this GIANT box of textbooks.  Because I’m doing research in a lab for credit this semester, I only have three classes – how could I possibly need so many textbooks!?

big box of textbooks.

Once the textbooks came in the mail, it really hit me that summer was almost over.  As I wrote about in a blog entry last month, I spent most of the summer volunteering at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.  I would highly recommend hospital volunteering to anyone who is thinking about entering a medical profession.  I thought I knew what hospitals were like because I’ve stayed in one as a patient and because my dad works there, but being a patient or visiting a parent at work are totally not the same as actually observing the team of nurses, nursing assistants, physicians, secretaries, supply managers, and everyone that contributes to the successful operation of a floor unit or an intensive care unit.  I had my doubts at the start of this experience whether it would actually help me decide if I wanted to be a doctor, but it was actually very worthwhile.

On top of the volunteering, I tried to take advantage of what could be my last summer at home by learning how to cook, and I think I made a lot of progress.  I’m still no Emeril, but at least now I’m reasonably self-sufficient and can make my own meals.  I also learned how to flip an omelet without a spatula and without splattering egg all over the stove.  I’m sure my suitemate will be impressed.

last year's textbooks neatly put away on the shelf

I’m a little in shock that the summer is almost over but could not be more excited to head back to Hopkins!  There’s so much to look forward to this year.  I’m living with my best friend in a suite in Charles Commons, and since she moved in last week for soccer preseason, she gave me a Skype tour of the suite yesterday.  It looks pretty spacious!  I’m also very excited to start researching in the Spradling Lab at the Carnegie Institution.  Being at the lab for several hours every week is going to be a big change and a big commitment, but it’s a great opportunity and one of the reasons that I chose to come to Hopkins in the first place.

On top of all that I’m so excited to join a few more student groups and to meet the new freshmen!!   It’s weird to think that at this time next week, we’ll be seeing the class of 2014 all over campus!

At this time last year, I was in your shoes.  I was an indescribable mix of emotions: nervous to move to an unfamiliar place, anxious to be more independent, sad to leave so many old friends, and excited to meet new ones.  At the same time, I was busy ordering textbooks, shopping for dorm supplies, searching the Class of 2013 Facebook group discussion threads for answers to my seemingly endless questions, and, most importantly, working part-time at a soft pretzel factory.

When I used to tell people that I worked at a pretzel factory, I usually got a reaction like, “Wow, twisting pretzels would get really old after a day or two!  You must be so sick of it!”  Truthfully, they couldn’t have been more wrong.  This job was perfect for anyone like myself with a really short attention span.  Just as I got bored of twisting pretzels, I’d fill the mustard cans.  When I got sick of that, I could stock the sodas, put together the party trays, assemble the boxes, answer the phone, sweep the floor, dip the cinnamon pretzels, stamp the frequent buyer cards, manage the cash register, and salt the pretzels once they came out of the oven.    Twisting pretzel dough all day would have been incredibly monotonous and boring.  For my own sanity, I needed all this variety in my job description.

The best part was that my boss didn’t seem to mind at all that I switched frantically from job to job.  In fact, I think she appreciated variety just as much as I did since she was constantly coming up with new promotions (my favorite being her idea to pay a middle school kid to dress up like a giant pretzel and wave at the cars passing by).  As part of these promotions, she always liked to switch up our pretzel varieties.  One week she would tell us to make dozens of pretzel dogs, the next week we’d be making pretzel sausages instead, and the following week, cinnamon pretzels would fill the glass case.  Running a factory dominated by regular salted pretzels was clearly not an option.

That being said, one day while I was helping a customer at the cash register, my boss came through the door pushing a giant freezer.  I helped her get the enormous freezer into the corner of the store and realized that inside were ten huge tubs of water ice (or Italian ice as they call it in Baltimore).  Since her store was part of a pretzel franchise she technically wasn’t allowed to sell water ice, but to avoid getting caught, she instructed us to quickly push the freezer into the back of the store if we saw any franchise representatives about to enter.  Just for practice, we even did a few “hide the water ice” drills.

The water ice was a huge hit!  The factory became significantly busier in the following weeks, and this water ice became my boss’s new pride and joy.  She raved about it all the time and seemed to like the mango flavor about as much as the pretzels themselves!  The only drawback to the water ice idea was that once a week when the franchise representative came around, all of us would scramble to get the giant freezer in the back of the store and smoothly answer the rep’s questions about why little kids were exiting the store with purple faces.  (Why did they always have to get the grape!!?)

Unfortunately, a rep came in one day and found the water ice after we failed to hide the freezer fast enough.  Our boss’s mood was much more solemn during the week that followed.  She clearly missed raving about the flavor varieties, seeing kids run around with sticky fingers, and occasionally snacking on mango ice around lunchtime.  Even though we still sold all of our pretzel varieties, the lack of water ice made the pretzel factory an entirely different place.

This (finally) brings me to my point and to the reason that I decided to come to Hopkins in the first place.  At Hopkins, there’s no need to hide your water ice, and there’s no one to tell you that you can only sell pretzels.  You can diversify your college years as much as you want!  Every one of you 2014ers should strive to make your Hopkins experience about taking a variety of classes, becoming involved in a variety of activities, and putting yourself in a variety of new social circles.  The more diversified your Hopkins experience is, the better it will be.  Here’s why:

1) You many love your intended area of study as much as my boss loved pretzels, but whether you’re attending Johns Hopkins or running a pretzel business, you’re eventually going to want some variety to keep it exciting.  Math major?  Try reading to kids at a local elementary school to mix things up!  Cognitive science major?  Try taking Italian!  Take advantage of the options available to you.  Let’s face it, nobody wants to have just pretzels for four whole years.

2) There’s nothing like having 123890813 humungous pretzel orders to fill at once to make you never want to see a pretzel again.  After standing next to the burning hot oven for hours upon hours working to finally get all of those trays and boxes filled, water ice is the perfect remedy.  It’s enjoyable, much less labor, and completely different in every aspect from a pretzel.  The same scenario applies to pursuing any major at Hopkins.  There will be times when you’ll get frustrated with your major and never want to do another integral, read about another important figure of history, or write another word.  In times like these, you’ll be happy you took a completely different class or joined a student group just for enjoyment.  You’re going to need some kind of water ice to pull you through.

3) Customers love water ice!  Having water ice is going to make your business more successful.  Think about how many pretzel places there are in the world.  Now think about how many of those pretzel places also serve water ice.  See?  The same thing will apply to you in the next four years.  There are tons of political science majors out there, but at Hopkins, you have the power and flexibility to be a political science/biophysics double major, pre-law student, admissions volunteer (hint hint), athlete, campus emergency responder, and member of the Art League all at the same time.  How many people in the world can say that?  You truly have a lot of opportunities ahead of you, so keep in mind that it’s good to be unique!

4) There are other flavors of water ice out there that you haven’t had yet, and who knows, you might end up finding a new favorite flavor.  Do you think my boss, one of the world’s biggest pretzel fans, ever thought she would love mango water ice so much?  Of course not!  If there is one thing to take away from this story, it’s that if you never try anything new, you’re not going to figure out what your true passions are.  You won’t get to attend Hopkins forever, so if there is any ideal time to discover your true interests, it’s now!

So, class of 2014, I leave you with these parting words of advice: attending Hopkins is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and in order to get the most out of it, you need to explore both academic and extracurricular areas that are outside of your comfort zone.  I’m telling you this as I’m sitting here with my brand new, bright purple book of Spanish plays for next semester wondering what in the world I was thinking registering for a theater course as a biology major. Aside from participating in a Shakespeare coloring contest back in eighth grade English, I have pretty much zero experience reading plays, so this course has a lot of potential to go horribly wrong.  However, I have to keep reminding myself that this is exactly what the Hopkins experience is about.  By next semester, I might be going around campus quoting Cervantes and Lope de Vega, or I might decide to never read another act or sonnet ever again.  Either way, for the next four months, theater will be my water ice.  What will yours be?

I can’t get over how great life is with air conditioning and home-cooked meals.  I’d be baking if I were back in the AMRs during this insane heat wave.  Thankfully, next year I’ll be in the air-conditioned Charles Commons, but I’ll still have to make the inevitable transition back to college food without the unlimited freshman meal plan!  Although eating at the Fresh Food Café every single day last year got a little repetitive, you can’t beat the convenience of prepared food thirty seconds away from your dorm room.  Next year’s meal plan is probably going to require some more cooking on my part.

FFC Desserts!

A few weeks ago, while I was reading Anthony Bourdain’s new book Medium Raw, I came across this little statement:

“…the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill…”

If you know me at all, it’s a pretty solid fact that I am seriously inept at cooking anything more complex than a grilled cheese sandwich, but when I first read this statement, I tried to reassure myself.  Maybe I’m not that bad of a cook.  I can make spaghetti.  Or I could just eat cereal for dinner.  Or toast.  Oh wait, there’s no toaster in the dorm room.

Reading on, Bourdain makes a list of basic cooking skills that he feels everyone should have.  Not wanting to face the truth about my cooking skills, I continued with the self-reassurance as I read through each skill:

“They should know how to chop an onion.  Basic knife skills are a must.”

Is there really a wrong way to chop an onion?  I don’t know how to dice an onion, but what’s the difference if the pieces aren’t cubes?  As long as they’re small, right?  That counts .

“Everyone should be able to make an omelet.”

My suitemate can make omelets.  Problem solved.

“Cooking vegetables to a desired doneness is easy enough and reasonable to expect of any citizen of voting age.”

I can totally cook veggies!   Whether they’re done or not is questionable, but I don’t have high veggie standards.

“The ability to shop for fresh produce and have at least some sense of what’s in season…”

I can go to the Waverly Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings to get fresh produce!  I’m sure what they have there is in season.  That makes me 3 for 3 in the vegetables category.  Oh wait, I forgot about the onion one at the beginning.  I’m 3.5 for 4 (half credit for kind of being able to chop an onion).

“One should be able to roast and mash potatoes.  And make rice – both steamed and the only slightly more difficult pilaf method.”

First of all, now I feel really stupid because I don’t know how to mash potatoes.  I can peel them if that counts for anything.  Secondly, I don’t even know what pilaf is, so I guess it’s safe to assume that I don’t know how to make it.

After the mashed potatoes, the point finally got across: I need to learn to cook at least a few things so that I’m not living on cereal and poorly cooked vegetables next year.  So I decided that I’m going to step up my productivity this summer by trying to make new recipes until I can make at least ten decent and relatively easy dinners by next fall.

I’ve already started this process with a few attempts.  Some have turned out better than others:

Attempt #1:  Pasta with spinach

This sounded simple enough so I thought it would be a good first attempt dish.  The only major setback was that it called for cavatappi and I couldn’t find that in the store, so I got the closest thing: another kind of pasta that started with a C.  No big deal, it was still a success.  I chopped spinach, rinsed beans, cooked the pasta, mixed it together, and added the cheese without any trouble.  I could definitely cook this at school.  One successful recipe down, nine to go.

Attempt # 2:  The Strudel

Ok, this was not a good experience.  Now I know that anything that involves phyllo dough is beyond my area of expertise.  That stuff is so thin!  Each sheet is thinner than a sheet of paper and breaks apart whenever you try to pick it up.  It’s just a mess.  (The strudel was bad too, if that wasn’t already implied.)

Attempt # 3: The Frittata

I didn’t know what a frittata was when I first started making this, but after following the directions (cook eggs and vegetable mixture in pan until eggs set, broil in oven until completely cooked), I made my parents try it and they defined “frittata” as “like an omelet, but worse.”

Hopefully by this time next month, my cooking will have improved and I’ll be more self-sufficient as far as meals are concerned.  I’ll keep you updated!

Two summers ago at this time, I was waking up early every morning, putting on my worker boots, and heading over to the site where I helped the construction crew haul bundles of cedar shingles to be assembled into a roof.  Last summer at this time, I was waking up at around 6 AM, putting on my baseball cap with a smiling pretzel on it, and going to the factory to mix dough and twist the dough into soft pretzels.  This summer, however, I wear actual work clothes to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to volunteer.  For me this job is weirdly, well, normal.

While I could have spent the summer researching back in Baltimore, working in a hospital was much more likely to help me answer the question of whether or not I want to go to med school in three years, so in the end I obviously opted to volunteer.  I was assigned to a unit with both neurosurgery and neurology patients, and that was pretty much all I knew about my unit before showing up on the first day.  As it turns out, it’s a lot more demanding and a lot more intense than I thought it was going to be.

For confidentiality reasons I can’t talk much about working at the hospital, but there have definitely been a few key things I’ve learned so far through this whole experience:

1.  Get to work on time!  Even though I’m a volunteer, if I didn’t show up for whatever reason, everyone would have to make adjustments in their already busy schedules.  Even if the train breaks down and leaves me stranded at some random station in north Philly (which has happened three times so far), I’ve somehow managed to make it there.

2.  All of the hospital staff really value education.  I frequently meet complete strangers throughout the hospital who are willing to bend over backwards to show me where something is or how to do a certain task correctly.  When people sacrifice their time like this so that my job is a little easier to figure out, I feel very obligated to do things right and to take some pride in my work.

3.  Treat everyone extremely well.  Even though the hospital is an enormous place, I see the same people over and over again every week, whether they’re nursing assistants on my unit, transporters, environmental staff, or anyone for that matter.  Even if you think you’ll never see someone again, it’s important to be friendly: you never know when you could be needing that person’s help.

4.   Don’t underestimate anyone’s job.  I’ve never seen a group of people work as hard as the people I see everyday at the hospital.  Everyone has an important job, and everyone is extremely busy.

5.  Learn about what and whom you’re dealing with.  If you’re working on the unit, most of the patients expect you to have some idea about how their conditions are affecting them.  Also, if they speak a language other than English, they expect you to be able to speak to them enough to figure out what their basic needs are.  Life becomes a lot easier for both you and the patient if you learn at least a few phrases of their language.

Even though I had some exposure to the medical field before this whole experience, I would definitely consider this a crucial experience to have before applying to medical school.  If I make it through thirteen weeks of working extremely hard on the nursing unit without pay and I still want to work in a hospital, then I feel like I have a good reason to stay on the pre-med track.

I’m stranded here somewhere in northeast Philly because my train broke down, so I thought it would be a good time to catch up on some blogging and recap my freshman year at Hopkins.

Freshman year really was an incredible experience, and I don’t think it’s really going to hit me that it’s over until I move into a different dorm next year.  I’ve been home for about a month already, which is impossible to believe, but I’m already missing my friends and Hopkins a lot.  I’m sure I’ll be very ready to go back to school come August, but for now I love having no midterms, finals, or homework to worry about.  Anyway, here’s a recap of my freshman year:

First Impressions

An Introductory blog about me, my classes, and my favorite things about Hopkins during the first month or so of school.

Food!

This blog entry explains all of the food options at Hopkins and how it is very possible to survive here without your parents’ cooking.  I talk about the cafes, the overwhelming dessert options at the Fresh Food Café, the selection at Charles Street Market, and my cereal obsession.  I also set a very ambitious goal for myself: “I’ve decided to switch from coffee to hot chocolate to avoid becoming a caffeine addict.  We’ll see how that goes.”  (In case you’re wondering, this lasted about two days.)

13^th Grade

I never got terribly homesick in the fall because I only live two hours away from school, but right before Thanksgiving it started to hit me that I really wasn’t in high school anymore and Hopkins would be my life for the next four years.  It sounds ridiculous that it took me three months to realize this, but when I finally did come to this realization it was a bit of a shocker that I’d be giving up some of my favorite aspects of home/high school life.

A Week with Wile E. Coyote

This entry is all about the Hopkins workload and goes into some detail about my experience in Expository Writing, a pretty popular freshman English option.  My Expos class was all about analyzing comedy, and if you read this entry you can kind of get an idea of how I basically went crazy trying to write a paper on Wile E. Coyote.  There’s no arguing that it was an awesome class though, and after this class ended I really missed watching cartoons to “gather evidence” for my papers.

Sick During Finals Week

I got sick/injured about a million times this year and had to go to the Student Health and Wellness Center, but this particular blog entry is about how Student Health and Wellness basically saved me when I had tonsillitis.  Seriously, I owe them the biggest thank you in the world.  They are fantastic, very nice, extremely patient, and they will always point you in the direction of another doctor if they can’t treat you right on campus.  This pretty much sums up the blog: “even though it stinks to be sick when you’re at school, I would definitely say that there could be much worse places to get sick than Hopkins.”

Reading Period Procrastination

When we should have been studying for finals, for some reason we really felt the need to take a Christmas picture with Santa Claus.  We even wore matching shirts to make two of our guy friends feel extra uncomfortable about it.  Read this entry to find out how we managed to get our friends out of the library and how we got a picture with Santa without paying seventeen bucks.

Back in the 215

I really didn’t do anything productive over the holiday break before coming back to Hopkins for intersession, but I did get my picture with Benjamin Franklin!  Read about my first time doing the tourist thing in Philly since our first grade field trip to Independence Mall.

Spanish Major

Even though I love biology, having a double major in Spanish balances out my otherwise science-y course load and pretty much keeps me sane.  Read all about being a Spanish major at Hopkins and some of the great classes and opportunities that the department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures offers!

Changes for the New Semester

After intersession, people began referring to fall semester as “last year” because spring semester was entirely different and felt like a whole new (really short) school year.  This blog tells about some of the changes I was anticipating for the start of the spring semester, including going through rush, tour guiding, taking a really challenging Spanish class, and most importantly never attending an 8 AM class ever again.

Personal Training Certification

The Recreation Center at Hopkins offers a course covered by Hopkins tuition that prepares students to take the American Council on Exercise’s Personal Fitness Trainer Certification Exam.  This course was a fantastic learning experience for me, and it was really interesting.  Because of my research position next year, I’m not sure I want to look into getting a job as a personal trainer during the school year, but I don’t regret for a second taking the course.  It was a really enjoyable part of the second semester.

Hopkins Favorites

Second semester was when I really started to branch out and find some spots around campus to eat, study, and hang out on weekends that weren’t just the FFC, the library, or the Beach.  Even though Hopkins’s campus always has something going on, I love that a lot of students here are very familiar with some of the best places to go in the surrounding area, and hopefully by senior year I’ll be Baltimore savvy too.  However, this blog entry tells about some of my current favorite places on and around the Hopkins campus.

Freshman Housing: Things to Consider

It’s no secret that I was absolutely AMR obsessed during this past year.  I love that no matter what friends I made in other classes or activities at Hopkins, Wilson House was like my family, and I don’t know what it’s going to be like next year not seeing them all the time!  This blog tells about how I was really close to choosing Wolman and having a completely different experience.

Hopkins Cribs: AMR 1, Wilson House, #114

And to continue the AMR obsession, here’s the cribs blog!  Here I write more about Wilson House, freshman housing options, living in a double versus a single, and what to bring with you to college.

Questions from Admitted Students Day!

I had a lot of fun answering questions from admits at the open houses, and I used this blog entry to answer a few of the most popular questions in more detail.  Students asked about everything from getting off campus to the workload to the sunglasses I was wearing that day.

Two More Weeks

The last few weeks of being at Hopkins were definitely bittersweet.  This entry talks about what I thought Hopkins was going to be like versus what it actually turned out to be.  It also talks a little about what I was looking forward to this summer.

Weeks One and Two at Home

Featured in this blog is a snapshot of my Sesame Street coloring book that I’ve been working on this summer – check it out!  If you find yourself bored at home this summer I highly recommend investing in one.  And if you really want to splurge you should go for the 24 pack of crayons.  To read more about what I’ve been doing this summer, read this blog entry.

Hopkins and Hoagiefest

Read about how I managed to relate attending one of the country’s most prestigious universities to ordering lunch at my favorite gas station convenience store.  (By the way I’m very sorry for anyone who’s never been to Wawa if you have no idea what I’m talking about in this blog entry.)

That pretty much sums up my freshman year!  Check back later this month for another update on my summer.

One of the very first things I do whenever I come home is go to Wawa.  Everyone at my high school is obsessed with it, and my obsession has only gotten worse thanks to Wawa-deprived Baltimore.  For those of you who haven’t had the Wawa experience, Wawa is kind of like Seven Eleven, but there are a few major differences that set it apart.  Wawa has a lot more breakfast and lunch options in addition to all of their snack food, they have “Icees” instead of “Slurpees,” they have machines that dispense milkshakes at the press of a button, and the variety of coffee drinks that they offer rivals even Starbucks.  Not to mention they have catchy jingles on their TV commercials for Hoagiefest every June.

A lot of people find it overwhelming to order at Starbucks, but making a decision at Wawa is even more of a challenge.  To choose a meal, you use a touch screen computer to select whether you want a bagel, flatbread sandwich, Hoagie, melt, etc.  Then, once you finally choose from an intimidating number of food categories, you still have to choose your meat, cheese, toppings, and size.  And of course, since the coffee drinks are all so delicious, another big decision must be made as to whether or not you want a hot or cold drink, cappuccino or latte, regular or flavored, small or large, or whether you’d rather skip the coffee and go for a soda, iced tea, or the extremely popular chocolate milk.  Then, being surrounded by aisles of snack food, you usually feel compelled to choose some kind of dessert, or maybe a snack for later.  It’s all very overwhelming.  Even if you’re an expert at making decisions, ordering at Wawa can be hard.  Getting the most out of your time there without over-indulging is a challenge, but at the same time, having so many opportunities to create so many meals is what makes Wawa such a popular and wonderful destination.  Sound familiar???

wawa lunch menu (from wawa.com)

If you take away the gas pumps, the bright yellow goose signs, and the somewhat awkward smell, creating your Wawa meal is kind of like creating your life at Hopkins.  You’re going to have literally thousands of decisions to make about your academics, extracurricular involvements, friends, classes, living situation, and many many other aspects of your day-to-day life.  While it’s important to try everything in order to find out what you truly want to do, it’s just as important not to overwhelm yourself by getting over involved and as a result, being thinly spread over a plethora of groups and activities without being truly committed to any of them.  Just like you wouldn’t order everything on the menu at Wawa, don’t try to commit to everything at Hopkins.  Get a taste of everything at the beginning of the year:  go to as many club meetings as you want, but try to narrow it down and stay involved with the ones you truly enjoy.  It’s much easier to do a thousand things in high school than it is in college.

On the other hand, if you’re one of those people who know what they want right off the bat, try to be a little less decisive.  Some people have a clear-cut Wawa niche: they know as soon as they enter that they want a toasted flatbread with a Mocha Wake Up Cappuccino or a BLT Bagel Sandwich with a fountain Coke.  You’re not going to experience all that Wawa (or Hopkins) has to offer unless you step back and force yourself to try other things.   If you always get a Hoagie, you could be missing out on the Cheesesteaks, which is a pretty big loss since this is Philadelphia after all.  Don’t just go for the same old thing at Hopkins.  Lots of students find that they really have a passion for something different than they thought.

Finally, sometimes it’s better to go for the strange combination.  Wawa is all about strange combinations.  (I can’t think of any other place that puts scrambled eggs, steak, and American cheese in the same sandwich.)   Since Hopkins doesn’t give you a list of core classes to take, you’re free to pursue whatever random combination of classes you’d like.  You can be anything from a biophysics and English double major to a Premed student majoring in history of art or minoring in music.  This freedom isn’t offered at every university, and Hopkins kids do a great job taking advantage of it.

Even though this parallelism is a little flawed since passing Hopkins classes is slightly harder than ordering lunch at my favorite gas station supermarket, both places still offer a breadth of opportunities and therefore require careful decision making.  As a result of the multitude of choices that Hopkins students inevitably have to make throughout their college experience, no two Hopkins kids are the same.  Each Hopkins student is given the chance to create a unique experience for his or herself, which is exactly what I love about our school.

As of Sunday the 17th, I’m done with finals, done with freshman year, and most importantly done with physics and math forever!!  Last weekend, my parents drove down to Baltimore and were thrilled to find that I hadn’t packed my room yet.  So after many comments from my dad as we packed about how I had way too much junk in my room, we put everything in the car, spent the rest of my dining dollars for the semester at Char Mar and Einstein’s Bagels, said goodbye to Wilson House, and headed back home.

Wilson House Banner

When I first got back to Philly, I was so excited to finally be able to do absolutely nothing work related except volunteering at a local hospital.  Since my volunteer job is only two days a week, I still have quite a bit of leisure time at home, which has been mostly spent watching TV, going to the YMCA, coloring my almost three-foot tall “Animals of the World” coloring book, and sleeping.  It’s been a good life, but there’s no arguing with my parents that I’ve been a little bit of a lazy bum.  Since my mom’s convinced that I don’t have enough to do, she’s been making me spread soil and grass seed around the backyard, and in order to prevent this from continuing, I’ve begun the search for another job for the five days of the week when I’m not at the hospital.

some coloring I've been doing

Compared to the first week at home, this past week was pretty productive.  My friends and I were invited back to the high school by one of our former teachers to be on a panel to listen to some AP English presentations.  The project that they were presenting was entitled “This I Believe” (based on the NPR podcasts), and the assignment was to write a speech based on a core belief or experience of theirs that they believe has shaped who each of them is.  The two friends that I was on this panel with both just finished their freshman year at college and both did this project last year before graduating from high school.  The two of them both kept saying that if they had to write another speech right now, it would be completely different than the ones that they wrote last year, which I agree is completely true.  This past year has brought significantly the biggest change in my life, and it has clearly had an equal impact on my friends as well.  Some of my high school friends have come home as very different people.  A lot of them are much more confident, mature, and excited that a year of college experience has given them a much better idea of what major they’re going to study or what career path they’re going to pursue.

Probably the weirdest part of going back to high school for two days was that the class of 2010, who I still think of as juniors, was wearing around their college t-shirts and talking about how they only have three days of school left!  Since when are they graduating?  It feels like I just graduated yesterday!  It goes without saying that seeing them all during their last few days at Wissahickon made me feel super old.  At the same time, I’m a little jealous of the class of 2010 because they have such an exciting freshman year ahead of them!

With not even a full week left of classes, finals are approaching very quickly!  Friday is the last day of lectures, this weekend is our two-day reading period that got shortened because of our snow week in the middle of February, and next Monday is my first final!  Two weeks from now I’ll be done for the semester, I will no longer be a freshman, and I’ll be back in Philadelphia until the last week of August when I’ll be moving into Charles Commons and starting another year.

City Hall, Philadelphia

Last week, my summer plans became finalized: I’ll be working on a nursing unit in the neurosurgery department at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.  While I could have stayed here in Baltimore to do research at the embryology lab that I’m starting at next fall, in the end I decided that it would be crazy to choose to spend three months in a dorm when I could potentially spend those three months at home being able to sleep in my own bed, not do my own laundry, eat my Mom’s food, drive myself places, and see my high school friends.  The other great part about getting to live at home is while I’ll still be an awesome opportunity to work at a fantastic hospital and figure out whether medicine really is a career I want to consider.  I’m not exactly sure what I’ll be doing yet at the hospital, but I’m thinking it’s going to be a little more intense than my last summer job twisting pretzels in a pretzel factory.

I remember at the beginning of the year I wrote a blog about missing life back in Philadelphia, but now that I’m actually going back, I feel the exact same way about leaving Hopkins!  This single year has completely changed my life, and it’s weird looking back to last year when I didn’t know any of my Hopkins friends or where I’d be living at Hopkins or the classes I would take or the groups I’d be a part of.  At this time last year, I was planning my grad party, taking AP exams, and beginning to make a list of dorm supplies I would need for the upcoming year.  Now, after six AP exams, several grad parties, and one whole year of college, my life is totally different in a lot of ways that I didn’t expect.

I know I ramble on in my blog posts all the time about how I’ve met some of my closest friends here at Hopkins, but they’re all really incredible and I didn’t expect that I’d have an almost sibling-like relationship with them after just eight months of living together. I’m of course very excited to be seeing my high school friends again in a few weeks, but I’m seriously going to be having some separation anxiety this summer when I’m not living in Wilson House anymore.

Next year, I’ll be living with my hall-mate, Laura, in a two-person suite in Charles Commons, which has two single rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchenette.   Our neighbors next year are also two girls from Wilson House (that actually live in the same room now as Jackie did when she was a freshman!), and a bunch of other people from our hall this year are going to be on our hall and in the wing right above us.  We’re already making big plans to learn to cook over the summer so that we can make use of our kitchen next year.  We’re also planning on maintaining the tradition of going to weekend brunch at the FFC together.  So as much as I’m going to miss freshman year, I’m telling myself that it’s really not going to be that much different in the fall.  We’ll just be living in a new building, taking new classes, and cooking food on the stove instead of in the microwave.  I’m already looking forward to it all, but for now, I’d better start studying for calculus.

Even though I had a great time at the admitted student open house last year as a high school senior, I have to admit that being at the open house this year as an admitted student was even more fun.  Maybe it was because I had a little too much sugar after sitting behind the candy bowl at the Ask-a-Student table all afternoon, but the whole day was really fun meeting and chatting with all of the admitted students.  Throughout the day, a shocking number of parents all asked me the same question: “what is the most bizarre question that you’ve been asked all day?”  While I wouldn’t really consider any of the questions I was asked on Thursday to be bizarre, I did have a few favorites that went beyond the typical “Why Hopkins?”  While “Why Hopkins?” is a perfectly legitimate question to ask, the less conventional questions that students asked were what really made the open house a lot of fun.

-How often do you get off campus? Probably about once a week.  There are free shuttles that can take you pretty much anywhere within like twenty minutes of campus, or else you could take a cab or rent a Zip Car for a few hours to drive wherever you want.  This weekend alone, I went to the Hunt Valley Mall, Panera Bread, and a tulip garden for a Phi Mu sisterhood retreat.  Some of my favorite spots are Sabatino’s in Little Italy, Towson Mall and the nearby Vietnamese Restaurant, and Tapas Teatro and the Charles Theater.

My Phi Mu Family at a Local Restaurant

-Do you think your freshman year was more stressful than your hardest year of high school, and will people at Hopkins be as competitive as my high school class? In all honesty, I felt a lot more stressed out in high school than I do here at Hopkins.  The work is definitely harder here, but I know I can handle it all and I have a lot more time on my hands.  As far as the competitiveness of Hopkins, I would say that while my friends at Hopkins are more driven and intense than my high school friends, they’re actually less competitive.  Ever since like day two of classes, we’ve figured out that classes are a lot easier when you’re collaborative, so we work together on homework and we’re really only concerned with doing as well as we can individually.

-What kinds of things do you cook in your dorm room? I wish I could give a more exciting answer to this question, but since I live in the AMRs I don’t cook very often.  Occasionally we’ll buy pre-made cookie dough and bake it in the AMR common kitchen, but we’re really bad at cooking so aside from that we eat at the FFC.  Judging by what I’ve seen in Miranda’s blog, it seems like she’s a much better cook.

-How big is the closest mall to campus? I live right by the second biggest mall in the country at home, and I still consider the Towson mall to be pretty big.  It has like four floors too, so prepare to climb some steps.

Towson Mall at Christmas time

-Are there a lot of people here from the East Coast? I’ve met a lot of people here from New Jersey, and it seems like there is a good number of East Coasters, but overall I think Hopkins is extremely geographically diverse.  A lot of the students I’ve met here from farther west consider it really convenient to have close friends from the East Coast because whenever they get homesick, they can always take the train home with their friends and get a home-cooked meal away from home!

-What is there to do besides run, lift weights, and play basketball in the Rec Center? There’s a rock wall, a huge variety of equipment for students to rent and use in the enormous indoor gymnasium, and there are several racquetball courts.  A lot of students here also purchase passes to attend unlimited classes throughout the semester – anything from spinning to Pilates to boot camp.

Laura's schedule

-If I come to Hopkins, do I ever have to take a foreign language course again? Nope, there are hundreds of other humanities classes to chose from to fulfill your distribution requirements.  That’s the great thing about not having a core curriculum.  However, as a Spanish major, I’d encourage you to give foreign languages another chance!

-Do people complain about the food? Not really – the general consensus among freshmen is that the Fresh Food Café is pretty good.  The only complaints are that people are bored of the food in the FFC, but this is easily resolved by using other on and off-campus dining options like Nolan’s, Levering, Pura Vida, Charles Street Market, Silk Road Café, Einstein’s Bagels, University Market, Subway, Chipotle, and many others.  In terms of dining, there’s something here for everyone.

-With a Hopkins workload, will I still be able to watch Bones every week? Yes, there are TVs in the common/lounge area of every dorm building.  The second floor of Wilson House hasn’t missed an episode all year.

Wilson House excursion to the Baltimore Comedy Factory

-Is there anything that you feel like the admissions office really exaggerates? I really don’t think so.  Back when I was a prospective student sitting in the info session, I thought that they were for sure exaggerating the whole research aspect of the university and maybe the security, but now that I’m here I realize that they really weren’t kidding around.  This campus has been ranked by Reader’s Digest as the Safest campus in the country, and the research opportunities for undergrads here are in my opinion even more significant than admissions describes.

-Is there a class you can take about food? Yes!  I took Fiction for Foodies over Intersession, and there are a lot of other really random and fun classes to take during Intersession.  The best part is that Intersession is completely covered by your fall tuition, so classes, meals, and housing during the month of January are free for anyone who wants to come back.

food at Charles Street Market

-Did your sorority give you those sunglasses? Why yes, they did!  Just another reason why you should consider rushing.

-How often do you talk to your parents? I talk to them just about every day, usually when I don’t feel like doing work and my friends are all at class.  I call frequently enough for my sisters to complain that I should stop interrupting their TV shows.

So whether you’re an admitted student coming to the open house this week or a prospective student browsing the blogs, ask us something!!  Looking forward to meeting more of the Class of ’14 on Thursday!

In my last blog post, I talked about my decision to live in the AMRs, but this week’s post is all about my room!

As I mentioned last week, I live in AMR 1 Wilson House and I absolutely love it.  In contrast to Wolman Hall and Buildings A and B, the AMRs, or Alumni Memorial Residences are a traditional dorm style living in which there are communal bathrooms on each hall.  The AMRs are broken into “houses,” which are made up of about 25 kids that share an RA.  At the beginning of the year, the RAs plan a lot of house bonding activities and some friendly competitions between houses, which help to create a pretty closely-knit group.  Wilson house has grown very close, and a lot of us are actually living on the same hall in Charles Commons next year!

my bed and posters

Anyway, I’m in a single on the first floor of Wilson House.  Getting a single was completely luck of the draw – before you enter your freshman year, you can state your preference for a double or single on the housing questionnaire as well as your preference for building, and it just so happened that I got my first choice for both!  Even though I’m sure having a roommate would have been a fun experience, my friends are constantly in my room anyway, so sometimes it actually feels like I live in a quadruple.

Each room in the AMRs comes with a chest of three drawers, a desk (with light), and a wardrobe with two drawers underneath.  I also brought from home two decent sized plastic drawers where I keep a lot of sweatshirts and sweatpants and bulkier clothes.  These drawers plus the three drawers that came with the room both fit under my half-lofted bed, which has created a lot of extra space in the room.

the cork board wall

I also highly recommend renting a Microfridge for your room.  Even though the rooms in the AMRs don’t have kitchenetters, there is a kitchen in the building that students can use, so it’s good to keep some basic ingredients in the refrigerator if you like to cook.  Next to the Microfridge I have a big rainbow light that I brought from home.  Even though the room has good ceiling lighting, I like having the extra light and would suggest bringing at least a bedside lamp.

the wardrobe

A couple other key things I’m really glad I brought from home are milk crates (great for storing shoes and extra towels), a fan because the AMRs don’t have air conditioning, lots of clothes hangers, a printer, and a small bookshelf so that my textbooks and notebooks aren’t overflowing everywhere.

Here’s a better look at my room: