Sooooooooo, we are deep into the midterm season here at the Hop, and you can definitely tell. The library (who many students have, including myself, nicknamed “Milton”) made all of its levels 24/7, the cubicles are packed from the evening till about 12 or 1am, there are a plethora of stressed out sounding FaceBook statuses and tweet updates, and the students in general just look tired and overwhelmed. Part of the package is that overwhelmed feeling that drains you…it’s just part of college, especially a rigorous one like JHU.
I went on a retreat last weekend to a Christian campsite, and I got the chance to enter a corn maze and try to find all of the clues in each of the 7 acres before exiting. And while I was in the corn maze all lost and wandering, I couldn’t help but think about how the maze reminded me of Hopkins, and college in general. So here’s my comparison:
CORN MAZE:
My friend Lena and I started out with a map, and the time was written on it so we could time ourselves…they gave prizes for people who completed the maze in the shortest amount of time. We were also given useful yet kind of vague information about how to kind of navigate the corn maze then we were off!
HOPKINS:
You get here, and you’re all excited because this is a new place with freedom to navigate your life they way you want to…you have so much to look forward to, you’re with people who are just as clueless as you are, and you have instructions…i.e. advice from parents, counselors, teachers, and upperclassmen students. However, some things still seem kind of vague and you have an idea of what you want to do and your end goals, but you’re not quite sure how to reach them. And you won’t know until you start to explore your new surroundings.
just starting
CORN MAZE:
Once we got into the maze, we were a bit less clueless because we finally saw what the thing looked like and we no longer had to imagine it based on the dinky map we had. It was so much fun seeing all of the different paths we could take (each acre was color coded…so if we were in orange, we were in acre one. If we were in pink, we were in acre 3, and so on.). We had to look through each acre and try to find the little clue stamps which were hidden in color coded mailboxes. Once we found the clues, we had to stamp our map with them to prove that we indeed had made it through the acre. The first one was really hard to find, but we got some impromptu and rather vague help from a random lady and we got it.
HOPKINS:
Whenever I speak to freshmen, they are always most anxious about how in the world it would feel to be away from home, how it would feel to be on a college schedule, and how it would feel to have college level work. When the first day or week of classes hit, the anxiety and cluelessness start to wear away. And experience is the only remedy for anxiety. Once you start to navigate your way, things become a bit more clear and you see all of the cool paths you can take in college. Sometimes it gets hard and you get stuck because you don’t know what to do or where to go next…but sometimes advice and clarity come from the most unlikely places, people, classes, or experiences. Many students change their career goals or majors based on one awesome class, professor, job, or experience they have had. And that’s great!
CORN MAZE:
We found the first clue in the black acre, then we found another clue on our own. But it took a really long time. We got really tired of walking in circles and hoping that something new and exciting would be around the bend. Usually it just ended up being somewhere unexciting that we’d already passed. We started to ask other people, who looked just as confused as we did, for help, but it kind of took us in different circles.
HOPKINS:
There will indeed be plenty of times in college when you have a crisis of major or of identity. You feel like you have outgrown what you were once in love with, and you hit roadblocks.. Everyone else seems so happy and content with their majors and classes and jobs and clubs, so you feel like you’re the odd one out. What’s wrong? Where’s the passion you once had? Then you start to ask other people about themselves and their academic and social lives, and what’s making theirs so great. And sometimes their answers make you feel worthless and like crud, and even more lost than you were before.
CORN MAZE:
We really started to get frustrated after finding the second clue. We found the third one about an hour after we started, and then we started to regret that we had chosen to enter the corn maze (we had a choice of the corn maze or a zip line). The joy was just about gone, we were tired and hot and going in circles again. We even noticed that we were crossing paths with fewer people, as if they had given up and left, or as if they had somehow found the keys to advancing while we were stuck at the beginning.
NEVER ENDING FRUSTRATING CORN
HOPKINS:
And then the frustration gets even more annoying at times. You really don’t know what to do and you start to want to give up . Thoughts of transferring to less rigorous or less academically focused schools cross your mind more often than you’d like. And to make matters worse, you feel like so many other students are just succeeding away while you’re kind of sucking at the whole college thing. And those who aren’t succeeding may have made the decision to just give up. Either way, you’re different from those two groups of students because you’re still struggling.
CORN MAZE:
About an hour and some change into the maze, we came across the rest of our friends who had started after we did, and there were more of them, and they were so happy and bouncy and just glad to be together while in the maze. We were about to exit the maze and give up , but when we saw them, we decided to stick with them. Plus, we found 3 more clues with them in about 20-something minutes…which was way better than the three we found in about 1.5 hours. The atmosphere just changed, people were singing Disney songs and the feelings of suckiness basically dissipated.
trying to see if we could find a way out!
HOPKINS:
I CANNOT STRESS HOW AMAZING YOUR TIME IN COLLEGE WILL BE IF YOU MAKE SOME AMAZING, SUPPORTIVE, AND GENUINE FRIENDS. Our moods changed once we became a part of their group, plus we found the clues way faster! Depend on your friends to help you with rough material, depend on them for support and to give encouragement and perspective. My friends here are amazing and I cannot imagine how my life, socially, emotionally, and academically, would be without them. Those things that bothered you before can be diminished with the love of friends.
CORN MAZE:
So after we found our friends and 3 more clues, we did start to get tired again…the group was breaking up a bit because people wanted to do their own things…take pictures, naps, prep for the next activity, etc. My friend and I ended up leaving before we got the last clue because we wanted to prep for the last activity. But I didn’t see it as giving up at all. We were satisfied with how far we’d gotten and that was what mattered.
HOPKINS:
So my last comparison…independence and choosing your own paths. Friends are amazing and will help you so much…but in the end, what YOU do ends up being a choice that YOU have to make. You use the support and help you receive from your friends, but know that your goals and aspirations and decisions have to be yours. We decided that we’d leave a bit early and take some pictures, and see our friends later. Paths always cross again. And they’re all beautifully diverse.
awww..right before we broke off and left to do our own things
So yea, that was a loooong entry (so if you read it all…THANKS!) But I couldn’t help but see the metaphorical similarities between the corn maze and college. I hope this entry helped to inform you about college, and also helped put some things into perspective…writing it sure helped me!
Until next time,
Dominique
P.S. All photo credit goes to my friend Lena!~ whoo!
What a cool entry! I love mazes (and college)! :)
Pretty sweet comparisons…made a lot of sense…domodomodomo
“experience is the only remedy for anxiety” – that just changed my life a little bit. writing it down and putting it over my desk. :)
You went on a corn maze, too?!?!? I went on one on the 29th, haha.