I’ve heard the saying “April showers bring May flowers” all my life, but I’m starting to see a new meaning to the old phrase. I know that most of us think that whoever created this catchy tune was talking about the typical weather patterns of Spring but what if they were really talking about college. Yes, college! April is a tumultuous month for a college student with assignments piling up in front of our eyes and the threat of finals looming in the back of our minds. There aren’t enough Red Bulls and Starbucks triple-shot frappuccinos in the world to get college students through the month of April. But just like the old saying, after dealing with a month of pure hell, we have been rewarded with our May flowers of summer break. I know, it’s crazy to think that this is my last post in my commonplace book — it feels like my freshman year just started. Now that I have realized how close I am to ending my first year as a college student, I’m filled with so many different emotions. Of course I’m happy that the burden of assignments and exams will be gone but I’m also going to really miss some of my teachers. I also can’t help but see how much I have changed in just a few short months. Not only have I changed in the ways that I maneuver through classes, but I’ve slowly grown comfortable to the college environment.
There’s no doubt in my mind that I’ve become more comfortable at Ole Miss. I’m an EXTREMELY shy person, so let’s just say moving away from home and leaving all of my friends was not an easy task. The first week on campus was awful to say the least. I knew no one and didn’t feel comfortable going up to complete strangers trying to make friends. For an entire week before classes started, I couldn’t go anywhere without feeling uncomfortable. When classes began on Monday morning a new feeling of anxiety hit me hard. I walked into Mrs. Forgette’s writing class and wanted to vomit. The tables were two to a table and it was an extremely small class. I knew that meant there would be a lot of group discussions — boy was I right. Writing class was the only class that wasn’t in a lecture hall type setting for me, so I can honestly say that for a while I hated the class. I loved the writing, don’t get me wrong, but I loathed having to openly discuss my ideas and writings in front of others. As the semester progressed, I started to learn more about my classmates in my writing class. Once I began to think of these people as more than just strangers who were going to hate everything I said, I started getting more comfortable in writing. The moment that I truly became comfortable in the class was during the PowToon peer review. I was partnered with Hunter, Madelyn, and Megan and I was extremely paranoid with how my cartoon had turned out. Instead of hating my PowToon, they loved it. I will never forget when a student in another group said that they had a pretty good cartoon and Madelyn turned to them and said that they should watch mine and see what they thought. Since that moment Writing class has been so much fun. I don’t think twice now when Mrs. Forgette tells us to partner up; it kind of feels normal now.
Another change that I can see in myself from first to second semester is how much I trust myself. When classes began in August I was still in a high school state of mind. I was doing all of my classwork exactly by the book just as I has been accustomed to in high school. I realized that I wasn’t putting that much creativity in my work but I didn’t think that it was appropriate for college material. In my papers in writing I was putting my own voice on mute to try and sound intelligent. Even in my biology lab, my TA told me that the example projects that I had made were too similar to the ones in the book and that I needed to be more creative in my future designs. This was all a shock to me. I mean, I thought the whole point of college assignments was to sound as sophisticated as possible, even if that meant having to google a lot of synonyms. I think I finally realized that my voice was the one that I should be listening to when I was composing my PowToon script. I had just written the biggest, most academic paper in my life, about alcoholism of all things. When Mrs. Forgette told us that we were going to have to make a cartoon about the same paper I was thinking that everything was set. Then the bombshell dropped. We had to make the uber-academic paper into an engaging cartoon that a regular day imbecile could understand. I remember coming to class with a draft of our voiceover for peer review and after one student listened to it she just looked at me as if I had just baked a pie that was half frozen in the middle; it wasn’t even close to being done. I rewrote the entire script that night and was all but certain that it was the worst thing that I had ever done in my life. I don’t know if it was the sleep deprivation or what but I just started writing down the first things that came to my head instead of tooling over my word choice for minutes as usually did. I talked about Seth Rogen in my PowToon script for crying out loud! Because I had broken through my comfort zone, I was expecting an awful grade from Mrs. Forgette but she actually loved it. This semester I have pushed myself to unleash all of my creativity. The multimodal website for the synthesis paper is a great example of how much my creative expression has increased. There is not a single thing on that website that is written in an academic sense, instead it’s all written as if I’m giving a very unprofessional speech to a group of middle schoolers and I desperately want them to laugh. If we had done that project at the beginning of the fall semester I would have failed. I would have been so set on sticking to the high school norms and academic language that it would have been more boring to read that website than the source list on Wikipedia.
The rollercoaster called “Freshman Year” has come to a stop and all we are left with are the memories. From the highs of new friends and social gatherings to the lows of late night study sessions and struggling GPAs, this year never had a dull moment. As I leave campus on Wednesday, I’ll keep in mind a quote from the great Dr. Seuss, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”