Letter to my freshman self: Samhi

Dear Freshman Samhi, 

Welcome to Hopkins! As I was writing this letter, I really had to think back to who you were, what you were worried about, what you were experiencing — a lot has changed since you first stepped foot on the Homewood campus. 

I have to first warn you: Your Hopkins experience won’t have an entirely good start and certainly won’t initially live up to the high expectations you set for yourself. At the start, you won’t have a solid friend group, go out exploring the city you now call home, find fulfilling research or feel like you belong. You will spend many parts of your freshman year actually feeling the opposite and struggling to make friends or find clubs you like on campus. You will spend most of your time holed up in MSE C-level or Mudd doing homework and wondering if you were missing out on why everyone said college was so great. 

But, I promise you it will get better. Sophomore year, you will meet two of your closest friends during group work in Molecular Biology and will spend the next three years exploring Hopkins, Baltimore and even the East Coast. From New York City to Maine, you will have the best time exploring new cities and making lifelong memories. You all will laugh during biochemistry group work, try so many new restaurants and eventually be roommates. You will find your people — it may take some time, but once you find them, you will be surprised at how much more Hopkins feels like home. 

You will also find home in a community called The News-Letter, to which you will give an incalculable and astounding amount of your time. What is The News-Letter? You are probably wondering. Is that who made that Cover Letter magazine that I got during O-Week and have saved in my desk drawer? 

Yes, it is! But it will soon mean more to you than just the physical paper. Mondays at 7 p.m. will quickly become one of your favorite times of the week, when you get to know your fellow editors and find meaning in your shared work, and the Gatehouse will quickly become your second home on campus. You will spend hours editing articles for the paper, laughing during print nights, having intense and cerebral conversations during editorial boards and perhaps most surprisingly, serve as Editor-in-Chief during your senior year. 

I know you and I know you have a Google Doc with every single extracurricular activity you have to check off your box to get into a good medical school or every goal you have to hit to achieve The Ideal College Experience. You will be surprised to know that you have deviated from that list and instead are pursuing what you are passionate about and brings you joy, at your own pace. You will no longer be a neuroscience or public health major, but instead, a political science major. You will be shocked to learn that at one point, you were pre-law and spent a summer interning at the public defender’s office, before ultimately finding your way back to medicine. 

But, don’t be alarmed! The list was never realistic and if you followed it exactly, you wouldn’t have been happy or made the most out of your time at Hopkins. Let go of your rigid expectations of what college should be and follow your passions — they will guide you where you need to go. 

In a less tangible way than the clubs you join and the friends you make, you will change on a deeper level, for the better. You are no longer as unsure of who you are or fearful of what others may think. You have realized that almost nothing is as deep as you make it out to be in your anxious spirals and that the important part of being happy is to prioritize living just as much as you prioritize school or work. You will try so many new foods and even like some of them, become comfortable at public speaking and perhaps most surprisingly, love being a Hopkins student. 

In some ways, I feel unreasonably annoyed that you used to not realize these things in yourself -- things I now accept as fundamental. But to get to this point and to get to this version of me, there had to be you and the four years of experiences at Hopkins that you are just beginning to have.

It won’t be a perfect four years, but at the end of it all, you will be so grateful it happened exactly the way it did and that spending time with these people at this school in this city was your college experience. If I could go back to tell you to do something differently, I wouldn’t, except to tell you to enjoy and savor what is to come. 

You are undeniably curious about what I am up to now, and I’ll spoil it a bit. I am moving to New York City for a gap year while applying to medical school, finally living out both of our dreams to live in the city and explore all it has to offer. 

This letter has temporarily intertwined us in time, but now, we must go our separate ways. You: just starting out your time at Hopkins. I: saying goodbye to the place that I have come to love. 

Sincerely,

Samhi

Samhi Boppana is from Columbus, Ohio and graduated with a degree in Political Science and Natural Sciences. She is a former Editor-in-Chief and Opinions Editor for The News-Letter.