Oftentimes, college is expected to be a time of reinvention: you’re thrown into a new environment and asked to build yourself back from the ground up after the world’s hardest factory reset. Maybe this is the year you start going to the gym on the daily, practicing your instrument more or writing your magnum opus. The problem with asking such a hard pivot of yourself, just as with New Year’s Resolutions, is that your body’s resistant inertia will nearly always lead to those new desirable habits first becoming chores, and then memories left in the past.
Instead, if you really want to make your college life more interesting, let yourself develop into the new environment around you.
The beautiful thing about Hopkins is that not only do you have an incredible assortment of resources around you, but those resources are designed specifically for you to use. Nearly every time, the people working desks where the bureaucratic gatekeepers normally sit are actually extremely enthusiastic facilitators who would be more than happy to show you the ropes.
Whether you’re dipping your toes into photography by renting from the Creative Media Center, trying out your first 5.10 at the climbing wall or picking up fire spinning with the Entertainers Club, you will always find yourself immersed in a community of growth. That’s the beautiful thing about college: you get to pick anything your heart desires and take it as far as you want to (and importantly for me, at little to no financial cost)!
As an exercise in advice-giving, I want to share the story of how my hobbies evolved during my own freshman year — not just to talk about myself out of vanity, but to give you a sense of where my two cents lie.
At the beginning of fall semester, I let myself try anything: that meant signing up for any and everything at the Student Involvement Fair. While some of these organizations I am still in, like The News-Letter, most have been comfortably left to the wayside. I picked up photography and joined the Photography Club before realizing my relationship with the hobby was much more casual than I initially thought it was. On top of that, I continued my high school theater kid antics by auditioning to be in the Hopkins Theatre Arts and Studies’ “Gross Indecency” before quickly realizing that the rehearsal schedule on top of going in to do research at the med campus was sapping my supply of life force dry.
After an unfortunate phase of Texas Hold’em fanaticism, I settled into joining a band (we’re called Monkfish!), and music has become a much larger part of my life than I ever would have imagined it being.
What this experience told me is that nothing I could have predicted happened, and nothing that happened to me I could have predicted. If I sat down during orientation week and wrote down the person I would have wanted to be 12 months later, I would not have written anything close to where I am right now. Actually, I’m much happier right exactly where I am than I would be as this hypothetical ideal Steve because I know now that I gave everything I wanted a good shot, and whatever I do now can have the full force of my heart and passion behind it.
This is all to say, it is okay to not feel like you’re hitting the ground running. You don’t have to immediately join the student organization that will carry your volunteering hours straight into medical school applications. You don’t even have to be all that good at the things you choose to do for fun. You just have to take it one day at a time by doing what calls to you, and the best version of yourself will emerge from that process.
Happy discovering!
Steve Wang is a sophomore from Missouri City, Texas majoring in Biomedical Engineering. He is an Arts and Entertainment Editor for The News-Letter.