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In September 2021, after two heavy rainstorms, Baltimore welcomed its fall season. Now, in the beginning of October, leaves have started turning yellow, winds are blowing harder and people are piling on a few more pieces of winter wear. These are just a few of the many observations I make as I stroll around campus to go to classes each day.
Content warning: The following article includes topics some readers may find triggering, including gender-based violence, sexual assault and death.
When I was 5 years old, I wished upon a shooting star. I was swimming in my backyard at night and saw a flash in the sky. Now that I’m older, I’m pretty sure it was just the blinking lights of a commercial airplane, but that possibility didn’t occur to me then. I had watched enough Disney Channel to be convinced my life was about to change.
Honestly, we met in the most curious of ways. Neither one of us could have imagined meeting such a close friend in the way that we did. Coming into Hopkins as newbies — and just barely making it through Orientation with all of the walking that we had to do — we were terrified of the workload that was soon awaiting us... thus, a night of Drag Bingo.
If you’re in college and you haven't learned something new about yourself, you're doing it wrong.
At my first Thanksgiving dinner, I didn’t have turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, gravy or any type of pie. Instead, there was rice, kimchi, guk and various other Korean side dishes. In fact, at my first Thanksgiving dinner, I had no clue why I didn’t have school that week. I was just happy that I wouldn’t have to do more homework.
Sitting at my grandparents’ breakfast table as a little kid, I once had the brilliant idea of taking one of the die from a board game and stuffing it up my ear. When I tried to take the die out, I counterintuitively pushed it farther and farther into my ear canal. Worried but embarrassed, I hesitated to tell anyone about what I had done, until my parents finally noticed hours later.
There’s a sick dichotomy between Sept. 2, 2021 being my 19th birthday and Sept. 2, 2021 being the day my 20-year-old cousin, Thomas, was diagnosed with leukemia.
A friend of mine once told me that the health of one’s relationships with others is often the strongest indicator of one’s personal happiness at that moment. Regardless of the truth of this statement, it’s been very relevant to my life, especially recently.
Here we are. We’ve managed to make it back to campus. But reacclimating to college and in-person classes has been challenging, at least for me. I thought it would be easier since I’ve lived in an apartment off-campus for the past year. We’ve had our setbacks with mandates and variants, with politics and restricted travel, yet for those of us still here (for those of us still alive), we must honor the lives lost by continuing to survive and making the vow to protect one another.
Before starting grad school, people often told me this would be a difficult phase of my life in many ways. I didn’t know at that point what they were talking about. But when I moved to the U.S. six months back, the main thing that hit me was loneliness. As a grad student, I end up seeing the same five to seven people every day in the lab. Most of them believe in having a professional relationship. If you are lucky enough, you may find one or two good friends in them.
Just like every other person, I have several substantial aspects to my personality that I make sure to mention on a daily basis. For example, every person on my floor is now very much aware that the state of Michigan obtained the Upper Peninsula after the Battle of Toledo.
The night before the first day of classes, my roommate asked me if I would be able to find my way around campus. Inside, I knew the answer was probably not, but out of fear of letting my nerves show, I nonchalantly told her to relax and that I “100% got this.” The next day came, and once I arrived on campus, I immediately realized that I had absolutely no idea where I was going.
One of my friends keeps joking that Hopkins has three classes of freshmen this year. And while I don’t want to make light of the serious loss we’ve all suffered in our education (and other areas of life), he’s not exactly wrong. There are the juniors, who had their actual freshman year cut short; the sophomores, some of whom were here last semester but many of whom are now on campus for the first time; and then there are the legitimate freshmen (welcome!).
I chose my column name for two reasons: I wanted to focus on positivity, and I’ve needed glasses my whole life... until now.
Few things about sixth grade stand out as particularly memorable to me, but I do remember something my band director used to say to me when I meandered into his room complaining that I couldn’t wait for the day, the week, the year to end. He’d always say, “Don’t go wishing your life away.”
I walked along N. Charles Street this morning, Taylor Swift’s album Red playing in my ears and the crisp, 63-degree air necessitating a cardigan to keep me from shivering. The feeling of the cool air, complemented by the warmth of the sun’s rays, made me feel excited to see the turning of the seasons, the likes of which I had never seen.
As the end of August drew near, I began to spot more and more cars filled with boxes and suitcases parked outside the AMRs and CharMar. After a semester and a summer of online everything — whether it be a class, movie watch party or an internship — seeing people walking around on campus was surreal. Watching the bright-eyed freshmen move their bedding, pillows and other school supplies out of their parents’ car trunks, I was reminded of how I arrived at Hopkins three years ago.
You can’t go to Hopkins without hearing about impostor syndrome. As soon as I accepted my admissions offer from the University, it was like a specter waving at me from the semester to come. The phrase continuously popped up in Reddit threads and prospective student group chats. Upperclassmen warned me that I would sometimes (or often) feel inferior to my classmates, doubt my intelligence and wonder how I ever got accepted in the first place.
My mother’s dream since childhood was to have a horse. She was not around horses as a kid, other than in books, and only began riding in her 20s. In her 40s, she began volunteering at a horse rescue. She was interested in quite a few of the horses that passed through, like Troy, the thoroughbred who wasn’t fast enough to be a racehorse.