“Welcome to Hopkins! We’re glad you’re here!” Over the next few weeks, you will hear variations of these words more times than you can count. You will be inundated with invitations to the new world in which you find yourself. Maybe Hopkins feels wholly foreign to you or maybe it feels natural. In either case, you will need time to explore it and find your place. I urge you to savor this time.
Welcome to Hopkins! As a student, a lot of your time is unfortunately taken up by studying for your upcoming midterm or finishing up a problem set. Fortunately, our campus is filled with a plethora of places to study, and, depending on your mood, you can always find a new place to get some work done.
There are abundant options for getting around Baltimore without a car while living on or near the Homewood Campus. From local buses to Hopkins-specific transportation options, exploring Baltimore at a low cost is easy.
Eating good food on a daily basis can be important for staying sane and feeling healthy in college, especially when you’re leaving home for the first time. While the buffet-style meals and unlimited desserts of the dining halls may seem like luxury on your first week, by the start of classes you’ll probably be craving something that reminds you of home.
Once you try most of the restaurants on St. Paul Street (which, unfortunately, doesn’t take too long), you might want to explore places outside Charles Village. If you find it difficult to choose where to visit first, don’t worry! Here are some recommendations for good food in Baltimore.
Once you join the Hopkins community, you will soon learn to speak the Blue Jay language. Below is a list of words whose meanings are unique at Hopkins and whose presence are woven into Hopkins students’ daily life.
All incoming freshmen and sophomores at Hopkins are required to live on campus with their peers. This can be one of the biggest, but often overlooked, adjustments for most students coming out of high school. I know it was for me, so I’d like to offer some insight into my experience with my roommate and suitemates in my freshman year.
Welcome to Charm City! As your Leisure Editor, I see it as my obligation to introduce you to my favorite spots around Baltimore. Of course, I can’t possibly cover all the eateries, museums and wonderful neighborhoods in just 800 words, so I am choosing a few that students frequent the most: Hampden, Mount Vernon, Inner Harbor, Federal Hill, Fells Point and Towson.
After a summer of anticipation, attending every New Student Zoom available and obsessively soaking up every bit of information about Hopkins, my freshman year arrived. I imagined myself being very social, going out on weekends with friends and quickly forming deep friendships.
Yana I’m not going to lie and say I’ve always wanted to be a journalist because that simply isn’t true. I have always been interested in writing though, and it is this interest that brought me to The News-Letter.
I wish I was cynical about goodbyes. No matter how many times I’ve had to close a chapter and let go, nostalgia and sentimentality always get the best of me. As I lament the end of not just my Hopkins career but the time spent with my friends, I’ve always envied those who are able to rationalize goodbyes and move on, though I know this graduation is going to hit differently for all of us.
It’s hard to believe I’m currently writing my last article for The News-Letter ever. Though I have yet to walk across the stage at Commencement, this feels more like my true Hopkins finale. Yet this closing act of my studenthood hardly feels bittersweet. I can’t keep the corners of my mouth from turning up with gratitude while my fingers tap out reflections on the keyboard.
Dear freshman Leela, Four years ago, there was so much unknown. When I think of you (us?) standing on the stoop in Brooklyn, surrounded by all your earthly possessions, waiting for Dad to pull the car around to drive to Baltimore for orientation, I wish I could give you a hug.
“You are like a ball of constant stress.” I remember this line spoken to me during the beginning of my freshman year. At the time, I was still a Peabody Institute voice student, and I was in one of my earliest studio lessons. While nervously singing an art song learned hastily the night before, my legs kept shaking and my head could not keep still.
At this point, it’s not really a secret anymore, but, for those who don’t know, my name is Isabel, and I started @jhufreestuff on Instagram. To be honest, part of the reason I wanted to write this article was because of the theatrics (not surprising if you follow the account). The other reason was that I wanted a chance to reflect on what it’s been like to run this account for almost four years, which I can’t really do in one “face reveal” post on my Instagram story.
Content warning: The following article includes topics some readers may find triggering, including sexual assault. Back home in Taiwan, my family likes to joke that I am an ai ku gui: a crying ghost.
As someone who started at Hopkins in the fall of 2020, many of my “college firsts” were virtual. It’s hard to define when exactly my college experience became “normal.” It could have been in my first in-person class sophomore year or the first show I was able to perform without wearing a mask.
I made my last batch of brownies today. Not my last batch ever, of course, but my last batch for a few, specific, important people.
Believe it or not, one of the hardest goodbyes I’ve had to make at Hopkins was to a building — the Gatehouse to be exact. The grayish-green building, worn down yet exquisite in its architecture, that remains unknown to most of Hopkins represents much more than a corner of campus: it houses the institution of The News-Letter, an organization that I have dedicated my entire Hopkins career to.
Speak Out Now is a socialist group that advocates for active participation in ending capitalism through revolution. According to their website, a socialist system means the “common ownership and sharing of the world’s resources and productive capacity under the democratic control of the world’s peoples,” rather than the exploitation of labor and the ownership of profit by a small number of capitalists.
