Hopkins is a diverse university where an incredible mix of cultures, academic interests and personalities coexist and thrive. Here is the section where you can publish your unique thoughts, ideas and perspectives on life at Hopkins and beyond.
“Your English teacher said your writing skills are poor and that you need to work on them. We signed you up for these literature clubs and camps for you to improve.”
While walking through the hospital hallway at work the other day, I heard three, middle-aged women discuss in Mandarin one of the women’s new pair of brown leather boots and what shoe styles are currently “in.” A pang of nostalgia hit me, and I felt my eyes tear up, a familiar tingle rising in my nose that I suppressed by scrunching my face.
Located just a few miles from the France-Germany border, Strasbourg was at the top of my list of places to visit within France. I was curious about the French and German cultural influences in the city and was excited to learn more about France’s Alsace region.
At some point in every Writing Seminars class I’ve taken at Hopkins, the same thought has crossed my mind: What if I’m actually bad at this?
“You don’t need to learn how to code.” That’s what I told a cousin of mine who visited from China this past winter break. His interests were in computer science, and he remarked how he felt behind because his peers were doing all sorts of programming projects and competitions while he still didn’t know how to program.
At the beginning of my sophomore year, when I got off my taxi after 24 hours in airports and on flights, I discovered that my dorm had burned and the water damage from the firefighting rendered my room unlivable.
This past semester, my senior fall felt simultaneously like one of my longest and shortest semesters at Hopkins. I took more academic credits than I ever had during my time as an undergraduate, yet my workload felt somewhat lighter than in previous semesters.
“I’m going to be home for the summer. What about you?” The more people I talked to, the deeper the sinking feeling in my gut grew: I was going to be alone for the summer.
On a particularly lonely day, I am in a coffee shop, grief-stricken over the death of an imagined romance.
My sister always does the deep frying. Unafraid of the hot oil, she lays two egg-and-flour-covered pork chops into the wok. They sizzle and solidify into crunchy golden pucks after which she stacks them on paper towels to allow the excess oil to drain.
When you listen to a vinyl, it is both the first and last time you’ll hear it. As the needle traverses the record it creates new grooves, subtle nicks here and there, like a co-producer editing the musical content beyond the control of its original artist.
Whenever my brother and I are back home in Manila, Philippines for break, we have a mission: to eat at all of our favorite restaurants. From the crepes of Café Breton to pasta at La Nuova Pasteleria to steak at Mamou, we have created a formidable list of places to go, always delighting in picking the restaurant of the day every time we eat out.
Attending a college as rigorous as Hopkins requires an extensive amount of time spent going to classes, completing assignments and studying for a never-ending stream of midterms. Because our days are filled with unceasing schoolwork, it can feel as though there is no time to do anything else.
One of my favorite photos of me as a child was taken in the kitchen of the house I was born in — I’m standing at a cabinet that’s taller than me, unopened packages of pasta strewn on the floor, wearing a red onesie that says “Moose!” that was later passed down to both of my sisters.
At 3:30 p.m., I finally received the phone call. Every Wednesday around three in the afternoon, I anticipated a phone call. I was expecting to hear back from a medical school that I interviewed at. On the day of my interview, they told me I would receive my results within six weeks.
As college students, we don’t always think a lot before having sex. We are so excited to explore all possibilities in life that we forget about the consequences of our actions. We go with the flow and do what feels right.
During my last week of studying abroad in Seville, Spain, I finally had the opportunity to go rowing in the canals of the Plaza de España, something I had been looking forward to for the entire semester. Even though I lived a five-minute walk away from the Plaza, I somehow hadn’t carved out the time to go rowing until the last possible moment.
Three out of four members of my family love watching Korean dramas. The one member, my father, who doesn’t like watching dramas always argues that, at the end of the day, it's fiction and we gain absolutely nothing from it except warm fuzzy feelings. Is fiction really that irrelevant?
I have been in France for just over three weeks. It’s still just the beginning of my time here, as my study abroad program runs until mid-May, but it’s incredible how much my life has changed in a few short weeks.
I am much better at buying notebooks than I am at finishing them. In fact, I have a sizable collection of half-used notebooks, journals and diaries filling my bookshelf at home and my desk drawer here in Baltimore.
