Year-in-Review: Year 1
It's been a year of new experiences.
Everything in college is different and not always in the ways you might expect coming from high school.
When I moved into my dorm in August, I knew that the adjustment would be challenging. I was moving away from my home, my family, my friends, everything I had become accustomed to during my life. But leaving the relative comfort of my hometown was something that I was prepared to do. I was ready for the change.
That did not mean that it was any less difficult. One thing that was particularly hard was the dramatic shift in the way that I had to manage my time as compared to high school. The expectations for work outside of class were much higher, and it was hard to find a routine that worked, especially since my schedule varied so much from day to day. I was forced to start thinking ahead, considering my schedule in advance, and setting aside time to get everything done on time. Otherwise it would have been practically impossible for me to balance classes, homework, club meetings, team projects, and driving out to the middle of nowhere to ride my horse at the two different barns that I tried in the Cincinnati area (one per semester. He didn't like either of them and has made up his mind that he will not be leaving home again.) Time management became even more difficult at the end of the year, when my trainer broke her leg while riding our youngest horse. I volunteered to help out, of course, which meant driving back to Columbus for weekends to ride all of the horses and work at the farm. This gave me the opportunity to show her top horse, reigning national champion at his level, my first USEA rated win. But this meant that I had to set aside more time in the week to get ahead on my schoolwork, not just keep up. In the end, I managed to maintain my GPA, not quite at the level I had been achieving in high school, but considering the difficulty of the engineering curriculum, I was more than satisfied.
I decided early in the school year that I was going to switch majors. Had I known how difficult the process would be, I probably would have chosen the exploratory engineering program instead of declaring biomedical engineering as my major when I was applying to University of Cincinnati, but at the time I applied I thought for sure I had chosen "correctly". As it turns out, I realized quickly, before I had even started major-specific classes, that I wanted more flexibility in potential career options than biomedical engineering offered. To provide this flexibility, I chose to change majors to mechanical engineering. The change was confirmed between fall and spring semesters, which ruined my priority scheduling, but at least I was able to make the switch smoothly, without falling behind in the curriculum. Now, as I prepare for my first co-op, I know that I made the right choice.
My search for a co-op was particularly enlightening. I worked at my trainer's horse farm throughout middle and high school, and while I hold the belief that the experience was probably more valuable than a minimum-wage summer job at a fast food restaurant, it did mean that I had no prior experience with job hunting. It's unbelievably frustrating when your friends have jobs already and you haven't even heard back from a company yet, so I have to admit I became a little bit frantic as days turned into weeks of applying for position after position and seeming to get nowhere. Luckily, my waiting paid off with a co-op for the fall in my hometown with a company that manufactures temperature and magnetic sensors and controllers primarily for research purposes, Lake Shore Cryotronics. Starting this August, I'll be working as a part of the product development team. All of the waiting and the worrying taught me that instant gratification is not a part of the job search. Sometimes patience is necessary, even though it can be nerve-wracking.
High school teachers are constantly warning students about how much harder college classes will be, but for me (and probably many of my fellow first-year engineering students), the most difficult part of classes was not necessarily the content. I am not going to rant about the mess that was Engineering Design Thinking or complain about professors from other classes. I realized at some point during spring semester that moaning about curriculum or teaching methods does not help. There is only so much that we as students can control, and we have to do the best we can with what we are given, even when it seems unfair, because that's how college - and the "real world" - works.
More than anything, this past year has taught me that you have to just keep pushing forward, even when it seems impossible. Even when it feels like you're being kicked when you're down. Because that's what makes you a better version of yourself than you were the day before. And in the end, that's what I believe we all hope to be.