Husky Life

One of the major benefits of going to a D1 school is free tickets to good games. Tonight I went with my dormmates to the biggest on-campus men’s soccer game of the season: UCONN v. St. Johns.

UCONN won 1-0. And the fans went wild.

I had never seen so much enthusiasm at a sports game. When our team got the kick, I could feel the bleachers shake as many people made a foot-powered drum roll. I particularly enjoyed watching members of the Goal Patrol, the official fan club of the soccer team, waving and shouting by the goal. Having my school’s team win for the first soccer game I ever saw was just the whipped cream on the hot chocolate (which would have been nice since it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit outside and I decided to wear shorts).

When I woke up last Friday morning, I discovered that my only scheduled class had been canceled. Seizing the opportunity to visit home before I have to study for my first exams, I traveled to the co-op where I bought a bus ticket and boarded a coach bus to Hartford. I arrived at the Old Greenwich train station three hours later. I had taken a record two buses and two trains from Storrs. But it didn’t matter… I was home.

The main highlight of visiting home is the having the opportunity to see friends and family. Of course, I saw my parents and good friends from high school. And I should say that I ‘caught up’ with friends in unusual places. While I was driving in the fast lane of the Post Road by the Hyatt in Old Greenwich, Phuntsok Rinkartsang, my Cross Country teammate pulled up beside me in the right lane. Rinkartsang and I exchanged hellos before we headed in opposite directions. It made me happy to see someone from my very enjoyable running days at GHS (and it sounds like this year’s team is having the beginning of a promising season.)

Cell phone picture of my tower of notecards, one of my study aids for next week's exams.

This weekend, however, I will be catching up with a different set of friends: famous historical people who live in the pages of textbooks. These are the individuals who I haven’t ‘met’ for weeks and let’s say we have a lot of catching up to do! I’ll have to know them well enough to take an exam on them next week. So this weekend I’ll be spending some quality time with my class notes, study outlines and flash cards.

I’m not apprehensive about these assessments but I’m not exactly sure what to expect. However, if my exams which are in the social sciences are anything like the A.P. exams in high school, I think that my current study methods will provide ample ‘game day’ preparation. And here’s the nice part: my two exams are multiple choice. With the exception of some unique seminars that I am taking, class sizes for the basic introduction classes are about six times the size of my average class in high school. Therefore, computer-graded tests are more feasible for the professors to grade than subjective essay tests. We’ll see if they’re easier to take.

For all those veteran test takers out there… what’s the most obscure question that you have ever answered on a college exam?

I thought that my days of field trips and schools buses had ended when I entered college. I was misled.

Today I visited Lake Walden and Concord, Mass. as part of a course on Thoreau. My professors — there’s three for this particular class — read passages from Walden as we stood at the shores of the book’s namesake lake where Thoreau wrote this famous American novel. I’ve studied many works of literature in high school, but I never traveled with an English class to explore the setting of a book. I think that the experience will make Walden seem less dry and more personal when I actually begin to read the book later in the course.

This experience just comes to show that you’re never too old to have a field trip. Even if you’re in college.

One minute I run past cows grazing on golden fields on an empty road, a few minutes later I dodge traffic (cars, bicycles and pedestrian) on the crosswalk by the co-op. With a large campus split between a city of academic halls and a village of agricultural buildings, I like to think that UCONN offers some very diverse running terrain.
Many of my dormmates run to alleviate stress and explore. They come back to the dorm with route suggestions. Yet, I like to venture out without advice or a map and just run. Of course, today I happened to get lost in a cornfield, or at least an array of tall grass that resembled one. Where is one of those large maps of campus that are posted on the side of the road when you need one? Eventually I found my way out of the organic labyrinth but I enjoyed the brief escape from the city-like feeling of campus for a few minutes. The buzz of cicadas replaces the honking of cars which makes for a tranquil atmosphere. It’s like the agricultural version of Tod’s Point: the water is replaced by fields and the pungent smell of the seashore takes the place of the odor of cows. But in order to have fresh homemade ice cream, I suppose you need livestock. And while I hear on TV that “Happy Cows Come From California”, the more often I travel past the ag fields and taste The UCONN Dairy Bar ice cream, I’m begining to think that perhaps “Happy Cows Come From Connecticut.”
However, not all campuses have livestock. Some have subways. Some have mountains or oceans nearby. What did/does your college campus look like? Imagine that you are running (or walking) through campus on an average fall day–what would you see?

Cell Phone Photo From Week One: Convocation (welcome ceremony). This is the only time that the entire class is assembled as a whole with the exception of graduation.

How does one measure a week in college life? Laundry. I have spent a little over one week at college and I already have exhausted my extensive wardrobe of t-shirts and shorts.

Washing my own clothes is one of the major adjustments to college life. I can no longer put my clothes in a hamper at home and have them “magically reappear” in my bureau washed and folded. Now, I have to press a button for warm or cold water, pour the detergent and push ‘start’, hoping that wet clean clothes appear when I open the washer (and not a deluge of soap).

However, one of the most important adjustments to college is making friends. Over the past four years of high school, I had known enough people that I could walk down the glass corridor and know the names of most of the faces that I encountered. When I first arrived on campus last week, I was expecting to know nobody, but I actually saw many of my friends from GHS. (It seems that quite a few cardinals flew up to Storrs.) When I sat in Gampel during convocation with more than 3,000 of my freshman classmates, I saw Joe Williamson, Jr. across the acre-wide basketball court playing in the Clarinet in the University of Connecticut Marching Band. I’ve seen him many times around campus. And while many people don’t recommend becoming roommates with an old high school buddy, I have found that eating or chilling with your old friends provides a great opportunity to get introduced to other people. And, of course, the laundry room provides a great opportunity to make smalltalk.

As much as I enjoy the experience, I wonder if I will have to wash my clothes every weekend. While most of my friends have done their first wash this week, they have noted that it may be a temporary experience. With the large number of free t-shirts we seem to receive on a daily basis from various clubs and organizations, my doormmates like to say that we may never have to do laundry again.

Question: What adjustments do you remember making when you went to college?