Husky Life

The canvassers are out, sliding little pieces of paper advertising candidates under the door. The ballots are being collected (electronically). It’s Undergraduate Student Government Elections at UConn.

graphic/creative commons theresasthompson via flickr

As reported in The Daily Campus, the parties running for office are: Haggerty-Richards (incumbents), Burrill-Thompson and Chery-Feshazion.

I’m not the type of person to ask who you are voting for, but which candidates strike you as the most compelling, interesting, open, honest?

For those who haven’t found brightly colored leaflets under their door, you can vote (if you are a UConn student, of course) by visiting https://elections.usg.uconn.edu.

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?