Final Portfolio: Let's start with an adventure...

That's what I think I'll call my freshman year of college. An adventure. I don't think there's really anything else I can call it to be honest. When I think back to my first day, it seemed almost like camp. A new place, a new room, a new person to share it with and a beautiful campus. My path seemed so clear at this trail head of sorts. Even when I looked at the syllabuses for my respective classes, they seemed to read like a map I'd studied before. I thought, 'I've done school before, I can do this.' But just as I thought I knew the trail I was hiking, the path I thought I would take was obscured and I had to take a new path with a much steeper incline.
    Perhaps it was the suddenness with which my work load escalated, or maybe I retained too much of my "senior-itis" from my last year of high school. Whatever it was, it hit me full force straight in the nose, and I was not prepared for it. On top of that, my very first semester in college was filled with scandal and sadness, as a legend passed and a single man shrouded my school in confusion, controversy and tragedy. The persistent media and my ever growing work load seemed insurmountable. I spent countless hours on the phone with my mom trying to figure out the big questions: "What am I doing here?" "Is college even the place for me?" "Why do I feel like this stress can't be fixed?" "What does it all mean?" and "Why the hell am I having all these existential issues?"
    Over the course of this tumultuous first semester, I kept myself sane by focusing on my music and my art whenever I was stressed, and I eventually learned to organize myself both literally in terms of the papers on my desk and the assignments on my calender and in the sense that my thoughts were so scattered that they needed to be reigned in somehow.
    Then, during second semester, I felt like I had a hold of things. I got back on the path I saw for myself in August and I was able to read the map again.

    At this point, maybe it is clear why there is a Calvin and Hobbes panel above this introduction, but let me clarify just to be sure. This is the last panel from the last strip of Calvin and Hobbes that Bill Watterson ever wrote. In my opinion, it is nothing short of genius. To me, this panel has come to represent among other things, the profundity of simplicity and the power of fewer words (ironically I think this introduction is quite a few words). Mostly though, this strip, especially the ending line, "...let's go exploring!" has served to remind me not to pass up opportunities and not to ignore possibilities. In the last of the three blog posts I've included in this portfolio, I discuss the importance of living in the moment. If there's one thing that I value over all else that I've learned this year it's that life goes too fast. Maybe that seems silly or naive coming from a 19 year old, but I really believe it. There's not time enough in life to waste dwelling on feelings of stress or jealousy or anger or any other such emotion.
   
    So without further verbiage, I thank you for visiting my page, and hope you enjoy the material I've included in this portfolio.