After a long, but wonderful summer, I am officially a little freshmen duck at the big UO. The end of my first week on campus is coming to a close and what a long week it was. It feels like I haven’t been here that long but at the same time it does.

My initial impression of life on campus is that everyone is pretty active, friendly, and that you need to watch of the bikers. Also I found that campus is pretty big and you really need to establish some big landmarks early on to help you figure out where you are and what way to go to get where you need to be. I am living in a resident hall and I actually like it a lot. I mean the rooms are pretty small and communal bathrooms are not my fave but the girls on my floor are super nice. We all leave our doors open a lot so we can just pop in and say hi to each other and stuff like that.  We have already bonded quite a bit and it’s really nice to have a small community of people that you can talk and hang out with especially the first week of campus when you are still trying to figure everything out.

Classes, the reason why we are actually here, are actually mostly what I expected them to be. I am in a couple big lecture classes that are somewhat hard to pay attention to but are also super interesting. My spanish class and my FIG class are smaller groups of people and both are a lot more hands on and supportive which is something I really enjoy and I look forward to getting to know people more in those classes. Overall, I think my classes are definitely going to be a bit of a challenge, especially because I am not used to the quarter system yet  but I also think they’ll be super interesting and thought provoking.

Currently I spend a lot of time in my dorm just hanging out, reading, watching Netflix and etc. which I think will change once the madness with classes begins but also when I find that core group of friends. I have made friends but I still haven’t found like my “people” yet which I know can take a while. It’s somewhat hard when you see a bunch of people on like day two already having all of these friends but I just have to remind myself that it’ll happen and that I need to keep being social and putting myself out there. I am also thinking about joining a club or two, not actually sure which ones yet, to meet new people and have something to do besides go to class.

I think my biggest challenge this week was just having to push myself to be social and go out and talk to people because I am somewhat of an introverted person and honestly just trying to remember everyone’s name.