A Week of College Life

I arrived at Virginia Tech to a long line of cars; I remember the day perfectly, like it just yesterday. A bright sunny day, with tons of people everywhere, and students just like me trying to move in. some people might describe this as chaos, but to me this meant freedom. Freedom from home, from parents, and from a restricted life with a schedule of everything I had to do. It meant that I no longer had to follow the tedious routine, of waking up when the sun was still on the horizon and having to ride the bus to school to find the different races of people divided into their little groups all along the narrow halls of the school. Then the classes began and it was the same teachers every single day and you sat in the same seat every day since teachers had assigned seating. Once school was done I would go to practice which would end with me lying on the track, exhausted and gasping for air, trying to capture every ounce that I can. Then I would get home to see my mom cooking and my sister coming to the door to annoy me, but that’s another story I won’t get into right now. Then I would get into the shower and enjoy my nice cold shower only to get out and find myself doing my tedious homework which would take up to one am in the morning. And so it would go, five days a week, seven months a year. This would all be gone the moment I stepped onto the campus of Virginia Tech. I was something that I was really looking forward to.

So getting back to my story, I arrived here to find a lot of new faces, and many different races. The new races part was not a new experience since my high school was a very diverse place, but seeing all these new faces was a little weird since I was used to seeing the same faces every day. Even though two of my friends were attending Virginia Tech and I knew people who were attending here from classes before mine, I still missed my friends. Those same faces now felt about 256 miles away, since most of them are attending school in Maryland. Suddenly I felt a sudden rush of sadness, I don’t know why I was feeling this way but it was happening and there was nothing I could do about it. Even though I really wanted to come here and get away from all those same faces that I saw every day, a part of me wished that I could do back and not have to go through the same process of finding and getting to know more new people in order to complete my friend circle again, like when I moved here from India.

The first day went by with me hanging out with my friends from high school and the new people they had met since they had been here a few days before I arrived, but that first night was a totally different story. I came into my dorm and there were people everywhere. I met a whole bunch of new people and they happened to be really friendly and I made a few new friends that first night here. This made me feel a little better and miss my friends from high school a little less, but this didn’t stop me from speaking to half of them that night.

The next few days was a lot of fun for me, since it was the weekend and there were many activities all around campus, I found myself going to most of them, not to meet new people, but to get free food. This didn’t stop me from socializing and meeting new people. I met people from all different places and I did all this while enjoying the delicious pizza in my mouth. These events helped me settle in and fell a little less home sick.

And then it was Monday. First day of classes and then came another anxiety attack, but this time it wasn’t that I was sad, but it was because I was nervous for all my new classes and I didn’t know what to expect from them. All these fears were erased by my first class of the day, which was Engineering Exploration, where we did basically nothing at all, since it was the first day of class. The whole class went by in a matter of minutes for me since I was enjoying not doing anything, but in fact the class was fifty minutes long. Then came the long five hour break, which was a very new idea for me since there were no breaks between classes in high school. I spent my break eating the delicious food here at Virginia Tech. I stuffed myself till I couldn’t stuff anymore, I was eating like I had never eaten before, it was like there was no tomorrow. I couldn’t tell if I was eating so much due to nervousness or deliciousness. All I knew was that I was eating.

The next few days were pretty exciting since I went through all my classes and my schedule got easier as the week went along. I figured my way around campus, even though I don’t know where half the stuff is yet. Walking from class to class felt like it took forever, since in high school it only took a mere two minutes to walk to class, but here it was like an average of eight minutes.

The week went by pretty fast and before I knew it was the weekend and I had enjoyed myself and had almost forgotten about my friends that I had left behind in Maryland. When I eventually got the time to sit back and look back at my whole week I realized that this was going to become another one of my cycles or routines. But in this case it would be different since I was actually having fun while I was in this routine of mine and this made me feel very eager for the weeks of school remaining before I could return home to see my parents and all my friends who I still miss dearly.