New Student Blogs

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?  Mary Oliver

Writing an essay on “The Point of it All” struck me as a daunting assignment, to say the least. Naturally, I took my inquiry– “the point of college”–to the fount of all knowledge that is Google. Opinion pieces in the New Yorker, NPR, and the NY Times offered a few possibilities: college empowers careers, college produces “a society of like-minded grown-ups”, college is the “best delivery system for getting…stuff into people’s heads,” college “gets you up the right educational ladders and down the right career chutes.” College teaches you “how to disagree,” “how to tackle problems,” “enables you to find interests or pursuits that may somehow change the way we see things.” (NPR). In 0.32 seconds,  Yahoo answers searched its forums and concluded the point of four years of college amounted to nothing more than four years of “sex and alcohol.” Somehow none of those answers accounted for my time at Baylor.

Looking back, Baylor was camping out on Burleson quad in January, singing Johnny Cash songs in a religion class, canoeing Lake Waco, laughing at IHOP at three in the morning when Collins flooded, hosting crowded Thanksgiving dinners in our apartment, enjoying tea and scone parties with study abroad friends, swapping books with my classmates, reading in my favorite corner of the library, channeling my inner childhood self on the slide at the SLC pool, playing Ultimate Frisbee on the Brooks quad, jumping up and down at the basketball games, making late night runs to Health Camp for the milkshakes, dancing at Welcome Week. In summation, I think Anne of Green Gables said it best, “What I want to get out of my college course is some knowledge of the best way of living life and doing the most and best with it. I want to learn to understand and help other people and myself.”

The people around Baylor campus who can teach you how to live life are often unexpected. My roommates—ranging from the silent to the loquacious—taught me how to understand people. We talked about our hometowns growing up, the differences between the suburbs of the Midwest, rural Tennessee, the urban wonder of Singapore. My roommate Heather taught me how to make sopapilla cheesecake** (the most delicious dorm friendly dessert known to man). I learned to live life in our shoebox of a kitchen, eating pans of lemon bars, swapping stories, and occasionally working on homework.

 People I didn’t particularly get along with taught me how to listen and understand people. Group projects sometimes required me to spend hours at Moody with sometimes unpleasant company. Once, a large-scale art project required me to papier mache a balloon with one of my least favorite people. When we quickly ran out of small talk, I learned 1) that it is almost impossible to papier mache a balloon with someone and continue to thoroughly dislike them, and 2) that when polite small talk eventually gives way to genuine conversation, you may discover that there is a good deal more to people than meets the eye. I misjudged a person, and I have since tried to be more mindful of Plato’s advice, “Be kind, for everyone you meet may be fighting a hard battle.”

I learned how to help people serving pie at the Crossties Gospel Café. I bussed tables, refilled sweet teas, took pie orders, and served plates. One man named Dale always saved me a slice of pie, and we’d sit and talk about school, the books I was reading, and his time in Vietnam. When I spent a holiday in Waco, a fellow volunteer, Stephanie, invited me for Thanksgiving dinner in the Kate Ross Housing Projects, and I wondered (not for the first time) who was really helping whom.

My classes in mathematics and physics taught me to make the most and best of life: how to appreciate the crystallization of white dwarf stars, how to generate fractal ferns, how to examine the world numerically—in short how to “question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky,” as Augustine put it.

Literature taught me to understand people: the characters in Dostoyekvsy’s Brothers Karamazov taught me to understand the image of God in my neighbor; the terrible sonnets of Hopkins taught me to understand patience; Dorothy Sayers’s zest and wit taught me to understand church.           

I learned how to live life from the gentle hospitality of the people at my church; I learned to bring your best to a potluck. I learned how to pray from a Korean woman who prayed for me in Hungarian. I learned that sitting and listening to the stories of the people in my church choir is a gift. A huge, plastic tarp turned hillside waterslide during Vacation Bible School taught me how to make the most and best of a hot June day.

I suppose, there’s not one, all-encompassing Point Of It All in college. Perhaps instead college is a series of points, moments that taught you something of the adventure of living.

NPR: http://www.npr.org/2011/06/11/137093258/professor-value-of-college-extends-beyond-paycheck

Menard: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=all

**Sopapilla cheesecake:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/sopapilla-cheesecake-pie/detail.aspx

Someone told me once that burgeoning young physicists often exhibit one of two tendencies: either a predilection for large scale explosions or an irresistible urge to disassemble microwaves. Growing up, I contented myself with professional firework displays and generally toasters were safe from my prying fingers. Instead I spent my free time painting watercolors, crocheting trivets, and reading voraciously. I learned that I liked patterns of threads, patterns in art, patterns of words. I learn like I work puzzles, and my favorite puzzles are brightly colored with a minimum of a thousand pieces.

In a way, my time at Baylor has been like working a puzzle: sorting pieces by color, by thought, by idea; slowly working the border, the framework, the academic foundation; and then gradually watching the tiny unexpected interlocking of the wide spread pieces unfold. Coming into college, my puzzle piece interest spanned the entire kitchen table. Fascinated by everything from charmed quarks to Chopin to Chesterton, I had no definite career plans. An interest in genetics led me to apply for the King Foundation Summer Research Program at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. I was accepted and packed my bags the week after high school graduation to move into a dorm room in the stifling Houston heat. The first day was a whirlwind tour of the medical complex and introductions to the program, our mentors, and the mildly terrifying idea of completing a project in the multimillion dollar labs. I had never heard of a Luciferase assay, or proteins with strings of Greek letters and numbers trailing behind them.

So I learned anything and everything anyone would teach me. I learned basic lab techniques like cell culture and western blotting. I listened, I asked questions, and I read papers online. M.D. Anderson was a rich learning environment: outside of the lab, students attended lectures and shared stories about our work in the various different labs. Besides my studies in biology, I also received a crash course in world cultures. I worked under the supervision of a Japanese grad student, ate lunch with fellow students from Puerto Rico, and practiced my French with Elaine, a postdoc in the lab next door.

By the time I arrived at Baylor, I knew I wanted to continue research in some form. My increasing interest in math and physics classes soon exceeded my interest in biology. Math symbols articulate the patterns in art and nature. My freshman physics teacher, Dr. Jeffrey Olafsen offered me a position working in his lab on nonlinear dynamics. In the lab, I learned a new programming language (IDL) along with the basic math of dynamical systems. And then I began to see dynamical systems in everyday life: the order in a cup of tea and milk swirls dissipating with the flick of a spoon, the “torn tuft puffballs” of clouds in the poetry of Hopkins, West Texas storm systems sweeping across the screen of the television. Inspired by my work in the lab, I decided to apply for a wide range of NSF REUs (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) to discover which branch of applied math or physics I would like to study further..

McDonald Observatory granted me an REU position for the summer. For ten weeks, I lived at the Observatory atop Mount Locke, a blissful 200 miles from the nearest Walmart. My project focused on the elemental abundance pattern in a particular globular cluster of stars. My mentor and I gathered data using the prototype of the spectroscopic tool called VIRUS that will be used in the HET Dark Energy Experiment. One of the highlights of my summer was actually collecting data during an observing run on the 2.7m telescope. After analyzing the data, we unearthed a strange elemental abundance pattern.

When I wasn’t wrestling with programming in IRAF or becoming almost entirely nocturnal during observing runs on the telescope, I volunteered at public star parties at the visitor’s center at the observatory. Together with a small group of volunteers and students, we positioned the telescopes at the moon, planets, and other Messier objects and waited to hear the excited gasps of children looking at the moon through the eyepiece of a telescope for the first time. Our group of REU students spent time hiking in the Davis Mountains, swimming at Balmorhea, and reading Cormac McCarthy’s novels in hammocks strung up between trees. My academic work at McDonald culminated in a paper published in the Astronomical Journal. I was also given the opportunity to present my work at the American Astronomical Society Conference in Washington DC where I met the main authors of the paper.

I returned to Baylor with a renewed passion for dynamical system. My project at the Observatory focused on the particular patterns in the stars, but I wanted to study these natural structures from another perspective. During the fall of my junior year, I continued working with Dr. Olfasen’slab.  Having learned the basics of chaos theory, the focus of my project shifted to modeling the mixing in granular systems using Vladimir Arnold’s cat map. I designed the experimental apparatuses for my project, wrote the code for the analysis, and researched other metrics for results comparison.

In the process of designing my projects, I spent much of my time in the lab reading literature on dynamical systems. As a result, I came across papers that approached the science of complex systems from the perspective of networks, a topic in pure mathematics. The focus of my education has always dwelt somewhere between mathematics and physics. I appreciate the practical applications of physics but also marvel at the beauty of pure mathematics. Throughout my time at Baylor, I have continually sought extracurricular math activities. I took the Putnam test, a challenging exam for college undergraduates where the median score is typically zero. The Math Contest in Modeling is a 96 hour long competition to research, create, and test models for a given problem–an arduous research effort condensed into four days. Together with two friends, I spent those hours in a computer lab with an abundance of expo markers and library books. We modeled flow around a traffic circle using a fluid dynamic model and a cellular automata model. The contest is judged on a solution packet containing background information, detailing the models, and discussing results. I served as the primary writer for the team, and our solution packet  was the first paper I ever typeset in LaTeX. At the end of four days of napping on swivel chairs in the lab and subsisting on large amounts of caffeine, the final paper detailing our solution fell out the printer and into my hands. That was when I knew I wanted to continue developing my problem solving skills through the study of complex systems.

A google search led me to the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics, a program for undergraduate math students taught by Hungarian professors. As I perused the course offerings, I encountered branches of math I’d never heard of before: graph theory, Galois theory, and measure theory. Although I knew that I ultimately wanted to study applied mathematics, I thought that a few classes in rigorous pure mathematics would strengthen my problem solving abilities. Hungary is arguably the best place in the world to study combinatorics. A huge proportion of the great names in combinatorics and graph theory are distinctively Hungarian. I had the chance to take graph theory, hypergraph theory, as well as dynamical systems and bifurcations. Courses in Hungary solidified my decision to study complex systems from the perspective of networks.

Looking back on my path in research can seem chaotic; I bounced from immunology to astrophysics to applied math. But I was always motivated by a love of learning and an eye for beauty and patterns. And in truth, I only spent half of my time at Baylor on math and science. Since the beginning of my freshman year at Baylor, I have worked in nearby housing projects mentoring a group of children who have grown up in a chaotic environment. As I read academic papers on modeling slums using network theory, I am driven by the idea of using mathematics to better understand and hopefully alleviate the deep cycle of poverty. My love of literature and art stayed with me. I’m currently writing my honors thesis on the mathematical currents in the poetry of Hopkins. I spent some of my time at the AAS conference exploring DC, marveling at the paintings of Roualt in person. G.H. Hardy said “The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.” The beauty of mathematics cobbles together my seemingly scattered puzzle piece like interests.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

–Albert Einstein

Our modern physics teacher was the sort of person who wore sunglasses indoors and smuggled  an illegal number of cats across the Canadian border when he moved to work at an institute. Lectures were quirky, to say the least. The course description listed online maintains that modern physics covers special relativity, an introduction to quantum mechanics, atomic and molecular structure, nuclear and particle physics. I suppose the class touched on most of those topics. But I certainly don’t remember the particulars of every single equation in the book. Instead I remember the stories behind the discoveries in physics. I remember particularly bothersome problems from homework sets and midterms. I especially remember dropping by my professor’s office for hours to talk about a problem on the Putnam examination. The problem had asked for the length of the diameter of a sphere inscribed in a four dimensional unit hypercube. I remember that discussion, and I remember the flaws in my argument. That moment solidified my love of problem solving.

The other information cornerstone that I took away from my sophomore year course was Schroedinger’s What Is Life? During one class, our professor mentioned it. This was not unusual, class discussion often veered on wild tangents, but this was memorable because on a whim I decided to check the book out from the O’Grady Collection in the library. This, in and of itself, was rather exciting. When the book came from special order I handled it gingerly, intrigued by its strange dilapidated condition. Somehow, reading that book changed my academic life. Holding the little collection of lectures, understanding bits and pieces of it in all my sophomoric wisdom, I stepped into the wider conversation. Most of the moments that have been so transformative in my learning career have been moments of perspective. And as I unfolded the pages of the book, physics unfolded before me too.

The quote from the book that has always stuck with me is this:

The chromosome fibre –may suitably be called an aperiodic crystal. In physics we have dealt hitherto only with periodic crystals. To a humble physicist’s mind, these are very interesting and complicated objects; they constitute one of the most fascinating and complex material structures by which inanimate nature puzzles its wits. Yet, compared with the aperiodic crystal, they are rather plain and dull. The difference in structure is of the same kind as that between an ordinary wallpaper in which the same pattern is repeated again and again in a regular periodicity and a masterpiece of embroidery, say a Raphael tapestry, which shows no dull repetition, but an elaborate, coherent, meaningful design traced by the great master.

As I read it, a dozen things struck me at once—it was art meets science meets math meets patterns meets beauty. I sometimes spend my free time embroidering aprons, and once I lost myself for hours in front of the exquisitely patterned tapestry exhibit at the Tate Museum in London. Somehow reading about the conjunction of tapestries, crystals, patterns and wallpaper, I understood the chromosome differently. Perhaps it is that I understood the chromosome as something dynamic, no longer static. It was as if it had leapt off the textbook page and the surrounding objects flitted about until coalescing into a brilliant undeniable order before dissolving again into messy reality. Later I would learn that this study of patterns had a name—complexity science—and the patterns Schrödinger noticed in the chromosome fibers fell under the study of emergence.

Physicists, particularly Albert Einstein have always assumed a particularly reverent attitude towards curiosity. He remarked, “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” Rather than critiquing the education system with its jumble of grades, projects, exams, and expectations, perhaps Einstein was issuing a challenge—a challenge to keep questioning, a challenge to prod boundaries of understanding, a challenge to check out books that spark your interest, a challenge to pursue subjects dropped momentarily in a conversation, a challenge to listen, a challenge to wonder.

“Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars,” said Henry Van Dyke. Be glad of life, and in particular be glad of the four years at Baylor. Life gives you the chance to dance on the top of the parking garage, to bike the trails of Cameron Park, to host potlucks, to sit under a tree and read, to play ultimate Frisbee, to talk with friends over coffee, to canoe at the Marina, to pluck the strings of a guitar, to watch the sun sink behind the hills.

But what Henry Van Dyke didn’t say is that life also gives you the chance to sit in your dorm room and stare at a screen. Life gives you the chance to stream TV shows on Megavideo for hours on end. Life gives you the chance to Netflix yourself to death. Life gives you the chance to spend irresponsible amounts of time on Facebook. Life gives you the chance to game for days on end. Life gives you the chance to watch it go by. Life is full of chances.

College is what you make of it. The people who feel the most isolated at the end of their first semester are consistently the  ones who never left their dorm room and the safe, warm glow of a screen. I am not convinced that anything exciting at college happens sitting alone in your dorm room in front of a computer screen or television.  (In fact, the only exception to this rule I can think of is watching the royal wedding at 4 a.m. while drinking tea and eating shortbread biscuits with a group of friends.)

Maybe Ray Bradbury took it a bit far when he defined television as “that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly,” but his sharp critique of television asks us to take a second look at how we spend our free time. Rather than attacking television consumption in general, perhaps there is a certain way of watching TV that stifles thought and increases isolation—the sort of watching where you just sit in the dark in front of the screen and stream shows until you’re numb. Sometimes TV becomes a strange sort of substitute for reality. Some days it’s easier to watch the world of shiny people onscreen laugh in the coffee shop than actually talk to your neighbors. In this way television becomes what T.S. Eliot identified as “a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time and yet remain lonesome.”

I’m not advocating a return to the dark ages and the abolition of television. A group of freshman in my dorm gathered every afternoon in the lobby for enthusiastic Jeopardy watching. I watched the television series Firefly during a summer when I spent long nights observing on a telescope. My roommate and I gathered groups of people to watch Monk, and Pushing Daisies will always be one of my favorite shows.

Maybe the question of television is not a question of how much we should watch television, but instead a question of how we watch television. Perhaps instead of resigning to a night of dorm take-away food and an evening of watching Castle, knock on the door of your next door neighbors, ask if they would like to watch too. Then perhaps you go for frozen yogurt, perhaps you wind up walking the Bear Trail swapping stories, perhaps you find a friend. The chances are endless. Be glad of life.

1) Skimming the Powerpoints online is totally the same thing as going to class.
Class is unpredictable. Some professors will never crack the textbook they’ve assigned. Others will deviate from the Powerpoint faster than you can say “tangent!” You can sleep on your textbook, but you can’t learn by osmosis. Believe me, I’ve tried it.

2) The syllabus is just for show.
Professors don’t kill trees needlessly. If they give you a handout, chances are they’re under the impression that that particular sheet of papers is worth killing a small piece of the Amazon rainforest. You should probably read it. Nowhere is this more important than in case of the syllabus. It is probably the first stack of papers that will be passed around. It will tell you the dates of your final exam, the deadlines for your major projects, how many days of class you can skip and still make an A. Additionally, the plural of syllabus is syllabi, but don’t use this in casual conversation if you want to remain cool.  If you learned nothing else from U1000 today, read your syllabus.

3) Silence is golden.
Sure you don’t have to be the kid on the front row with a firecracker-esque hand raising habit. Don’t be that person who argues with the professor when class was supposed to let out ten minutes ago. But don’t be afraid to ask questions either. If you don’t understand what in the world polymerase chain reaction is supposed to be about, then ask a question. Chances are, the class will utter a collective sigh of relief after you ask. So take one for the team—ask a question or two. 

4) Multitasking is for superstars.
In fact, multitasking is for the weak. The internet is a minefield of distractions: facebook chatting, exploding Furbies on Youtube, LOLcatz, free singles on iTunes, but don’t let it eat your study time. Stick it to the television, the computer, the phone—sit down, take a breath, summon some focus, and accomplish something. If summoning focus does not come easily (thanks to a lethal combination of your opera singing next door neighbor and paper thin dorm walls) may I suggest a white noise app. (Check it out here: http://www.simplynoise.com/)  Unfortunately, there is no known shortcut for focus. Try rewarding yourself with a cookie (one of those nice molten chocolate hunks of deliciousness fresh out of the Memorial ovens) after reading for two hours. You can bribe yourself into efficiency.

5) The library is only open around midterms and finals.
Contrary to popular belief, the library offers a rip roarin good time all year long! The librarians are some of the most aggressively helpful people on campus. Once I was sitting in the dorm lobby composing an email when a plain clothes librarian approached me, eagerly asked if I was writing a paper, and inquired about what resources I was interested in. So go out there and make a librarian’s day—ask for help with your term paper.

6) The red marks on my paper are there for decoration.
Chances are when your test or essay comes back, it’ll have some red marks. And unless the red marks display a 100 with smiley faces in the zeros, then the red marks are there to help you come closer to a smiley-faced 100 in the near future. Nothing is worse than reading red marks or looking over old tests. In fact it makes me rather ill. When the paper comes back you avert your eyes, you become intensely interested in the lint on the jacket of the person sitting in front of you. You flip through it speedily, hoping for a glimmer of a red ink smiley face in vain. You jam it hastily in your bag and slink away in shame. Man up. Read the red marks or be doomed to a life of making the same mistake twice. As Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.” Be honest with yourself and read the red marks. Really. I know it’s painful, but do it anyways.

7) The notes you write down in class are emblazoned on your mind forever.
So you took notes in class and maybe they’re legible and maybe they’re not. If you’re having trouble recalling things on the first round of examinations, consider taking the time to go back and read your notes. You can’t skim them before a test and summon it all to your mind like magic.

Cramming is for real college students.
Sure, you can probably get by on a caffeine fueled mental sprint before an exam. Probably. But it’ll make the next round of exams a lot more difficult. College classes are obnoxiously cumulative. Just make some space in the afternoons to go over notes. Some of the most productive people I know are also the people who have the most fun in college—they finish studying in the afternoon and leave the evening for what Rebecca Black famously termed “Fun, fun, fun, fun.” 

9) Everybody learns the same way.
Some people are auditory learners; some are visual learners; some are experiential learners; some people are even kinesthetic learners (Case in point: I had a precalculus teacher who had us hold our arms up and down to exhibit x^3, sqrt(x) etc…). You might learn by flashcards. The person next to you might be a post-it not fanatic who thrives on color-coded notes. The next person might be color-blind. Try recording your notes on a mp3 player, try rote memorization, try singing the song for the periodic table of the elements. Just find what works for you.

10) Your professors are out to get you.

Your professors do not want to see you fail. In fact, they probably would love to talk with you about your question on problem #6 on the homework set. These are people who loved learning in college, and they are here because they love teaching. Professor conversations can steer you towards research activities, extracurricular opportunities, co-curricular reading, or just spark thoughts to mull over later. In one introductory biology course (one of the largest courses at Baylor) the professor kept very regular office hours and only had one student come in to talk with him. Don’t let those office hours go by all year, take a moment and just stop by an office.

11) The basement of Carroll Science is haunted. 

I was not one of those illustrious students that made good use of the writing center. Instead I was metaphorically frog marched there by my upcoming term paper which required me to schedule an appointment. I was terribly intimidated and terrified at the prospect of reading my paper aloud. Aloud! For people to hear! PANIC! Needless panic. It was quite helpful and not traumatic in the least. It was there that I began to rectify my abuse of commas and discovered the unexpected contingent of the world’s most helpful graduate students.

12) I am alone in my confusion!

By enrolling in courses at Baylor, you just joined the legions of students who have all sat through Biology 101. You are neither the first, nor the last, in a long succession of students confused over the concept of mitosis. To help calm the general confusion, tutors are available to help you over the learning curve. Name your discipline, and a tutor is available. No one who ever amounted to anything in college made it through on their own, so check out the Success Center.

1. Be generous with your friendships but stingy with your trust

Maybe you went to Welcome Week, shared your life story, and bonded forever with the person sitting next to you. BEST FRIENDS 4 LYFE kind of bond. In a week. Sure. More likely, you skipped the finer points of Welcome Week, but still became inseparable friends with someone down the hall. And that’s great, but they still have to earn your trust—don’t just hand it out like Dr. Pepper at a Baylor function. Maybe the friends you made this week will be lifelong friends, or maybe they’ll try to involve you in a pyramid scheme sometime around October. It happens. Save your deep dark secrets for later in the semester and don’t loan out your keys or lend someone your car to drive to Austin on Friday nights.

2. Go to class

Let’s do some math. Baylor tuition for a semester is $16,044. Say you’re taking 12 hours. 15 weeks of school. That means every hour you get to sit in the BSB or Old Main or Tidwell costs about $90.  Of course, no one hands out gold stars for perfect attendance at the end of the day, and most (Most! Not all!  Check your syllabus—some will dock your final grade for a single absence), professors allow one or two absences but save them for the end of semester when you have two term papers, mono, and an exam.

3. Constant vigilance (at least for the first few weeks…)

The first few weekends are ah…um…a bit of a free-for-all. Have a blast in college, just don’t cram it all into the first two weeks. Take the time to get to know your surroundings. Don’t add a boyfriend or girlfriend to the mix just yet and avoid hooking up with someone who might be bad news. The odds are just against you here. Also, watch your finances. Your parents won’t believe you spent all your spare cash on laundry in the first two weeks. If you don’t have the luxury of calling home for those magical funds called BearBucks, all the more reason to hang on to your summer savings. New college students are sitting ducks for credit cards. Be smart, dodge the predatory lending schemes.

4. Sleep

Coffee is good. Coffee will NOT, contrary to popular belief, enable you to live without sleep. The espresso laden Nervous Breakdown from Common Grounds may sustain you through one jittery night of hasty project completion, but I suggest you refrain from making a habit of it. Case in point:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaMN5cY23Ec&feature=related .

5. Get involved…but not too involved

Late Night at the SLC is tonight. Basically, the SLC will be cram-full of every single campus organization.  (There’s also a rather hysterical dodgeball tournament going on in the gym where one of my good friends competed in a full Indian headdress…worth checking out at any rate.)  Maybe Greek life isn’t your thing, but it can’t hurt to go by the tables and meet some new people. Try a new sport like water polo, crew, or Ultimate Frisbee. That said, don’t go overboard. Be picky and find one or two organizations you’re stoked about.

6. Living with a weirdo

One summer I had a roommate who spent her spare time calculating the volume of dry ice she would need to suffocate me in my sleep. But after that initial greeting, we discovered we both liked Thai food and the band Death Cab for Cutie. Really, we got along okay: our shower schedules didn’t conflict, she refilled the toilet paper with a new roll, and she respected my possession of the Cheezeit box. We didn’t spend every waking moment together, but we shared some laughs. If your roommate is absolutely nuts, look at it as a chance to meet more people outside of your dorm and consider having a chat with your CL.

7. Fight Homesickness without Trekking Up and Down I-35.

Maybe you’re sitting in U1000 right now with your dirty clothes hamper in the trunk of your car ready to head home. Maybe your roommate and half the people on your hall are already gone for the weekend. You can hear the crickets and you don’t want to be left out in the cold. But you’ve got more collegiate adventuring spirit than the rest of them put together because you’re not going home for the weekend. You get 15 weekends this semester. FIFTEEN. These are your college weekends: the stuff of legend. Don’t spend those weekends spending some quality time in I-35 traffic.  Make the most of them. Explore Waco. Run the Bear Trail with you roommate. Knock on all the doors in your hall and go dancing. Toss tortillas off the suspension bridge. If all else fails, bake some cookie dough and watch a movie with the roommate. Going home may make for a comfortable weekend, but it also makes returning on Monday more difficult.

8. Helpful people

The CL. Knock on the door, find a convenient time to have a chat. They spent a fair part of their summers trying to make your door decorations cute. If they just wanted cheap housing, they’d look elsewhere, they seriously want to get to know you. I promise.

The Residence Hall Director/ Hall Chaplain/Faculty in Residence. Send your RD an email. Drop by and say hi. These people can be incredibly helpful and often have dorm apartments that smell like warm cookies. These people graduated from college (often more than once), have families, and still want to live in the dorms. They are seriously helpful people.

9. Keep stuff safe

• • Always LOCK:
    • Door: even if you’re just going to the laundry room. You may have a kleptomaniac for a neighbor. There is no way to know.
    • Car: Rows of cars in college look like sitting ducks to people who are down on their luck and really want a stereo. If you get back late at night and park out in the boonies, remember you can call for escort services. This is an intelligent thing to do.
    • Bike: not with a chain, not with a coil lock, with a U-Lock. You can buy them at Target and Walmart any week except the week where anyone moves in. But get one stat. If you caught the late end of the back to school shopping, check Bicycles Outback for some really serious U-Locks.  Heed my advice or wake up one morning to find your bike MIA. Also, if you U-Lock it, it is still possible for someone to steal the front wheel if it’s not chained. Just in case you were wondering.
  • Keep tabs on your:
    • Phone/iPhone/cell:  leave it sitting on the corner of a Starbucks table and give it 20 minutes tops before someone takes it off your hands.
    • Laptop:  It’s just not worth the risk. Think of all your photos, music files, video files, and essays.
    • Backpack/Purse:  fairly self explanatory.

10. Friendships

After the first week, take a step back and reassess some friendships. Are you laughing at the same jokes? Do you want to get to know the people at the other end of the hall? Don’t restrict yourself to the group of people you met the first week, keep meeting new people. Don’t be afraid to widen your circle. If you’re having trouble meeting people you can always sign up for intramurals at any point in the semester. (I have the hand-eye coordination of a grapefruit but had a blast playing intermural ping-pong with some girls down the hall.) A note about Greek Life: It’s not for everyone, but it doesn’t hurt to sign up for Recruitment (Fall Parties for girls) just to meet people. You don’t have to pledge. When I went through I wound up being great friends with the girl in alphabetical order next to me. Give it a chance.

11. Drinking (Direct quote from BustedHalo.com)

You might be tempted to tune this advice out because you’ve heard it so many times but…DON’T! I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve known who’ve bombed out because they drank too much! Without the simple limits of home—curfews, “my mom will know if I spend the night hugging the toilet,” friends who don’t want to go drinking—it’s easy to find yourself with a very expensive waste of a semester. It’s a really embarrassing way to flunk out of college or get yourself into stupid trouble. If you won’t take my word for it, the statistics on the effects of college drinking are astounding—see for yourself. If you’re getting wasted every weekend you’re headed for trouble. If you’re missing class because you’re hung over you’re IN trouble. [See the list of helpful people in #8.] Underage drinking is a bad idea.

Don’t do it.

12. Psych 101

College maybe touted as “the BEST FOUR YEARS OF YOUR LIFE!!” but in reality early young adulthood can take a toll on your emotional health. Addiction, anxiety, self-injury, and mental illness can be extremely disruptive and dangerous issues for college freshmen. If you’re struggling I’d wager there is someone else on your hall struggling with the same issues. Go to the counseling center and stay emotionally healthy.

13. Dating and relationships on campus (Direct quote from BustedHalo.com)

Everyone seems to have a story about a bad dating decision or a hook-up gone wrong. Whether it’s an older student that takes advantage of freshman naïveté, a crush turned stalker, or simply a case of leaping prior to looking, campus relationships can be a bit of a minefield. Be particularly cautious in those first few weeks when everyone’s still adrift. Falling for someone who’s just looking for a little recreational intimacy early in your first semester can mess up your head, not to mention your grades. Besides a broken heart or a bruised ego there are lots of other reasons to avoid hooking up. College is a great place to get an STD. According to Go Ask Alice!, somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of college students are or have been infected with a sexually transmitted disease. Wait ‘til you’ve been on campus and have built some friendships you can fall back on before getting into a romantic relationship. Then if your romance works out you’ll have some friends to be happy for you, and if not there’ll be somebody to hand you a Kleenex when you’re crying into your teacup.

14. Words about religion

Just because Baylor is Baptist doesn’t mean there won’t be different ideas floating around campus—different ideas not only about Christianity, but also about Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions. Being a good arguer and being a good Christian are certainly not synonymous. If you find yourself in a conversation about God that makes you uncomfortable or defensive, don’t feel like you have to keep talking or listening. Also, you don’t have to let someone pray for you.

15. Wash your hands

College is much less fun when you’re ill.

16.  Remember to HALT

Keep your act together! Don’t let yourself get too…

• Hungry: Your mom’s not here to remind you to eat. Get to the dining hall and take care of yourself.  Skipping meals messes with your mood AND your appetite.

• Angry: Manage your emotions, take a walk, work out, talk to a friend, and especially don’t drink when you’re angry! Angry + drunk=stupid behavior, sometimes involving campus security.

• Lonely: Stay connected to your support network. Call your mother! IM your old friends, e-mail your youth minister/pastor/mentor.

• Tired: If you find yourself weepy all the time, impose a strict bedtime on yourself and see if that doesn’t improve your mood. All-nighters are a bad idea. NOBODY does their best work under pressure—that’s just something we procrastinators tell ourselves to rationalize our bad behavior.

17. Food (Direct Quote from BustedHalo.com)

Doritos is NOT a food group. Everyone is afraid of the Freshman 15—the infamous fattening up that happens to so many new college students—but many people have trouble avoiding it. Most of us are used to having our mom set a plate in front of us with a pretty balanced meal—something meaty/protein, something green, something starchy. When you head into the dining hall the first time you may be dazzled by the array of choices, but make sure that what ends up on your plate has some balance to it. And just because you can have ice cream with every meal doesn’t mean you should! Try not to skip meals; you can end up overeating at the next meal or just wolfing down a bag of chips (or three) back in the dorm because you’ve gotten so hungry. Drink water, not soda. You can easily pack on a few pounds in your first semester by adding two or three cans of soda to your daily food intake. This also applies to other canned beverages. They don’t call it a beer gut for nuthin‘!

The other extreme: Eating disorders—in this new high-pressure environment some people respond by controlling the one thing they feel they can: what they eat. You probably already know if this is a danger for you. The people who would normally help you keep an eye on your eating problems are also the people who would help you deal with the stress that causes them…and they’re not here! AHHHH! But fear not! You can get some help at the counseling center—a number of colleges now have eating disorder support groups that meet right on campus—find yourself a supportive friend (or two) that you feel you can share your struggles with, and stay accountable to friends or family from back home who can encourage and support you. Watching your weight can become a dangerous obsession that will distract you from your goals just as surely as any other addiction! If you’ve never had problems with dieting, binge eating or weight obsession before but you find yourself distracted by calorie counting, controlling your weight, or are afraid to eat—talk to someone! The counseling center offers help and resources.

18. Unplug (gaming, online porn, gambling) (Direct quote from BustedHalo.com)

Whatever your game system, favorite online RPG, or electronic distraction is, be careful! That harmless looking little XBOX can be your education’s worst nightmare. It should stay in the closet and only come out on weekends after your paper is written! Anything addictive or familiar right now is going to be more attractive than going to class and getting your work done. TV, Facebook, blogging, You Tube, downloading music, IM-ing or just surfing can all be nice stress busters but it’s a slippery slope. You start out just finding a little comfort or harmless distraction and before you know it you’ve stayed up all night, not written your paper and missed a couple classes because you were up too late! Self-discipline is a bigger challenge for some of us than others but one of the biggest tasks in life is setting your own limits. If you’re struggling, give yourself an Internet, television, or Wii “allowance” each day and stick to it. Nobody can multi-task! All it does is slow you down and keep you up later. When you’re doing homework, put up your away message and silence your cell phone. Don’t let anything or anyone steal your study time. Chat or text for 15 minutes and then get off IM and get your work done! Afterwards you can stay up and chat without the worry of the unfinished work hanging over you.

And while we’re talking about the Internet… here’s a hint! Online porn and poker are a bad idea! Because you’re in a strange place with new people (and suddenly without the people and habits that would set external limits on you) anything addictive can be a danger zone. Porn and online gambling, besides their general unsavory nature, are both extraordinarily addictive and the Internet gives us unprecedented access. Don’t get sucked in! Quit. If you find you can’t quit, even when you know you should, there’s lots of help available.

19. Enjoy Waco

The Baylor Bubble only exists if you let it. Embrace the Valley Mills Starplex.  Also take some time to enjoy the local Waco restaurants. A few local favorites are:

• ·Harold Waite’s Pancake & Steak House, 941 Lake Air Drive
• ·Gospel Café, 828 S. 10^th St.
• ·The World Cup Café, 1321 N. 15^th St.
• ·Bangkok Royal Thai, 215 S. University Parks
• ·Kitok Restaurant, 1815 N 18^th St.
• ·Teriyaki Park, 220 S. 2^nd St.
• ·Vitek’s, 1600 Speight Ave.
• ·Cupp’s Drive-in, 1424 Speight
• ·Dubl-R Burgers, 1801 Herring Ave
• ·Health Camp, 2601 Circle Road
• ·Baris 904 N. Valley Mills
• ·Poppa Rollo’s Pizza, 703 N. Valley Mills Dr.
• ·D’s Chicken & Mediterranean Grill, 1503 Colcord
• ·Leal’s, 9000 Panther Dr.
• ·Terry & Jo’s Food for Thought, 1121 Speight Avenue
• ·Café Cappuccino, 100 North 6th St # 100, Waco