Hello, readers :).
As I was lying in a bed a few nights ago thinking, the following thought occurred to me: I’ve got a really, really amazing situation in life right now. It’s something I think about on some level when I wake up every morning, but it’s been a long time since I wrote about how lucky I am, how blessed. The best part of it is that it doesn’t even feel like it’s luck—it feels like I’ve “deserved” it, that I’ve worked for it—a laughable idea, and one that I appreciate all the more because it so completely belies all the people and luck and circumstance that really brought me to where I am, and here I am giving myself credit anyway :). As a high school senior in March 2011, I’d never planned to come to Wellesley, to be interested in computational neuroscience, to work with Prof. Conway, to form life-long friends on the swim team, to travel to Nicaragua, to take classes at M.I.T, to become a senior with a plan for graduate school. Some of these ideas I somewhat anticipated; some could not have occurred to me. And yet here I am, so thankful for all of the choices and situations that leave me so utterly not-astounded by the beautiful life I have before me every single day. How I treat the amazing as normal. Most of it’s not even my work—it’s choices piled together by my parents, my peers, my communities, and my mentors. I had and have been given such an easy path to be successful, compared to the situations I could have been born into, could have needed to fight and lost anyway.
And this brings me to the first thing I want to write about, in this post about things-I-wished-I-knew-as-a-first-year: that we are lucky. Everyone who comes to Wellesley should know that everything is going to be fine; we’ve got ourselves some loaded dice: because if you have made it here, those people (including you) who helped you get here have placed you in the hands of a new community that is just as or more committed to moving you forward. A community of faculty, peers, mentors, janitors, deans, alumni– all are clearing your path, and making it so, so easy to be successful. All you have to do is work hard, and it’s practically guaranteed everything will be fine. More than fine. Excellent, not-what-you-planned, beautifully fine.
Not that coming to Wellesley that first semester will be easy, because you’re leaving your family to come to a new place with new expectations and new people. But it’s the best time in your life. You’re here to learn, and learning is fun. It gets better every year. All mottos that I repeated to myself my first and sophomore years, when I was stressed because of all of the work I had to do. Work that I chose to do—I chose what classes I wanted, what activities I did, when I worked, how I worked, and where I was going. If I could go back, I would tell myself: stop worrying! You’re doing what you want to and you’re working hard, and in this system, in your lucky world, that’s all you need. Remember to be fascinated, Monica. Remember to enjoy all this information: years of research poured into your head by a teacher who cares.
Stop worrying! And enjoy your peers around you. They’re all such interesting people, from fascinating places and different backgrounds. Their mindsets are mostly similar to yours, but different enough to make life interesting. I kept almost no friends I made my first year—some friends keep their first-year friends for life. Some will stay, some will go, and it’s all perfectly well. Join a club, join an organization, and go meet more.
Ask for help! Because you’re through the hard part—you made it in. Now everyone’s going to do his or her best to help you through. You’ve got upperclasswomen and peers, deans and faculty, administration, alumni, everyone who works at Wellesley. You’re lucky, remember? Lucky to be here. If you know what you want at Wellesley, people will help you.
Don’t overload yourself (unless you want to). Challenge yourself academically (first semester grades don’t count). Try a new academic class (if nothing else, you’ll get your distribution requirements out of the way. And if you’re lucky, you’ll find a new major or minor to pursue.)
Talk to your family! (Or not, if that’s helpful.) Apply for things! (Practice makes perfect.) Eat (so much food!) Exercise (a good habit.) And sleep—sleep makes everything better.
Enjoy where you are. Enjoy what you’ve done to get here. Enjoy what is fantastic here, everything you couldn’t do before. You’re independent, trying new things, hanging out with friends. Forming new families. It’s the best time in your life. Smile.
You’ll apply none of this when you come, of course. If I had been talking to myself as a first-year, I’d have gotten all stressed and worried regardless. It’s a new time, with a lot of change, and nothing’s easy until you’re accustomed. But you’ll get through it and you’ll do great anyway.
And that’s the joy of it, isn’t it?
That no matter what you do, you’ll do great anyway.
Monica