As of 3:00 PM, I will have been on campus for exactly one week, and in just over two hours, I will be done with class until 8:00 AM on Monday morning.

Reality has yet to fully sink in, as I am certain that late nights, early mornings, and piles upon piles of assigned reading will take a toll upon me; for the moment, though, I could not be happier.

The retreat I attended was almost exactly what I expected – absolutely cheesy and wholly uncharacteristic of the person I normally am, but also what I needed.  Cheers and dances and fight songs and food fights do not make the list of “activities I enjoy,” but it forced me out of my safety zone, to meet and bond with a number of people who I pass by on a daily basis.

For the first time in my life, courses are requiring me to think critically and analytically about the content matter – and even where memorization would suffice (Chapter 1 of my Econ textbook, for example), other classes and readings are drawing on those basic principles.  I have voluntarily taken more notes in the past two days than I did during the last semester of my senior year, and am getting involved in activities I never thought possible.

I plan to soon drop these cluttered, random thoughts for a return to the slightly more structured model I normally follow; I trust that as I fall into a routine and adapt fully to college, life will return to normal.