Our first real paper is coming up soon for the freshman cohort. It’s quite terrifying. I’m very gradually learning how to become a better thinker and writer, but it’s a very tough process. I got passing grades on my first two presentations though, and that was relieving! The work isn’t easy- it’s a lot of reading and thinking about things that are WAY over my head, and it’s very humbling. So far everyone’s been so willing to help, not just my cohort but the older THC students as well- they’re so encouraging and always seem to be willing to reach out and offer us advice (and we desperately need it- or at least, I do).
The “Allegory of the Cave,” from Plato’s Republic, is definitely my favorite thing we’ve read so far. I’ve taken great pleasure in a lot of the things we’ve read though- it was hard to pick a favorite. I love how there’s always some point in our class discussions when we must connect the conversation to God. Sometimes things start looking pretty bleak. But then we’re reminded of this huge, unfathomable Being who created out of His abundance of love and who redeemed us when we were corrupted. We talk about weighty, complicated things in those classes. It feels like by going to class I dive deeper and deeper into meditations on God. My classes in high school never felt so heavy, so weighted down with significance.
Blogging makes me feel a little self-absorbed. I had no idea blogging would be something I would take up when I arrived at Eastern, but I’m alright with trying something new. Beth told me I need to “try and keep it positive,” meaning I’m not supposed to say anything bad about Eastern or the teachers or my fellow students, but I genuinely couldn’t think of a bad thing to say about it all yet even if I tried. (I really did try... it turned out to be a huge waste of time). I’m scraping by in the honors college, trying to keep my head above the water among all of the brilliant people I’ve met, and they’re all beautiful (inside and out- seriously), and the professors have been wonderful. Don’t get me started on the faculty and staff; they’re amazing and possibly some of the most helpful of people. They engage us in conversation and seem to genuinely take interest in us, and it’s made the experience so much sweeter.
I’m going to a private Christian school approximately seventeen hours away from my birthplace in “the sticks”, and it’s not quite so drastic of a change as I thought it would be. I think I have a pretty sweet set-up, if I do say so myself. I don’t get homesick easily though- eighteen years in Arkansas were wonderful but I like to think I’m pretty adaptable. Who knows, maybe in a few months I’ll have a complete meltdown and I’ll be reduced to a constant state of red-eyed, stuffy-nosed sobs, but I seriously doubt it. And even if I did, I’m sure in the next moment my clever roommates will have me distracted somehow or someone in my cohort will let me listen in on their discussion about war and I’ll have forgotten that I was ever sad. Sometimes it feels like I’m living in a dream, and in this dream the homework is enjoyable and I get to talk to people who are twenty times smarter than I am and they don’t make me feel stupid.
I moved on the same day as the rest of the people in my cohort in the THC, and I moved in with fellow THC members in the cohort above me, and basically after hardly four weeks I feel like I’m completely in love with it. It feels like I’ve been here for a long time. I’d even venture to speak for all of us freshmen THC members and say that we all seem to be loving it so far. Granted, we haven’t had a real paper yet, just a few presentations and writing exercises, and we’re terrified but there’s something tremendously comforting in the knowledge that we’re all in the same place, and we’re going to help each other out as much as we can.
There was one point on the camping trip when they made us sit in a circle and write down what we were most worried about. They put all of the folded papers with our worries and concerns in a bucket and mixed them up and made us draw them out and read them aloud. We started reading them aloud and realizing how redundant they were getting and finally we looked around and there were sly smiles forming on our faces as our eyes glanced around the circle. We were afraid we wouldn’t make friends, we wouldn’t manage our time well, the work load would be too much for us to handle- the list continued as each paper was read and each one seemed to restate another. It was tremendously comforting.
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