Updates at the 21st Night of September
- Joanne Lee
- Sep 28, 2019
- 5 min read
Hello! I have started the draft for this post at the 21st night of September, however, here I am posting it at the end of September. I still this post gives a good recap of what have been happening in my first academic month of sophomore year at U of R.
Hope you enjoy sips of Jo!
Hi Mare,
sorry for the late response to your letter. I have been busy since I came back to Rochester. Since the school started, so many things have happened but the bright side is that I have overcome all. I am celebrating my nights, especially tonight, with the song September by Earth, Wind, and Fire. As I am "remembering the 21st night of September" at the night of 9/21, here are updates of my life.
1) I have been a First-year fellow for approximately 120 first-year residents. I came back to Rochester in the second week of August before the orientation week and started for training as a part of residential-life team. On my residential building, there are four wings each floor, and I technically am in charge of two halls on my floor (Gates and Gannett). But I have been hanging out with residents from other two halls (Hollister and Morgan) too! They are sometimes crazy but also fun to be around. Being one of few upperclassmen on the floor is a weird feeling because I feel way older than my residents even though I am only one or two years older than them. I think it is because of a this extra year of school comparing to these first year students. A year of college experience has brought HUGE changes. It gave me a new broader perspective of seeing things happening around me; it helped me to develop myself to be more like "myself"; it gave me an exposure to the real diversity of people, outside of Christian bubble for the first time. Overall, a year of college made me a more mature person. I see my residents slowly transitioning into college students but not completely yet. One things I have noticed is that many residents continuously try to find someone to flirt or go on a date with since they moved into the college. I understand that they would like to explore and try new things like forming relationships but I really would like to emphasize that they do not need to like someone all the time. I have been encouraging them to find and appreciate the open community at the university that is willing to accept them as who they are rather than forcing themselves to be put with random “cool” people. It's because whether guys or ladies liking you back or not does not define how amazing and valuable you are. Wow, I feel like an adult! I really hope them to remember good experiences at the end of their first year.
2) Another big update is that I have officially left my rowing team before the fall season started. It was a big process of thinking to go through, and it was extremely hard. For the first few weeks of this semester, I was overwhelmed with the heaviness of being one of two team captains for the women's team and question of if I can push myself to be competitive in rowing. With confidence, I knew that I love the people whom I rowed with but not sure about my love toward the sport itself is strong enough to push myself. There were more beside this that made me feel conflicted but I made the decision to leave the team at the end. I miss being in the team and rowing on the water but I do not regret my decision because I can use so many hours that I could have committed to rowing for studying, socializing, and exploring new activities that I had wanted to try as a First-year.
3) Since I left the team, many things have changed. I do not have to wake up at 5 am every day but can stay up late to study. I got a research volunteering position at my school's medical center relating to breastfeeding; I applied and got in to MERT team in my campus. MERT stands for Medical Emergency Response Team. It is a student-base organization and I will be training for upcoming 6 months, 8 hours a week, to be a EMS certified and being on shifts to save students from various medically urgent situations. I would have not been able to do these if I did not leave crew. I am very thankful to God for opening these doors of opportunities to me and excited to start the training and lab! However, there are something I have to work on now. For instance, I have to be accountable for myself to exercise and take care of my body without having any team accountability or commitment, which has been very challenging. More than that, I miss being in the team so much. I still spend my time with my teammates but the extra hours I used to spend time with them is gone from leaving the team. It has been all about adjustments to new changes, which is always hard in the beginning.
4) In the beginning of the semester, I had an event that I had to cut off a relationship with someone. When I have an unfortunate incident with someone that my relationship with him or her is not great anymore, I try to make the relationship recovered slowly and naturally. I asked the person to give me time to recover and reach out to the person because I was going though a lot (as you can tell from above). I was prioritizing myself at that time, which I do not regret at all and what I needed to do. However, the person did not think in the same way. He expressed his impatience very roughly and ended up using bad languages targeting me to "grow up." When this happened, I did not see any reason for me to put efforts to recover this relationship because it is not healthy and I did not have any desire to continue this relationship. I have to be straightforward and tell him that I do not want to see or talk with him anymore. I was not sure whether I was being too hurtful at the person or not but I now know the answer for it because I do not regret my action. However, it was my first experience of "cutting off" a relationship. It sucked that I had to do this and hurt someone's feelings but it was necessary for me therefore I would have done the exact same thing if I was in the situation again. Sometimes, it is okay to a "bad ass" for yourself. You are important and you are the one who is most responsible to protect yourself from anything.
This post was very obnoxiously sparatic and probably was not informative as blogs should be. But here are what has been going on in my September. Also, there are some photos, not in a chronological order, from this month.
Love,
Jo
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