During customs week my freshman year, the advice I heard over and over from upperclasswomen was to try new things. They said that finding your place at Bryn Mawr was a trial-and-error process—you had to try new things, find what you love, and move on from the things that you didn’t enjoy as much as you thought you would. I took this advice and readily threw myself into the newness of Bryn Mawr my very first semester.

I joined the varsity crew team having never rowed in my life. Knowing I wanted to be an English major, I took an English class, but I took it in a subject I previously didn’t even know existed—Postcolonial Literature. I took a geology class just for the hell of it. By the end of the semester I quickly realized that 5am crew practices weren’t my thing, and that I absolutely loved my geology class.

Five semesters later, I find myself a very content geology major, and the captain of the rugby team. It’s certainly not what I imagined myself doing when I first entered school as a first-year, but I love what I do at Bryn Mawr and I am forever grateful for the wise older women who advised me to try new things.

Now I am a senior, beginning my last year here at the top of the food chain, so to speak. However, I have retained that mentality through my time at Bryn Mawr and while I have found my niche at college, I still find the value in trying totally new things. And that is how I found myself in an Introduction to Drawing class this semester.

So far it’s been an interesting experience. I have always enjoyed art so I figured I would take this class just for fun to provide some relief from the other difficult classes I am taking. Here’s a drawing I did during the first class. Hopefully I will get better as the class goes on!

The hockey skate I drew on the first day of drawing class. Hopefully I'll improve!

I’m also taking two geology classes—marine geology and invertebrate paleobiology. Marine Geology is a fun elective class for me. It is taught by one of my favorite professors at Bryn Mawr and it deals with the subject matter that I am interested in. Invertebrate Paleobiology is a major requirement for geology majors, so originally I was taking it out of necessity. However, after my first class, I totally loved it! It is set up so that we spend half of the class in the classroom learning about concepts and terms, and then for the second half of class we go up to the paleo lab and do more interactive activities where we get to look at all sorts of neat fossils that the department has in their collection. My fourth class is physics. This is also required for my major, and I’ll just say I think it is going to be my most challenging class.

Perhaps the most fun thing about being back at school, though, is that it’s rugby season! This is my first semester as a co-captain of the team, so the other captain and I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how we want the season to go, organizing practices, and recruiting new team members from Bryn Mawr and Haverford. Today was the first day we did tackling drills and it was a perfect day for it—it’s been kind of rainy outside, so the pitch was nice and muddy. After practice everyone looked like they had been rolling around in the mud (actually, that IS essentially what we were doing….).

I’ve got to head to bed as I have an early class tomorrow (8:15!), but I have very exciting weekend plans that involve beach cows, so look for a post about that next week!

Oh, and check out my flickr set (link on the sidebar) to see some photos of my sweet single in Radnor!