Well, Ma, here is the blog post you wanted me to write, hahah…
I am sitting here outside of Atwater dining hall, having eaten breakfast. The sun is bright and yellow, a lemon in the sky. The breeze is soft, but crisp upon my skin. Everything is a garden salad, a burst of summer colors. It’s truly been a remarkable year to start college.
1st Semester
The first semester I had to take classes online because the US embassy in Indonesia was closed. Hard is an understatement to describe what it felt to begin your first year of college sitting in front of a laptop screen, zooming for 3 hours straight every night, wishing with every email describing upcoming activities that you were there too, in person, to meet people and stroll through campus grounds. At first I didn’t want to start college online. I desperately wanted to take a gap semester–learn coding, exercise, cook, play with my sisters, do the Global Citizen Academy program. But my parents pushed, nagged, and coaxed me to start online. They said, who knows what will happen in the future? What if next semester you wouldn’t be able to go again and you would take a gap year, graduate late, etc…
(more…)
The Blue Journal 