By GILLIAN LELCHUK
Year two begins not with the wide eyes of naïve freshmen but with the jaded gaze of a class that knows. We know what Hopkins has in store for us, and it’s not always pretty. Papers and midterms follow us like shadows, labs eat up all our free time, and problem sets fill our nightmares. And then you throw in all of our extracurriculars, because yes we, the Hopkins nerds, are also involved in sports, arts, Greek life and other miscellaneous clubs and activities. We love these things with all our hearts, but we sell them our souls and our time and sometimes our hard-earned money.
We no longer look at Gilman and think, “What a beautiful building!” Brody’s futuristic technology doesn’t impress us anymore (but really, did it ever?). Living in McCoy isn’t nearly as exciting as it was for us last year. We’ve lost our rose-colored lenses and now we see Hopkins as it is: the cluster of brick buildings that house everything that drives us crazy.
Despite all of this, we still came back. We may be disillusioned of the novelties of college, but we still love it here. And we’re still excited, maybe more excited. Because now we’ve made it through many of our intro level classes and our distribution requirements. Now we get to study what we want.
As we return to the Hopkins world, the familiarity of the library cubicles, the white-painted walls of student housing and the endearing tour groups who sometimes prevent us from being on time to class or meetings, we return with a greater understanding of what this school is.
This school is a place for people who truly want to learn. It’s a place where people double major in writing seminars and electrical engineering because they want to, and they can. It’s a place where Spanish majors are also pre-med and mechanical engineers get theater minors. There is so much freedom at Hopkins, and we take advantage of it.
And yet we still wallow in the anticipation of the misery that will come once we have three papers due the same week as two midterms. Even now, fresh out of syllabus week, we know that week is going to be hell. We’re not optimistic anymore, we don’t have the naïve “I can do it, easily” sentiment and we certainly don’t have the “I’ll just blow it off” feeling that goes along with covered grades.
We may not look at this school the way we used to because Hopkins has changed us. We’ve lost our naivety but we’ve gained a better understanding of the way the world works. College is vastly different from high school and, while that scares us a little, we’re okay. We made it through one year, we can get through three more.
We’re older and wiser now. Maybe we’re not as excited about the novelty of college as we were last year, but we’re smarter. We figured out how to study, and we understand the beauty of office hours. We abuse our professors’ email addresses, and we know that the FFC was a luxury we only appreciate now that our unlimited meal plans are a thing of the past.
So as we say goodbye to our fresh eyes, we say hello to a sophomore year filled with fun, education and probably a bunch of moronic things we missed out on doing last year.
