Hopkins is a diverse university where an incredible mix of cultures, academic interests and personalities coexist and thrive. Here is the section where you can publish your unique thoughts, ideas and perspectives on life at Hopkins and beyond.
I’m sitting in a tiny restaurant on a side street in Venice. It is late for lunch, nearly 3:30 p.m., and the restaurant is empty. The chipped brick walls curve up into the cracked white ceiling and the creamy tablecloths have little flowers printed on them. I order pasta alle vongole, or pasta with clams.
A few months ago, I began drafting an Admissions blog post about the beginning of my freshman year. I wrote about leaving home and finding a new one with my roommates in AMR III. I wrote about joining clubs and trying new activities. I wrote about walks around campus and dinners at Nolan’s… and then I stopped writing. I figured I could ramble about the ordinary, or I could turn attention to the taboo — highlighting what so many of us hide in the name of “success” seemed far more valuable.
It seems as if every time I write, all I can think about is aging. As 2024 begins, I am on the cusp of my twenty-first year. This milestone comes with its own set of hassles, yet twenty is a big year for most. For some, it’s the first time they are living away from home; for many, it’s a moment of self-discovery and finding their identity; and for most, it’s the start of accumulating existential dread for what’s to come (kidding, kinda).
My grandfather has been asking me to write his biography for years. A tome, he said. Something hundreds of thousands of words long to capture his every struggle and triumph. I brushed it off as a joke, and though he would laugh along, there was always a somber undertone to his request. He wanted to be heard. He wanted to be remembered and seen and celebrated.
This Thanksgiving was full of gratitude, coziness and nostalgia for me because I spent it revisiting a family I got to know back in 2019 and haven’t seen since: the Gatniks, the family that hosted me when I flew to the U.S. for the first time in my life back in ninth grade as part of an exchange trip.
The first time I went to see him at the hospital, I was in denial, staring blankly at the monitor that showed the stats of all patients in the ICU. When a nurse asked me what was wrong, I told her, “This is not happening to my father. This is a bad dream.”
Was it about my accent? Honestly, I didn’t even know I had one until I started at Hopkins. People would tell me they couldn’t understand what I said because of it, or that I had the “typical Turkish accent.” What even is that? And how does everybody know what it is except for me, the only Turkish person in the room?
I never understood it, you see — never knew how someone could walk into my room (in its heyday, no less, with all the homework and books and everything piled everywhere) and call it small. It was many things, but it was never small. Not to me.
I’m not 15 or 16 anymore. Today, I’m 21 years old, and I’m a senior in college. As such, I’m constantly thinking about the future, whether I intend to or not. I think about what’s to come after graduation, which quickly leads me down a spiral of endless thoughts and what-ifs.
Since the moment my fingers touched the 88 black and white keys for the first time, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the piano. While the joy that the piano brings to me always outweighs the frustration, it is those challenging moments that have made me grow as a musician and person and enabled me to love the instrument more and more.
The other day, I watched myself age by scrolling through my camera roll. Picture by picture, video by video, I saw change and growth in ways I hadn’t expected. It spurred a little reflection.
I wake up to the gentle sound of rain outside. Movie posters and postcards from my recent travels litter the walls and a soft, gray light escapes through my curtains and into my room. I’m making breakfast when I hear a familiar tap on my balcony door.
I’m a very anxious person. I worry about future finances, the weather tomorrow, my talent as a writer, how much people will like me — and of course, the possibility that the world will end by the time I’m 28.
Whenever I told people I was studying abroad, I felt like I was lying. I felt as if I hadn’t done anything to deserve such a rare once-in-a-lifetime experience — the kind most people don’t get. Ever since I met with my academic advisor and realized I could study abroad and still graduate on time, I had been set on going somewhere. I wanted something completely different from everything I knew.
Going into this summer, I knew it wouldn’t be about writing, but I told myself it would be — as if saying it could make it true. Honestly, I had hardly written in the winter and spring of 2023. At first, it was because I was busy adjusting to my life in a foreign country. As winter faded into spring, it was because I was grieving the loss of my cousin to leukemia.
My grandma, my baa, is the strongest, most beautiful woman I know. She married young, didn’t finish school and immigrated from India with her six children. We jokingly called her a family man. She made time for her 14 grandchildren, spent her days calling each of us before and after school and would ask for updates on our well-being and our friends. She was, and continues to be, my dearest friend.
We’ve all done it: woken up some 15 (or 30) minutes too late, scrunched our eyes in exasperation at the steps of our morning routines that must now be skipped in order to make it to class on time. In high school, we were all guilty of it — exhaustion compounded after a particularly heavy week of assignments — and those extra minutes in bed felt like a worthy trade-off for having to eat your breakfast while walking out the door. But all of this changes when you get to college.
As I am sitting on a park bench facing the runway at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, the ground begins to shake. As the plane thunders down the runway, the roar of the fan blades overpowers the sound of my camera’s shutter, as I gather as many photos as I can in the few short seconds it spends on the runway.
Growing up, I used to feel anxious before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. The thought of spending hours at my synagogue on an empty stomach made me feel uneasy, and I always found the holiday to be a lengthy challenge that I just had to push through without question.
There is a tiny little square of my computer screen, tinted light blue and gray, where I can see the silhouettes of people walking into my quiet level of the library. I don’t look at it often — usually, I’m too preoccupied with the blankness of my Google documents — but when I do, I can see so much. They’re just silhouettes — not people, really, not until they come into view — but without the face, you notice so much more.
