Shitty First Draft

There is all this talk about being a Hokie, Hokies are so community oriented, there is something different about a Hokie student than other college students. But what is it? What is it that makes every other student incomparable to Hokies. It doesn’t seem to make sense. The school, while good, and still improving is a far way away from the ivies and the PAC 10. It is in the middle of Southwest Virginia, a.k.a the middle of nowhere, and hicksville. The football team can’t seem to win the easy games against East Carolina University and Boston College, but they can somehow beat Georgia Tech and Nebraska. Furthermore, while the school and the students pride themselves on the football team, they’ve only once been to a national championship, and they lost it. People make it seem like we’re all so homey and helpful, when in reality it can seem just the opposite. There are over 20,000 undergraduates. How can there be such a family atmosphere with so many people. Whenever you’re walking to class, there are always mobs of people crossing the drillfield, the vast majority of them are listenimg to their ipods and paying no attention to anyone around them. Some Virginia Tech family! In the first half of the semester here at Tech I have become good friends with my roommate, my hallmates, and a couple others. However, with so many people at the school I don’t know how I haven’t made more friends. I was very well liked in high school, and I’m the same person I was coming out of high school. It’s not like I haven’t been making the effort either. I go out and party, and I’ve been trying to get involved in the many clubs and organizations the school has to offer. The people just seem like they are from another world. Is it something wrong with me or them? I feel like the only way to fit in is to change myself, and I am in no way up for doing that. What’s even more frustrating is that, while I have been doing well in my studies, I seem to be getting less and less enjoyment from them. I have always wanted to know how things world, and I have always had an instinctive curiosity. Since early in high school I decided that I wanted to be an engineer. I concentrated all throughout high school on the math and sciences just because I was so set on the engineering career path. Now that I’m actually in an engineering program, I can’t say that I have been as enthused. I’m still doing so much math and science work and my introduction to engineering class bores the hell out me, although that might be because it is at 8 a.m. on Mondays. While I am learning, I want to be doing more, I want to be exploring. One of the main reasons I came to Virginia Tech was because they are a leader in undergraduate research. My whole thought was what’s the point of learning if you can’t apply it? I also can’t seem to figure out exactly what I want to do. When filling out college applications I told them that I was interested in aerospace and mechanical engineering. However, now that I’m actually in the process of selecting what major I will continue with for the next four years I couldn’t be more indecisive. While I still like aerospace and mechanical, the required classes I would have to take sound so monotonous and boring, and I don’t know if they’ll be worth it in the end. I have now begun considering mining and mineral, industrial and systems, and even green engineering, but none of them seem to have exactly quite what I’m looking for. The more about the programs I learn, the less sure I am of the decision at hand. I am also frustrated because I still feel like a big fish in a small pond. While there definitely is much more engineering talent at Tech than there was at my high school, I still feel like I am one of the top students, and one of the most creative with that. For a sustainable energy project we had I came up with a really good idea to use the heat generated through composting to power and transform it into electricity that can be utilized for whatever. Compare this to the ideas of some of my groupmates: a wheel located under a sink faucet, which would turn as a result of the water flow over it, producing electricity; the friction made from pressing the keys on a laptop would be converted into energy, which would recharge the laptop battery. In my opinion these ideas in particular, along with others, were just absurd. I don’t think that I’m necessarily smarter than anybody else, but I seem to be one of the few who really cares about engineering, and really puts in the time and effort it requires. Although I didn’t know about club tennis tryouts and I will definitely consider it for future years, I did join intramural tennis. I expected to have a ladder of games to play, but instead they gave us a group of 15 or 20 players or so and left it up to us to play. We only had to play three matches, but even so it was too loosy goosy for me and I could never seem to get emails back from players, nor did any of them ever seem to have time to play. I became disinterested and ultimately only played one match, and because of that haven’t been keeping up on my tennis game. The resident advisors rarely ever plan any events to bring the halls together, and one of the few ones they did was a lecture on how to not get caught when drinking alcohol. Exciting! I guess I just haven’t felt the full welcoming power of the so called Hokie Community. While I want to believe that the school is right for me, and in the end I think it will be, I just always have that unsettling feeling in my stomach that perhaps I did pick wrong. Mainly, I think I just need to give myself more time to get settled. That’s my hope.