How did you, as a person, grow this year? This is a question that I both love and dread answering; I love answering it because, selfishly, I get to think about everything blatant and concrete that I accomplished as a young college student figuring out how to “adult:” I successfully lived on my own for a year. I made the Dean’s List. I re-learned how to make new friends, and successfully made friends who make me a better person. Conversely, however, I dread responding to this question because it means that I have to look back on everything that subtracted from my growth as a person in order to do the mental math of my growth; those instances that held me back from growing myself as a person subtract from the growth, revealing a sort of net total growth. My goal, every year, is to make sure that my “net total” growth is always a positive number, meaning that I grew through all that had the chance to make me regress. The things that held me back this year that I’ve reflected on are situations like letting stress control my day and how I treat those I care about, dropping the ball on projects here and there—and more. But, I know that I’ve grown despite setbacks because I know now how I can correct the things that may have held back my growth in the past. Learning how to grit my teeth and push through hardships is an ability I pride myself on doing and an ability that is a hallmark of adulthood, and this past year, I truly believe that I’ve cultivated that skill.

 

Rebuilding the resilience needed to move forward after the pandemic was a daunting task; having the final semester of my senior year of high school and going into the first semester of undergrad with a huge weight of uncertainty had me feeling extremely helpless and in the dark. If one thing is for certain, this was not an uncommon feeling during the pandemic. The resilience bounced back, though—by finding great friends in my new school, building a new day-to-day routine for “COVID-college,” and trying my best to take care of myself showed me that I can handle more than I gave myself credit for. Resilience is something people don’t often notice in themselves until the actual moment of resilience has passed.

 

In the future, to hold myself accountable, I plan on utilizing my support network of my friends and family and my resources of my academic advisors and the Learning Commons. My family and friends are there to remind me of my goals and to make me better in every aspect of my life. I’m constantly grateful to them for pushing me to be the best version of myself. My advisors and the Learning Commons are there to help keep me on track academically and to support my mentality during the intense years of my undergraduate years. I am so excited to see how I grow over the next three years.