Hello (again)!

Hello everyone! My name is Jessica Kostka, I hail from the little town of Auburn in Northern California, and this will be my second year of blogging for Real Life. I am excited to get started again, and hopefully I can help some of you decide whether Lewis and Clark will be a good fit for you. Stay tuned to find out a little bit more about me, and to hear some things I love about being a student here.

I am a second-year student majoring in English and (possibly) minoring in Philosophy. However, my academic interests are all over the map. Between my general education requirements and the classes I’ve taken just for fun, I’ve had the chance to take such a variety of subjects here that I can tell you about many of the departments on campus. You’ll hear a lot more about my classes in later posts, but for now, I’ll just tell you my schedule this semester. I have Major Periods and Issues in English Literature (for my major), Philosophy of Religion (a fascinating class which is the reason I might be a Philosophy minor), Education in a Complex World, Beginning Japanese 1, and Yoga. It’s a pretty great lineup, if I do say so myself. I love all my professors. Outside of class, I am into reading, writing poetry, running, Yoga Club, watching really good movies, eating all kinds of food, and obsessing over my future. I also volunteer off-campus in a kindergarten classroom as part of my education class. 

I live on campus in Akin Hall, which is the same residence hall I lived in last year. This is my room.



Akin Hall is the Multicultural Engagement Living Learning Community, which means that we get to help out with things like the International Fair. Everyone I live with is very interested in other languages and cultures and things like that. It’s become a second home for me and I feel privileged to have so many wonderful friends both from last year and this year. Here are a couple photos of me doing various exciting things with said friends!


A very blurry picture of half of my dorm attempting to squeeze into one long table at the dining hall. That's me on the right with wavy blond hair.




That’s my roommate Sully, me, Aubrie, and Molly, from left to right. We are at the food carts! Portland is well known for its food cart culture, and in an ideal world with infinite money and time, I would take the bus downtown every weekend and try a new food cart each time. Some of my favorite things I’ve had have been gyros, Pad Thai, taro boba tea with milk, and iced peach boba tea. On this occasion, I had bi bim bap from the Korean BBQ cart.

Last night, I went downtown again. This outing also revolved around food. Do you sense a pattern forming? Because I do. We went to my favorite restaurant – Shigezo Izakaya. It’s incredibly convenient because it is so close to where the bus stops, and it's delicious. The Japanese exchange students I'm friends with have told me that their food tastes really authentic, too. I think this is like my tenth time going there in the last year.


Well, I'm pretty exhausted from a long day in the library studying philosophy, so that’s all for tonight. But never fear! I will post again next week. If you have any questions about what it’s like to live here at Lewis and Clark, which restaurants/food carts to go to in Portland, what I think of elegiac poetry from the Middle Ages, or how Aquinas attempted to prove the existence of God, just shoot me an email at jessicakostka@lclark.edu!


Jess