April 1st, 2014

So, I’m actually transferring because I don’t want to go here anymore.

APRIL FOOLS!

Gotcha! Just kidding! I love it here and I am not planning on leaving this place anytime soon. Well, except for things like Spring Break. I spent the week at home in Auburn, California with my family. I got to hang out with my mom and my dog (Amber!) a lot, and my dad and my brother when they weren’t at work or school. My mom, Amber, and I took a bunch of "selfies" with my mom’s new iPad that she is super excited about.



Similarly to the Mt. Hood snowshoeing trip I told you all about previously that kept getting postponed due to rainy weather, my plans to go Nordic skiing in the Sierras over break were brought down by an ill-fated storm. Bummer. I was a little disappointed to come back to California to find myself back in the rain, but goodness knows we need it with the drought and everything. I ended up just spending a lot of time indoors, except for Friday when I went to a track meet at my brother’s high school. He’s a freshman, and goes to a different high school than I did, but my high school was also at the meet and I got to hang out with some friends from my old distance team! I had a great time talking with the seniors and juniors who wanted to hear all about college. I must have spent a good two hours talking with my friend Anderson – whenever he wasn’t warming up, racing the two mile, or cooling down, we were talking college. I couldn’t stop telling him about how awesome my professors are. They are so incredibly passionate about what they do – especially my English professor, Lyell Asher. We’ve been reading Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and Lyell is obsessed with that book. It’s infectious. I love literature already, but he makes me fall so deeply in love with it I can’t imagine myself studying anything else at this point. Even books I didn’t like at first, like Pride and Prejudice, I ended up loving by the time we finished discussing them. Being less interested in English literature than things like science, Anderson was less interested in my ecstatic rambling about my reading list than what time I got up in the morning and what the food was like. Regardless, it was great talking to a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. 

Well, tomorrow, it’s back to the old regime – 9am class and lots of studying and eating at the Bon and living in Portland! It was so hard to convey how much I like going to school here to people like Anderson back home who want to know “what college is like” or my grandparents who just want to know how I’m doing. Back here, I don’t have to explain why I love it here – I just live it.

Questions? I know all you seniors have heard back from the admissions office by now, so if you want to talk about decision-making, email me at jessicakostka@lclark.edu. I had such a hard time deciding where to go, but I’m happy with my choice.


Jess