As I write this the world is a bit chaotic due to COVID-19, but I know I have been trying to take a break from thinking about whats happening right now, so I thought I could talk about my experience starting college at Lewis & Clark. Since many of you are not done with your senior years early, I hope you can at least excitedly look forward to starting college in the fall when things are hopefully back to some sort of normal.
I absolutely loved the beginning of my time at L&C, especially starting off on one of the New Student Trips. If you take one thing away from this post: you should go on an NST if you can, it is such a great way to start your college experience. I was so full of nervous energy and anticipation and excitement, and it was a bit nerve-wracking, but once I started to get to know a few people, and we got to bond as we started off on our new student trip, college started off as everything I wanted it to be.
If you don't know what an NST is yet, these are trips for incoming students that happen the week before new student orientation and move in happens, they are put on by College Outdoors (which runs all kinds of trips all year long). You can check out the list of trips, and get all the details on the CO website here.
All the technical details are available on the website, so I wanted to talk about the experience I had. So I arrived at the PDX airport (my favorite airport now), and had so many duffle bags with me, but I made it to the LC shuttle, and started meeting a few other people. It was awkward, but we were all going on NSTs, so we were slowly figuring out if we were on the same trips, and talking about where we were from and what dorms we were in. Then we got to campus, and headed to the CO warehouse where we had to assemble all the gear we needed and pack out stuff into whatever bags we were taking on the trip, and then store everything for our dorms. Here we met up with our trip leaders (usually juniors and seniors who regularly lead trips for CO). And we met up with our group of 10 or so other new students.
The trip I was going on was to go Kayaking for a week on Waldo Lake, and I am still great friends with almost everyone I met on that trip, and I really loved our trip leaders. Even though we're peers now, I still feel like our trip leaders are like our cool camp counselors who took us camping and answered all our questions and really introduced us to what being a student is like at LC. They were fantastic, and so were all the other new students I was with. We spent the first bit of the week-long trip getting to know each other and also figuring out all the kayaking skills we needed. The first time we packed all out gear into the kayaks it felt like it took us 4 hours, but by the end of the trip, we were practically pros.
We also spent tons of time just getting to know each other, and bonding. The first night we all slept on two tarps with rain covers over us, in our sleeping bags. But soon after that we all started sleeping on just one tarp so it was easier to hang out and be close to each other. One of the days that we were supposed to go out paddling to a new campsite on the lake it was raining and dreary so we decided to stay at our campsite instead and hang out and play cards instead of going out, and we had a great time. We did tons of cheesy get to know you games, but they were actually really helpful. One of the nights we all had to anonymously write down our fears about starting college, and then they were all read out, and it was kind of comforting to know we were all a bit nervous and scared of a lot of the same stuff. We did another game where we stood on a log and had to arrange ourselves by age and birthday without getting off the log, and it was a bit ridiculous but it made us all laugh and get to know each other better. On the last night, we all shared lots of personal stories and each of us got a matching bandana and then we rejoined the real world.
When we got back to campus we all helped each other move into our dorms, which was nice because we got to see where we all lived. And in a nice circular story, many of us all shared a storage unit at the end of freshman year and we helped each other move out of our rooms to store ou stuff for the summer. In the first few weeks of the semester when we were all getting our footing and figuring everything out we all had a group chat and would meet for meals and explore campus together and act as a great support structure for our first foray into adult life. And my NST group wasn't unique, many people well into the sophomore year will still reference friends they made on NSTs and that group of people is always a group you will know well around campus.
So what I'm trying to say is that NSTs are a really great way to transition into college life, and if you have to ability to go on one, do it.
If you have any questions or want to talk about anything at all, please email me at quentingaul@lclark.edu.