THE FRESHMEN: December 2007 Archives

Patty Sponaugle's decision to attend Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio (with less than 2,500 students) came after she realized she wanted to study in a faraway (but not exactly exotic) land that splits the distance between Columbus and Akron.

Since my freshman year of high school, when I began my crazy college search, I knew I wanted to go to a small, liberal arts college.

I just knew.

And although rural life, with all its quaint and all its quiet, did appeal to me, one of the things I was most afraid of, even while I was applying to a plethora of 2,500-students-or-less schools in the middle of essentially nowhere, was boredom.

Read The Freshman column to learn why boredom isn't creeping in.

Lana Buu of The Freshman column writes about her "sense of doom" about that battery of papers and mid-term exams that usually hammer college students just ahead of the holiday break.

Here's an exerpt:

Midterms, for me, lasted four weeks. The continuous onslaught of papers and examinations brought me to my physical and mental limits. I slept only when I felt that I no longer had the capacity to process thought. I could not even enjoy a simple meal because my thoughts were inundated by what was on my to-do list.

I was a hermit. My friends thought I fell off the face of the Earth - until they caught a glimpse of me studying in the library and realized that midterms had taken hold of my life.

Freshman columnist Patty Sponaugle is weaving herself into the cultural quilt at Kenyon College:

Within every environment, there is a certain culture that one learns to embrace and become enmeshed in. The culture becomes a part of them; they become a part of the culture; together, they evolve.

Most definitely, this is true at Kenyon College.