Fall Welcome makes you feel like you are at summer camp.
Fall Welcome at Saint Louis University is a perfect way to branch out and meet other freshmen who are in the exact same position as you. I was SO excited to movie in and immediately have activities to fill my time with. Some of these activities included a barn dance, a paint rave, a day of service, and so much more. However, what that they don’t prepare any of us for is ACTUAL college. Getting up at 7:00 am to do organized activities with other people your age really just made it feel like summer camp, making it seem like after a few days I would get to go home, which eventually had to push me back to the realization that I was actually in college and would not go home until October. Maybe it was a good thing because it allowed me to constantly be busy during my first week, making it extremely hard to miss anyone or anything back home. However, doing this really made it harder for myself and others in the weeks after Fall Welcome.
Grand Dining Hall is pretty much irrelevant.
Well, I should say that I thought Grand Hall was going to be a much more relevant part of my life than it currently is now. I felt so lucky to live in Grand Hall this year. I was excited to have a private bathroom and most excited for the food to be only three floors below me with unlimited meal swipes. What I did not know was that I would consistently be too lazy to almost ever get food, and when I did go to get food, the selection was a lot more limited than what Dine SLU put out during our orientation. My unlimited swipes have almost turned useless because I never realized how much I would just snack in my room, not to mention that I have seemed to pick my class schedule around the only times that they have food in the cafeteria. For example, my only times to eat on Wednesdays are at 10:00 and 4:00. However, when I go to Grand, there is almost never any food! I would hardly say that 10:00 am and 4:00 pm are unreasonable times to eat. With the Meal Exchange program at SLU, Grand Hall is literally my last option for dinners on Monday through Thursday, which is something I would never have believed if you told me a month ago. So I guess what I should say is this: I wish I had known how much I would end up relying on the snacks that my mom sends me through the mail and the meal exchange program at Bill Grill to get me through the day.
The professor doesn’t have to tell you that there is homework in order for there to be homework.
This is one tough lesson I had to learn during these first few weeks. No one really tells you how to work Blackboard, or Sapling, or whatever website your professor may use, so good luck trying to navigate it. I found it crazy that I felt so old and adult-like here, yet I was shocked when no one “babied” me through the assignments. I had no idea that some teachers did not discuss homework in class until I finally figured out how to check my grades and found that I was failing almost every single class after week one. Most professors here are extremely kind and were willing to take my late work, considering I’m a freshman and all, but just that experience alone was so shocking to me because that would never have occurred in high school. But then again, this is not high school, and that is just something I’ve had to grow accustomed to.