Melissa Tucker, class of ’16, is finishing up her first semester at WashU with a bang. While it’s normal for freshmen to feel a little lost first semester, most do not have the guts to talk about just how confusing it can be – and Melissa does more than talk. She started a blog, Tuck This that details just what goes into being a freshman at WashU.
Year: Freshman
Hometown: Scarsdale, NY
Studying: Undecided in Arts and Sciences, maybe psych and definitely a minor in communication design
What is your favorite class you’ve taken? Design Process, it’s in the architecture school and you learn design process and how to bring the creative process of learning to everything you do. That’s the class I started the blog for.
Oh, so your blog is just for a class? I started the blog as a project. I wanted to explore the freshman experience because I felt like any books that you could read going into freshman year were written by adults. I thought it would be valuable if freshmen had more honest advice from fellow freshmen because no one really prepares you for what happens when you get here.
Did something in particular surprise you about your freshman year so far? I think I thought I was going to assimilate and be having a good and easy time a lot faster. I still feel at home here, and I feel like I have gotten a really good, close group of friends, but being away from your home and your friends is not easy.
What has been your favorite thing that you’ve blogged about so far? I wrote a post called “My Planner is my Only Friend” that, if you know me, makes a lot of sense. It was all about how if you’re really stressed, you can find a way to organize yourself and to me the way to do that is a planner and to-do lists, and I’m obsessed with them. A girl actually inboxed me to tell me that she bought a planner because of the post that I wrote, so that was awesome.
Wow, you’re such an inspiration! Do surprising people ever talk to you about your blog? First of all, I didn’t expect as many people to be reading it as there are. It has gotten a lot more success than I thought it would. And only the unexpected people message me to tell me that like they really liked a certain post or they like reading what I write every day, because I post once a day.
That’s a lot! Yeah, but its easy because I just write about something that struck me that day.
So it’s like a journal, but everyone reads it. Kind of, and just things I’ve been meaning to write about. I always have ideas.
Have you gotten any negative feedback about anything that you’ve written? I actually did. There is a post that I wrote that didn’t go over so well, and it was the first time that I was confronted with a situation where what I wrote about affected people negatively other than myself. I wrote another post a few days later once I realized there were negative reactions, acknowledging that I felt bad and that this is a hard thing to do. It just made it a lot more real for me that like my words have more power than I thought they did.
But you didn’t delete the post? I didn’t delete the post. I really thought about it, but I started the blog on the basis of honesty and the blog is called Tuck This, and the sub-header is “honesty is the only policy” so I would have really been going against a lot of things that I believed when I started the post.