Over the summer, I began preparing for my piano exam in Diploma. I hung out with my friends, and in general pretended that I didn't have to worry about all the preparations and refused to get hyped up about going to college. In short, I was kind of in denial about the whole ordeal, which was odd since it was only a few months ago in April that I cried and whooped with joy after I found out I had been accepted to my dream college. I couldn't blame my indifference on the summer mailings that my college bombarded me either. I also distinctively remembered the large boxed package from FedEx that contained a maroon binder, a guide book (to get me excited about the city and the campus neighborhood), and the Course Catalog. Right away, the course catalog became a job. Yes, I got excited about all the possible courses that I could take as electives (including a humanities course called 'Relativism, Skepticism, and Bullshit' or 'The Pyschology of Negotiation'). What I had been neglecting though, was getting familiar and understanding the academic requirements I needed to fulfill in order to graduate. My dream college was famed for its 'Core Curriculum', and it sounded fantastic and well on paper, the Great Books that formed the canon of Western thought, Aristotle, Socrates, Marx, Durkheim, and Neitzche, to name a few, all elapsed between those pages. I only had, after all, an inkling of the kind of class discussions I would be getting from my core classes. I had no idea that I would miss my high school English class terribly, balk at the way my math professor teaches, refuse to reconcile with myself, and worried over how much money my parents were spending to send me to this supposedly fine institution. I say this things now because I had arrived on campus disillusioned and naive. Today, I'm writing this in a moment of deep reflection, in front of my proud, pearl-white MacBook (I'm a convert, so sue me) definitively happier than I was in high school (that's only natural, isn't it?) with a world-view postively shaped by my first year in college. *I'm very proud of myself, but not in a shameless manner.