This past month I have been discovering the new place I call my home, Seattle. When I first toured the University of Washington I fell in love. It was your average girl meets perfect college love story. I stepped on campus and knew that this was where I wanted to be spending the next four years of my life after high school.

Fast forward a little less than two years and here I am actually living my dream, but not all dreams start out happy. My first week at the UW was miserable because I was going through Formal Fall Recruitment which is that long, awful process people call “rush” where girls all go to join sororities. The University of Washington decided to make the process even more stressful by saying that if we did not end up joining houses, then we would not have housing on campus since we had to move into the sorority house on bid day. I’m not going to go into exact detail about all of recruitment but trust the system. It is cliché but also very true. I ended up in a house that I love and could not imagine myself anyplace else even though the week was rough.

Bid day was September 16^th and school did not start until September 27^th. We had lots of time to bond with our new sisters and discover the community we lived in. Our house made a scavenger hunt for us and we were in a group with some of the older girls so we knew our way around campus, Greek Row and University Avenue. The juniors took us to Pikes Place Market and helped teach us how to use the light rail (which is free with your Husky ID!). By September 25^th I was just ready for school to start.

When September 27^th finally came around, I was ecstatic. I could not wait to go learn about the sociology of murder, psychology and communications. My sociology of murder and communications class are a part of a first-year interest group (FIG). The FIG meets once a week and it consists of me and 21 other girls. It is a good way to meet people and it is an easy 2 credit course. A FIG is only available to incoming freshmen in their autumn quarter.

Since the UW is on the quarter system, it was very hard for me to spend almost a month alone at home since my friends went to places like Iowa State and the University of South Carolina and left me to wither away in sadness by the middle of August. The nice thing about it was I was able to work a lot more and made a lot more money because that is an essential part of living in a big city.

The quarter system has its perks which is that the quarters are only 10 weeks long, and when you are on break you are legitimately on break. It also has its downfalls which are you do not have a long time to make sure your grade will not suffer. Just remember that pain is temporary but GPA is forever.

Since I am in the Greek community, there are a lot of social events that happen on Tuesday and Thursday nights. If you are considering about whether to go out or to stay in and finish homework I would recommend that you stay in and finish homework because there are plenty of opportunities to go out and meet people, plus school comes first (that’s the sorority’s number one rule).

Some other advice for class scheduling is to never ever under any circumstance take more than one science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) class at a time. You will most likely fail because that is a lot of imbalance in a schedule. The UW recommends that students take 15 credits (which is generally 3 classes) a quarter in order to graduate on time.

Another great thing I love about UW is football season. Washington is currently ranked #6 in the NCAA football rankings (SKO DAWGS). When I was first searching for colleges I knew that I wanted to be a part of a Division I school. My first official in school game day is tomorrow and I could not be more excited to see how much spirit this school has.

Overall, my first month at the UW has been amazing and I cannot wait to see what else happens in the future!