JOURNAL

Fall 2018

Although I started my fall semester of 2018 as a new freshman who had little to no idea about how research took place in college, I ended the term with a significant amount of knowledge. I didn’t know where or even when to begin looking into research opportunities, and I certainly didn’t know just how many our campus offered. The Research & Creativity class that I enrolled in because of my involvement in the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program (URSP) was of huge assistance to me. While I believe that the best way to gain knowledge about anything (including research) is to directly experience it, learning about research through this class was the next best thing. I learned to defy the stereotypical idea of research – everybody is familiar with the man with the crazy hair standing in a science lab surrounded by beakers and all sorts of confusing equipment – which helped me learn to create my own opinion of how I see myself doing research in the future. In addition, this class allowed me to see how near that future really is. Prior to attending the University of Florida, I had planned to start doing research in my sophomore year of college. However, by the end of my fall semester, I was already scheduled to begin conducting research with a small team of students like me in the spring semester of my freshman year.

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After completing my fall semester of 2018, I feel able to truly reflect on what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown. At the beginning of the semester, I felt overwhelmed by the new environment and various social settings that I had to quickly become accustomed to. I decided to not join too many organizations while I was still settling in because I did not want to face the rush to fit in and proper establish myself on campus the way that so many other students did. Now that the semester is over and I feel adequately situated with my new surroundings, I feel that I can offer more to my community; therefore, I have started to become much more active on campus in the spring semester. I believe that taking my first semester ever of college slow and focusing on my grades was a better decision for me personally because I did not feel the overwhelming stress that I would have gone through had I chosen to immediately immerse myself in the myriad of things to do around the University of Florida.

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Overall, I believe that the fall semester of my freshman year was successful for me because I gained an understanding of how I could see myself fitting into the University of Florida campus; I plan to begin acting on these ideas that I have for my future in the coming semesters, and have already begun to do so this year by enrolling in a CURE class and getting involved in organizations that support the overall health of the community. URSP has been especially helpful to me because it was through this program that I was able to easily secure a research position with a tenured professor in spring of 2019. I feel that the decisions I’ve made have allowed me to become more mature and to make a more profound impact on the world around me.