Going into freshman year here at McDaniel was one of worst things that could’ve happened to me at the time, as during the time I joined, I wasn’t really in the best shape physically and mentally. 

Basically that summer before my freshman year I suffered a great loss that probably changed me for life: my mom passing away. This absolutely destroyed me as I basically lost one of the biggest reasons for wanting to succeed in anything, which was to take care of my mom, and without her, I didn’t have a reason to do such things anymore. 

So that year I started the year off pretty sluggish, as after the loss I moved districts, as my mom originally lived in Washington, so going to a whole new district was big. As I basically knew nobody here except for a couple of my cousins, who were upperclassmen, so I didn’t really interact with them much.

Anyways I’d start off my freshman year with some basic classes where I couldn’t really focus, as there was no point in doing so for me, so I went through the year pretty rough. First semester ended with some pretty bad outcomes with my grades being horrendous at the time to the point where I had to do some make up work after the semester to change some of my previous grades to barely passing.

This pace was pretty much going this way until it happened: COVID-19. At first I didn’t think of it much as the time. They only closed off school for a week, so I was like “yay” a week of break. Then it became official shortly after COVID had finally shut the whole world down. So that  resulted in me having to do online school, which at the time for me, not having any friends, was pretty nice.

COVID was probably one of most helpful things for me, as I managed during this time to be able to build back up from my loss which had still affected me for most of the year. So I started with simple tasks such as more mindful activities and two of these were biking and meditating which I still do to this day.

In the end a lot has happened here at McDaniel and although it didn’t go in my favor well, it was still a great experience as I’m quite happy where I’m at now so thanks and goodbye McDaniel.