When I applied to colleges, I went through two phases. Initially, all I was concerned about was prestige. The school that I was going to go to was going to be the best possible, and at any price. Denied by MIT, denied by Harvard. Okay, okay..so maybe I didn't pick the easiest schools to get into. Especially since I am not brilliant and I'm a white male and all. Second phase: the all-around picture. Northeastern was actually the last school on my list. Even after Stevens. I didn't even get into honors here. Fuck yeah, 35 ACT, 2280 SAT, and.... 3.5 GPA. Right. But why would I go to the school that isn't giving me the most money or the school that wouldn't look the best in the end? Conveniently for me, no school had a good combination of the two. I picked Northeastern at 5:30 PM on May 1, 2010 entirely because of the city. Boston was where I wanted to be. Everywhere else seemed like it was either too concentrated in one area (read: drinking) or just too far away from civilization (read: more drinking).
When orientation rolled around, the engineers and myself congregated. First bad sign: I. HATE. EVERYONE. My orientation group was horrible. Everything was horrendous. Fuck this school, get me out of here. On my way back to my room to sulk on my bad decision, I bump into some girl. She's like, completely sane. Cool. Northeastern isn't so bad, after all. Go home, spend, like, way too much of the rest of my summer talking to this girl, like, all the time, and little things about her should have given me some warning, but, like, like, like, like, still no red flags went up. Get to school, start dating girl. And, would you would you look at that, she is completely BATSHIT INSANE. I need not offer any further expansion upon this, because, chances are, you are already quite knowledgeable into the realm of the actual depth of her Chiropteran fecal matter, or rather it's best off that you don't find out, at least from a blog post. If you are curious, I will be more than happy to enlighten you with a plethora of truly hilarious stories that made my first semester of college OH so enjoyable. I like to blame this entire experience on applying here as an engineer. Why did I pick chemical engineering, you ask? Because, as someone once said, since you aren't entirely sure what you want to do yet, it would probably be best to start at arguably the most difficult major and work your way down. Well, that person should be buried under a pile of steaming horse shit. Really. I mean this from the bottom of my heart when I say, fuck everything about engineering. All of the engineering-specific variations of introductory level classes are infinitely more tedious and time-consuming. It's not difficulty that is my problem. I love challenges as much as the next..erm..person who loves challenges. It was the overall atmosphere that differentiated these classes from the general core. Something I certainly didn't want to ever expand upon. My entire first academic semester was as dreadful as one could imagine, with the exception of a class called Foundations of Psychology.
I would be kidding myself if I didn't say that the brain was the area of study I was most interested in from the beginning. Somehow at the beginning I drew a correlation between chemical engineering and brain sciences that doesn't really exist, but nonetheless, switching majors (and colleges, for that matter) was probably the most liberating and enlightening thing I did all year. I can safely say that the day I logged into my.neu.edu and saw that my major had officially switched was by far one of the greatest moments of the last eight months. I feel that when I reflect back on September to December, the only memories that really haven't been given a cyanide pill, shot with a 7.65 mm Walther PPK, covered in petrol and lit on fire were the times spent alone or with some of the best friends I would make, listening to music, working out, running, walking, and things of that nature. I think that in the end, the amount of self-learning and growth that I exhibited may be something that one day I will actually thank the events of my first semester for causing. I can truly say, though, that my overall mental growth as a human has been significantly catalyzed by this period, as much as I still thoroughly loathed school at the time.
But not all was lost! January, while it did finally break my January curse of four years, could be described in one word: metanoia. New friendships, classes, direction, inspiration. January was a very good month, as was February (especially so because of an famous (or infamous) weekend now dubbed the 'The Hartley Situation'), March, and April. I now have two very close friendships I feel will stay with me for the rest of my life. Even with the significant decrease in the number of sleepless nights and everything else that a college student "lives for", I know I am much happier at school now than I was in the autumn and early winter months. I treat those months not quite as if they did not exist, but rather as a four-month meditation. Coming to terms with aspects of your life that you are dissatisfied with and changing them, even through the toil and the arguments and the destruction, is freedom, the thing that we seem to lose track of the most in life. The thing that really struck me the hardest was the fact that I was no longer me. I was no longer the renaissance man I was once referred to as, I was no longer the person that I wanted to inspire others as. I was living in a yteicos.
I named my blog and just about everything else yteicos long ago because I felt that it was the one thing that we were most unaware of. Most of us strive, usually unknowingly, to live in a society that interacts and has similar opinions and ideas, where when we have an idea or opinion, we can immediately turn to our peers for support, for that extra word that confirms or refutes our decision, as if it really wasn't ours at all. But that shouldn't be viewed as reality. We're all individuals; I think that's what I think most of us forget to see. We constantly feel this need to be reassured, to be told what to do and what is best, to follow someone with more wisdom or with a piece of paper confirming their mental superiority over you. I came to this school with a mindset that I should not have built, and I tore it down. I told myself that I wanted to do something that I didn't want to do, associate with people I didn't want to associate with, and live a life far too caught up in the petty things I know the Jeff Curry of eight weeks prior would have despised. This is what made me change.
And while I didn't accomplish everything I wanted to this year, and actually did the opposite of many of my initial goals, I feel that freshman year laid a foundation for the things that I plan on accomplishing in the near and distant future. I know for certain that my life will follow one of two paths: I will move forward with schooling with the intention of doing something brain related, or my severe right brain disposition will guide towards a more artistic career. But for now, I'm more focused on getting everything I wanted to accomplish accomplished and learning from my mistakes all the way. I want to build upon the ideas that were given light this year, I want to be more of the change I want to see. I want to discover who I am and what I was meant to do.
