{"id":18,"date":"2017-09-06T19:53:25","date_gmt":"2017-09-07T00:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/?p=18"},"modified":"2017-09-07T10:55:10","modified_gmt":"2017-09-07T15:55:10","slug":"the-beginning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/2017\/09\/the-beginning\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beginning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve been living in Iowa City for exactly three weeks now. Honestly, it feels like I\u2019ve been here for three months and I can\u2019t decide if that\u2019s a good thing or bad thing. <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-21\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/files\/2017\/09\/FullSizeRender-202x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"202\" height=\"300\" \/>When I left home on August 16th, I didn\u2019t expect my life to change as much as it did in such a short time. That sounds totally overdramatic, but it\u2019s so true!<\/p>\n<p>Good Changes<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Starting a workout routine.\u00a0<\/strong>Back at home, all I would ever do is hang out with friends and watch Netflix with my sisters. I never had the energy to hit the gym or even get a light workout in. I am not joking when I say I only worked out approximately three time this whole summer. But with the rec center being a five-minute walk from my dorm, it\u2019s hard not to want to go to the gym! A plus about living in Hillcrest is that if I ever don\u2019t feel like making the five-minute walk, I just go down to the gym in the basement! It has a beautiful view of the Pentacrest and river. I now go to the gym around 4 to 5 times a week and love the feeling of it. No freshman 15 for me &#8211; hopefully. *knock on wood*<\/li>\n<li><strong>Becoming such great friends with the girls on my floor. <\/strong>When my roommate and I got our dorm assignment and we saw it was the all-girls 4th floor of Hillcrest we both wanted to cry. We had our hopes set on co-ed Burge. Hillcrest was on the west side of campus, and although four flights of stairs doesn\u2019t sound awful &#8211; IT IS. We just had to work with what we got. The first week when everybody is moving in I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend keeping your door open! This is the best way to meet the people on your floor and make your first few friends. Living in an all-girls floor could\u2019ve gone either really good or really bad, and thankfully &#8211; it\u2019s been a blessing! I am so close with the girls that live around me. Having people just a few steps away has never been better. I can always run into their rooms if I need to talk, a hug, or even just company.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Gaining the mindset that homework comes first (&#8230;err, most of the time). <\/strong>We all know that high school teachers exaggerate when talking about college.\u00a0Although not everything they say is true, some of it is! The professors here are not as scary and daunting as previous teachers make it seem. They\u2019re all so down to earth and crack jokes 24\/7. On the down side, they do stack on homework like it\u2019s their job &#8211; which I guess it is, haha. It\u2019s definitely not a joke when they say that one lecture hour should be equivalent to three hours of homework. I have so much homework that I start as early as I can to have my nights off. Honestly, I have NO idea how I would survive college if I didn\u2019t prioritize my time wisely. Although I&#8217;ve had one or two oopsie days where I just want to hang out with friends and be lazy, I have made it such a good habit to do homework between classes and early in the day.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Bad Changes<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Losing old connections<\/strong>. It\u2019s true when they say you don\u2019t talk to everyone you thought you would after high school. People dispurse out into the real world and choose different colleges. . . nobody has time for superficial friendships. I stopped talking to about 80% of the people from back home, and it\u2019s scary to think that that is only going to get higher. I don\u2019t know if people would consider this a \u201cbad\u201d change, but for me it is. I\u2019m scared that I might stop talking to some people who are true friends just because of my lack of time to talk. I\u2019m always so busy with an activity, homework, or even just hanging out with people that are near me that I don\u2019t always want to be on my phone maintaining the conversations from people who aren&#8217;t near me.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Changing who I am in certain situations. <\/strong>People always say that college is the place to \u201cre-invent\u201d yourself and what not. Although this is true, it feels weird to me. Before moving here I told myself that I was going to try becoming a \u201cnew person\u201d (Lol &#8211; I know I hate myself too). Now that I\u2019m here, however, if I ever act like someone I know I\u2019m not I just feel dumb inside. I\u2019ve tried staying true to who I am and dropped the idea of changing into a \u201cnew person\u201d, but I still catch myself doing things I wouldn\u2019t normally do or say things I wouldn\u2019t normally say.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Developing a whack eating schedule. <\/strong>Since college isn\u2019t like high school where there\u2019s a specific lunch period, one must fend for themselves. For starters, I hate being alone so I never go eat unless I\u2019m with a friend. Then when I do get to the dining halls, most of the food becomes repetitive after a week or two so my appetite isn\u2019t the greatest. Although the food here IS good, it\u2019s not amazing. On top of this, I have a lot of homework most of the time so I purposely skip lunch or dinner to keep working. On a really good day, I\u2019ll have two pretty decent meals. But usually I only eat once a day and snack in my room.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>All of this has happened in just three short weeks! I\u2019m both anxious and excited to see what the future holds for me here at the University of Iowa. Thanks for following me through my journey, and I can\u2019t wait to keep writing about my experience.<\/p>\n<p>PS Wooooo, first blog post is done. Another good change \u2013 Lizbeth the blogger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve been living in Iowa City for exactly three weeks now. Honestly, it feels like I\u2019ve been here for three months and I can\u2019t decide if that\u2019s a good thing or bad thing. When I left home on August 16th, I didn\u2019t expect my life to change as much as it did in such a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/2017\/09\/the-beginning\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Beginning<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions\/25"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/lizbeth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}