This blog post is dedicated to my good friend and loving roommate Anna Rogers who not only inspired this blog but helped me write it as well. Thank you so much for making my semester fun and spontaneous! I’m incredibly grateful to have your constant support and stoke. <3
Anna in her natural habitat: cozy and caffeinated outside 🙂
So living through a pandemic is definitely not something most of us had on our bucket list— but it’s something we can say we endured. And as we look back on the past semester, we realize that there is a lot to be grateful for. It isn’t very often that the semester ends before thanksgiving, and we get to spend that time with close friends or loved ones (even if it is by government mandate). We certainly did not think we would be forced to decide between seeing family for the first time in months and going on a camping trip with friends that we live with because a deadly disease had gotten worse, but we can now see that we are among the lucky— and for that we are grateful.  We are also thankful for all the things we have learned tangentially to that which we have learned in class.
This semester alone has taught us a significant amount about who we are and the things that we as individuals can improve on, mostly because we spent a lot of time on our own— and for that we are grateful. There were certainly ups and downs, but it allowed us to grow in ways we wouldn’t have had we had the opportunity to be more social— we learned about ourselves, learned to love ourselves, and learned to accept the imperfect— and for that we are grateful.Â
Time spent with family was well needed
We are grateful for the classes that stressed us out— we had the opportunity to learn from leaders in engineering fields and to struggle to solve real-world problems. We had the chance to wrestle with the impossible and to contribute to the furthering of our intellectual discussion— and for that, we are honored. We got to learn from the best, and for that, we are immensely grateful.
Yeah, looking back on this semester it wasn’t everything we could have hoped it would be (I do have a pretty active imagination but a pandemic was not something I could have conjectured— even in my wildest dreams) but we are thankful for the fact that we got to spend that time figuring things out— slowly, intentionally and for ourselves. Learning from the most extreme has taught me about how we want to go about living life— constantly learning and adapting to the situations that we encounter— loving the experience, as opposed to planning the perfect response. And thank you to everyone else snuggling through this identity crisis unspoken— be it a 20-year-old student or an older professor that could not have anticipated an entirely online semester. We appreciate all of the learning and adapting you did— even if it was something small unnoticeable. Together, we can do much more than alone. And for the record, we are grateful for all of you with whom we get to share this. Take time this break to find the things that bring you joy and do them. We wish that for all of you 🙂
