Visiting the Cincinnati Zoo for the first time
Seeing the Egypt exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center with my roommate
Taking on the "3 Dune Challenge" at the Indiana National Lakeshore with my little brother
Visiting North Carolina this summer with my family
|
If I had to describe this year in the simplest of terms, I would say this: It has been a year of growth. As the poet Mary Oliver, who died this past year, once wrote, I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. For me, this year, I realized that I, too, don't want to live my life passively, as just a visitor. I've spent quite a bit of time this year in reflection as I try to figure out what I want to "do" with my life after college. Next fall, I will be a senior and I will have to start down the path toward all my future endeavors. When I finally get there - when I graduate and enter life as a practicing nurse - I want to do so with a sense of purpose. This past year has been a journey toward beginning to uncover that purpose.
Academically, my junior year at the College of Nursing has marked my foray into our "specialty" clinical rotations. In the fall, I was placed on a medical-surgical unit at UCMC, where I expanded my skillset enormously. The work was often messy, and I left clinical each week feeling exhausted, but the experience helped me gain quite a bit of confidence as a student nurse. This spring I had two clinical rotations - one on the pediatric oncology floor at Cincinnati Children's and another on the labor and delivery unit at UCMC. Since I ultimately would like to be a pediatric or neonatal nurse after school, these two experiences were incredibly formative and only made me more excited for life after college. As for the University Honors Program, I took a course called "Kids Who Kill" in the fall, which covered everything from neuroscience to psychology to the criminal justice system to the media, and how all of these factors may or may not influence young people who commit murder and other violent crimes. I enjoyed this class, as I have enjoyed my other honors seminars, because the content was so far outside the realm of what I learn in my other classes that are required for my major. Next year, I hope to take another honors seminar that is criminal-justice based, in order to fulfill my final honors experience. In my extracurricular life, I continued to volunteer with the UC Bearcat Buddies program, working as a tutor for third- and fourth-grade students at Hays-Porter Elementary School on the West Side. I stepped up my commitment to the program this year, becoming one of an inaugural group of Lead Tutors. In this role, I acted as a liaison between the program coordinators, Hays-Porter, and my assigned group of tutors. I also worked with various committees within the Lead Tutor program to re-work and improve the Bearcat Buddies program. Alongside this, I continued to volunteer at Good Samaritan Hospital - this time, as a baby cuddler in the NICU. As someone who wants to work as a NICU nurse in the future, this was and has been such a rewarding and genuinely fun experience for me. This summer, I will be traveling to the Netherlands for a week as part of a study abroad course through the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies college. While we are there, we will be examining the Dutch public health system, with a focus on drug and reproductive health policies. After that, I will be trying to take the time to finally relax a bit and enjoy my final summer before my senior year at UC. (Some of) My other adventures this year
|