Intro and a little Dali

Hello, friends! In my first post, I thought I would spend a few minutes describing a little more about who I am and how I ended up at a place like Transylvania University, and also why I have chosen this specific title for my blog. If you couldn’t tell, I hate about me sections and therefore find it hard to condense my history, my personality, and my values into a few sentences. That being said, let’s jump in, shall we?

I’m Amanda, as you probably have figured out at this point. I am from Versailles, KY, a small town just a spit away from Lexington and Transy. Seriously. I get aggravated when it takes me 20 minutes to get home. While this wouldn’t be so monumentally relevant under normal circumstances, I was one of those kids in high school. You know those kids--the ones who want to go to college as far away from home as possible in order to experience complete change. At the beginning of my college search, which started way before it probably should have, before I knew myself well enough to make such an important decision, my heart was set on UCLA, Johns Hopkins, anywhere out of the state of Kentucky. Quite obviously, something drastic must have changed for me to finally settle on Transy, right? Wrong. Actually, the simplest thing sold me on Transy—visiting here.

My parents dragged me kicking and screaming here for the fall open house in 2006. Okay, so I didn’t really kick and scream, but I didn’t want to come; that’s a fact. As soon as I arrived, however, one simple thing after another began to change my mind. The students opened doors for me. They smiled at me and said “hello” even when I had taken my name tag off. They cared about a well rounded education, leadership and service. The professors were enthusiastic and eager to talk to me about my academic as well as life goals—and this was just my first visit! Needless to say, I didn’t even fill out my applications to any of my out of state dream schools, because, it turned out my real dream school had been hiding in my backyard all along. In addition, it turns out that I didn’t have to go so far away from home to experience that complete change I had always craved, but more on that in a future post.

I have since completed my first year at Transy, and I have chosen to title my blog “One Second Before Awakening” to reflect how I view my college experience thus far. I have essentially snatched a piece of the title from Salvador Dali’s painting, “One Second Before Awakening from a Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate.” If you haven’t heard of it, take a look! http://www.virtualdali.com/44DreamCaused.html . I know what you must be thinking. How can THAT painting relate at all, even slightly, to the college experience? And I say this to you: in college, one is suspended between childhood and the “real world,” just as in a dream one is suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness. What we dream often can have profound impacts on the way we view and process the situations that arise in our conscious lives, and while I have yet to see any pomegranates eating fish eating tigers at Transy, as appears in the painting, I know that everything that has happened, is happening and will happen here will directly affect all of my decisions and values when I awaken into the “real world.”

So far, this has been and continues to be a fabulous, even sometimes fantastical journey, and I can’t wait to share that with you!