A great week!

Hi, friends! SO much has happened in the past week or so! I’ll try to keep the run-down as short as possible, but it’s all exciting stuff!

First and foremost—I AM DONE WITH THE GRE. For those of you who have no clue what the GRE is, good—you shouldn’t have to worry about it yet. However, when you too get to be a senior in college, you may find yourself to be crazy enough to want to enter graduate school. The GRE stands for the Graduate Record Examination, the standardized test required for entry into most graduate programs. Imagine the SAT on steroids. It’s about a 3 ½ hour test consisting of two writing sections, a verbal section and a quantitative section. I studied for this test all summer, and on my first try, I think I got a score good enough to get me in to the schools I want (at least, I hope!)

Aside from that, though, the World Equestrian Games have come to Kentucky, and with it, downtown Lexington has been hopping! The beauty of being at Transy at such a time is—we are literally a 5 minute walk from it all! On Saturday, some of my friends and I headed out to one of my favorite local restaurants, Natasha’s Café, to enjoy some dinner. After dinner (a pesto pizza with no meat, but extra mushrooms!) we walked around and looked at some of the art being showcased around town during the games. Later that night, a band called Here Come the Mummies played in a park downtown. While they were mildly inappropriate, I found them humorous, fun and incredibly talented. I can’t wait for more events next weekend!
Friends and I (I'm in the brown) at Natasha's Cafe!

This is a terrible picture, but you can kind of see that the band were dressed as mummies!

While the weekend was a blast, the fun has continued into this week as well. In fact, I just got back from an incredible poetry reading at one of my favorite places in the city--The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, which is right across the street from campus! The reading was completely free (including free food!) and I got to hear some of Kentucky’s most notable poets read their work and even meet with them afterward! Transy’s location really offers endless opportunities to entertain yourself—it’s pretty hard to become bored around here if you get to know what’s within walking distance!

Bianca Spriggs reads her work

Transy Professor Dr. Paden reads his poetry!

This week is off to a great start!

I never actually got to talk about my May Term trip from last year, and a couple of days ago, one of my classmates posted a video from the trip that made me pine for the jungle again.

At a beach in Guyana

I have to say that the trip was hands down the most exciting, taxing, and eye-opening one of my life. Suriname and Guyana are two relatively unknown countries in the U.S.--some of my family thought that I was going to Africa instead of South America, which is really strange considering how much of an impact the U.S. has on these two countries politically, financially, and culturally.
Unlike most of Latin America, these weren’t Spanish speaking countries. Guyana in particular, was English-speaking for the most part, which made it easy to converse with the people there and listen to their opinions about the racial, political and cultural dynamic there. I can’t even begin to describe how much knowledge I gained just talking to the locals and walking around observing. It was fascinating being able to have open dialogues with the locals about their history and the history of their people in the area.

We even got to know the local wildlife

One of my favorite parts of the trip was getting to visit a Bush-Negro (that’s what they call themselves) village in Suriname. The Bush-Negros were the former slaves who, before the abolition of slavery in the area, escaped into the jungle to live in isolation. They also called themselves “freedom fighters” because they often attacked plantations to free more slaves to join them. (Interestingly, they still like to be referred to as freedom fighters.) At the village, we got to see how modern technology has affected these people who have lived in the jungle for two centuries. They now have electricity, running water, cell phones, etc. But they still maintain their cultural identity and a strong sense of their culture’s history. I’ve never been more enlightened by a group of people. They even took us on our first jungle tour!

The children at the Bush-Negro village were fascinated by "the white people."

Our last 6 days of the trip, we hiked through the jungle and up a mountain to get to one of the largest single-drop water falls in the world-- Kaieteur Falls. I have to say, this was the most taxing but unbelievable part of the trip. May is rainy season in Guyana, and we were in the rainforest, so you can imagine our experience, right? We were wet and miserable, trying to hike on slippery moss-covered rocks in the pouring rain. I took a couple nasty spills, got bruised and scraped and cut, but nothing will ever quite compare to reaching the top of the mountain and seeing the incredible power of that waterfall.

Kaieteur Falls

I could write about this trip forever. I almost filled up an entire journal while I was there. In the end, I am just thankful that Transy and my professors who planned the trip offered me one of the most unique and greatest experiences in my life. If I hadn’t come here, there’s no way I would have gotten such an opportunity.

Some of the group hiking through the jungle

Aaaaaannnnd We're Back!

Yesterday marked the beginning of another orientation weekend. As a member of Omicron Delta Kappa (a leadership honorary), I was able to help the new first years move their stuff into their dorms all day (my calves and thighs send a huge thank you, by the way). What a good looking and level headed group of Transy newcomers! We get lucky every single year, I tell you! I had a great time meeting the first years and parents and getting to hear (and hopefully help ease) some of their concerns about starting college.

I can’t tell you how stoked I am to be starting another year at Transy! Although, I have to tell you, like many of the first years, I’m pretty terrified myself. It’s all come full circle. You come into college a nervous wreck, wondering what the next 4 years are going to bring. Well, now that I’m a Senior, I’m back to being scared to death. I’m finally at the point where I have to decide what to do with this college education, and it’s daunting.
This year you will hear of the pains of taking the GRE, applying to graduate school, taking on my first big and legitimate independent research project, and wrapping up my final year.

As always, I look forward to sharing the whole process with you!

First years moved in yesterday!