Come What May and Love It

So I just finished with my 3rd New Student Orientation. This whole week, I have been reliving the last two NSO's and realizing how much I have changed. Fall NSO 2011 I was a Freshman in college. If I am being quite honest, I was completely homesick. I remember the first night, I left the Housing party early and went back to cry. The first day of NSO, I came back from the activities for dinner with my parents and started crying the moment I got into the car. Reflecting back, I was a complete baby. The days that followed are a complete blur. I remember meeting so many people and doing so many things and being just completely and utterly exhausted. So that was my first NSO. It was hard. It was crazy. It really was not the best experience. Fall NSO 2012 So now I was a Sophomore in college. I had a year of experience under my belt. I was a Freshman Mentor and I was determined to make so that they would not have the kind of experience that I did. I wanted to make sure that I was ob...

(Please excuse the Hannah Montana song title. I couldn't stop myself!) There was a time that I thought I had to be perfect all the time. There are still days when I do not feel like I am enough. I feel like as a member of the church, sometimes we are expected to be perfect. We are given a lot of expectations and if I fail at even one of them, then I must be failing my Heavenly Father, right? Wrong. I feel like as we have feel like we must be perfect, we feel like others are judging us if we are not. I felt that a lot in high school. I felt like if I didn't do everything right 100% of the time then my peers would judge me and my faith. I felt like I could not make a mistake because everyone was watching. But WHO CARES? We weren't sent to this earth to be perfect. If we had, then we would be living Satan's plan. But we are not. We have agency. We came here to "take chances, make mistakes, and get messy" (is it bad to quote Ms. Frizzle in a semi-serious blog ...

“ The perfect place to begin is exactly where you are right now. It doesn’t matter how unqualified you may think you are or how far behind others you may feel. The very moment you begin to seek your Heavenly Father, in that moment, the hope of His light will begin to awaken, enliven, and ennoble your soul.”- President Uchtdorf It has been an interesting day. The office was busy the whole time I was there with phone calls from new freshman, but I love it. I work for Freshman Mentoring at BYU. I love my job. I love my co-workers and my supervisors. I love the freshman. It is again amazing to see how Heavenly Father knows exactly what you need when you need it. I have become a completely different person through Freshman Mentoring. I will need to reflect on that in another post (if you are a mentor, you will get the irony). Sometimes at work, I feel inadequate. I also feel inadequate during other times, but today in particularly I felt inadequate. I had been answering phones for a ...

I have been in Utah for almost three weeks! I still have no idea what normal life is going to be like... For two weeks I was in intense training for my job. I was working from 9am to 4pm M-F. Have I talked about my job yet? I LOVE IT! I am a Freshman Mentoring Peer Mentor. I get to interact with the Freshman and make sure that they are able to take full advantage of all that BYU has to offer. I am basically here for them for wahtever they need. Have I mentioned how much I love it? But as part of my job, I got the opportunity to attend NSO again. Now, last year I did not like NSO that much. Infact, I kind of despised it. Why, you ask? It was just so long! Here is the schedule from this year (which it is very similar to what we did last year) Wednesday: 10:00 a.m. On-Campus Housing Check-in 8:00 p.m. Housing Move-in Socials Per Assigned Housing Thursday: 8:30-10:00 a.m. NSO Check-in, Meet Y Group 11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Convocation 12:00-1:00 p.m. Lunch 1:00-3:00 p.m. E...

So it is officially official. I have been accepted into Brigham Young University (Provo). Right now it is exciting, and nerve racking. This is the school I have always wanted to go to since I first step foot into the BYU bookstore when I was five. It is just crazy that I am actually old enough to be going to college. I am basically creating this blog to document my journey. From the acceptance letter to my final graduation. I pray that this blog will not be too boring, not that very many (if any) people will read it. It is more for my benefit, that I can document everything I am going through (and try to get better at journal writing).