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Ask a Wag Heather Wolf On campus The Freshman Experience Wagner for Dummies

From Freshman year to Senior year…

I’m a senior. It’s seriously frightening. I feel like I just moved in for my freshman year and now I’m getting ready to graduate? What?!

I was visiting a friend in Harborview yesterday and I started having all these flashbacks to freshman year. It’s crazy how things are so incredibly different… but at the same time so many things haven't changed at all.

I'm still the same Taylor Swift obsessed girl, with an obnoxiously blue room that I was freshman year. Pictures of friends and family are still plastered across my walls, and I still wait until I'm on my absolute last pair of socks before I finally do laundry. My freshman year roommate and I stalked each other on the Wagner Class of 2015 Facebook group and after realizing our similarities, decided we would be the perfect roommates. Alli is still my roommate and my suite-mates, Kate and Kim, are two girls I met on the very first day of freshman orientation!

Kate, Kim, and I were in the same Learning Community (LC) freshman year. Our LC was a combination of marketing and graphic design. We worked with the Staten Island Borough President’s office to create marketing plans for various locations on Staten Island. From that LC, I decided to major in Marketing and I’ve been with my same advisor since day 1 at Wagner. Professor DeSimone, my advisor and my freshman LC professor, is also advising me as I write my senior thesis on Celebrity Endorsements. I feel like my Wagner experience has really come full circle. I’m finishing up as a different, more experienced and educated person, but with the same people by my side.

PicMonkey Collage
Talk about a #transformationtuesday. My roommates are going to kill me for this... The picture on the left I took on one of the first nights of freshman orientation when we had to evacuate to the gym because of Hurricane Irene! The picture on the right is all four of us on one of the first nights of senior year!

Despite the things that are the same, I can't deny that I've been through a lot of change in these past three years too. I've written papers on subjects I never thought I'd be able to intelligently discuss, I've made more meaningful relationships than I can count, I've had my highest highs and my lowest lows, and I’ve become a better person because of it all. I've learned how to handle situations that I never thought imaginable.

College changes you. It forces you to grow up despite how much you might try to fight it. For a girl who's favorite story of all time is Peter Pan, you might see how that could have been challenging for me. Through it all I've had friends by my side to make it a little easier.

That’s the awesome thing about the Wagner community. It may be a small campus, but you really become close with the people in it. There’s something wonderful about having a professor who has watched you grow from a freshman to a senior and taught you things along the way, or roommates who have literally been through every step of college with you starting from day one. I’ve spent the majority of my life trying to figure out “where I belong." I don’t think I ever quite figured it out until I came to Wagner.