Then I got the dreaded email. “Don’t forget to apply for your degree!” stared back at me one Thursday afternoon, after having just gotten home from my American Literary History class. “But I’m only a junior!” I tried to reason with myself. I still haven’t ordered my class ring. Most of my friends have already tried theirs on, but I haven’t even been to see the ladies at the student center.

But here I am still, only 2 and a half semesters left. Where has the time gone? I distinctly remember my freshman self looking at a four-year planner, completely overwhelmed. Four YEARS at this place? Four years was a long time!

I guess time flies when you’re having fun.

I’ve created the following revision plan as an infographic with the hopes that I actually follow it. The cream color is the past/present, the blue color is 2016, and the purple color is 2017.

It is important to me that I keep this up to date. I’m not very good at journaling, but I hope that I will at least remember to post big life events or things that move me enough to write. It is also important to me because I’d like to use this as a professional website to reference to employers as a sample of my writing. Because of this, I’d like to have a sizable amount of blog posts, so my aim is 2 a month, tapering off to about 1 a month later on.

In order to stay on schedule, I’ll be writing it in my planner as a way to remind myself to check on the website. However, if nothing worth talking about happened in that particular month, I’m not going to force a blog post just because I have to make my quota. This is because my style and voice of writing changes when I want to write versus when I’m being forced to write.

In essence, the biggest part of the website that I plan on using is my blog posts section. I do intend on uploading new projects, but that will not be my main focus. The audience for my website would be potential employers, as my resume and writing samples are included, but also people like my parents who enjoy reading my fun anecdotes about my everyday life. I’ll manage all of this by remembering to post a couple times a month and uploading good papers as I write them. I am very excited to keep up the maintenance of the site as I’m eager to see how my writing will have changed in the next year and a half, possibly longer.

In high school, football was a big deal. We made it to states one year and were very close another year. I didn’t really understand football, but my grandmother did. She grew up in Pittsburgh, so she’s naturally obsessed with the Steelers. She’s the type of grandmother to bake you cookies and make floral arrangements, but turn around on game day and shout louder than the rest of us at the television. She explained to me the fundamentals of the game, that there was an offense team and a defense team and they switched after every down. She explained what the yellow lines on the screen meant and that they weren’t there in real life. I kind of understood it, and went to football games trying to pay attention and I definitely knew what a touchdown was, but beyond that, I was clueless. In my junior year of high school, I got a little more into it and picked the team I would root for, and I picked the San Francisco 49ers and I can’t remember the reason. I used their history as the theme for my 11th grade English portfolio and how their development in the NFC mirrored my development as a writer.

Then I came to college.

Football is such an important part of southern life and especially Virginia Tech that it’s almost impossible to separate the two. It’s been said that there are 4 seasons in the south: Winter, Spring, Summer, and Football. Hokie football is a way of life that I very quickly grew accustomed to. My sophomore year, I lived with the probably second most football-savvy girl in America (only after Jen Welter). She really explained the particulars to me, about the pocket, different plays, etc.

And then we come to the apex, the reason for the title of this post, the 2015 Virginia Tech homecoming game against Duke University.

The Hokies hadn’t been playing at their best all season, though they were surely trying, and this game looked as if it might end like most of the others, in a big fat L. And then in the 4th quarter, we tied, and the clock ran out. Overtime. We kept tying, overtime after overtime. We went into quadruple overtime. We didn’t make the conversion, then they got the touchdown and made theirs. Game over.

The amount of stress that I had been under, linking arms with everyone around me, alternating between screaming my lungs out at their offense and when we got a touchdown, and being dead silent as our offense was on the field, was intense. They made the conversion and I was so overcome with emotion that I started sobbing.

Given my long history with football, I never thought I would be the type of person to cry at a football game, but what’s life without new experiences?

In the 2016 Miss America pageant, one of the contestants, Miss Colorado 2016, Kelley Johnson, performed a monologue about her experience as a nurse for her Talent. She wore a nurse’s uniform, complete with a stethoscope and her tennis shoes, and shared about her Alzheimer’s patient. In a later interview with Ellen DeGeneres, she defends her decision to perform the monologue instead of something more traditional, such as singing or playing an instrument. She explains that she wanted to be authentic to herself and give a voice to the nurses that work so hard behind the scenes.

However, following the pageant where she earned second runner-up, the ABC talk show The View mocked her and nurses, saying that her entry wasn’t a talent.

I bring this up because I think she is such an outstanding role model for young women and girls. She is unafraid to be true to herself and she has handled the backlash with grace and poise that I, as a young woman, would like to emulate. She also humbles herself to all the nurses in the country and doesn’t call herself the poster child of a nurse, but rather just one of an army of nurses. Humility like this is hard to come by in this day and age, and I strive to be a nurse as composed and humble as she is.

Photo was pulled from this article.

I clearly didn’t put much thought into the idea at the tender age of 5 (in retrospect, I was more likely 4). However, it gave me a clear answer whenever adults would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but other people wanted to know. It was my “backup plan”. I played with ideas of a forensic scientist, after seeing many episodes of CSI one summer afternoon, a lawyer, after watching Law and Order with my dad, but I never thought about being a nurse.

I went to a magnet school for my middle school years and everyone around me was incredibly driven and the pressure was turned pretty high for some 13-year-olds who were just hitting puberty. I was still stuck on being a lawyer at this point because I liked to argue. My school district offers specialized academies for kids who know what they want and of the few that I applied to, I got into the legal studies academy, and the health sciences academy. For a number of reasons, one of which includes a phone call from my aunt in Iowa, I chose the health sciences academy and never looked back.

I came to Tech with the outlined intention that I would major in Chemistry, get into med school because not many people major in Chemistry and I would be Unique, specialize in pediatrics, and get on with my life. After my first semester, my life turned upside down.

College is hailed as the best time of your life and also the busiest. It’s the last hurrah before being launched into the real world. It’s the last time you’ll be surrounded by people of your own age for the better part of 9 months. It’s also incredibly stressful. Chemistry is notably one of the hardest sciences and everyone complains about it their first year. General Chemistry for Chemistry Majors, however, is a whole new ballgame. I had taken high school chemistry my sophomore year, a whole three years before, and hadn’t taken any other chemistry since then. I was incredibly stressed all the time, crying on phone calls home, asking for prayers for every test. High school had not taken the pressure I was under in middle school and upped the ante, rather, the stress was turned down. High school was a breeze. I never learned to study, and graduated with honors. College was the cold water wake up call that was at least a year too late. I didn’t pass my first semester of General Chemistry by 3 points, and had to retake the whole class again.

Med schools are notoriously competitive. I was also competitive, but knew when to take myself out of the race. I decided in my spring semester that med school wasn’t going to be for me and I needed to figure it out. I got the idea from someone else that pharmacy was the way to go. Still in the medical realm, and right on the path with Chemistry. Perfect. And then I read an article that discussed the pharmacy school bubble: too many graduates, not enough jobs. Great. Back to square one. After talking to my advisor, I looked at a post-baccalaureate program that would allow me to boost my GPA and take extra classes before applying to med school. This was my game plan until I realized that nursing is what I actually wanted to do.

The thing about nurses is that they’re the ones who do all the hard work. They’re the ones that have to placate patients, clean up after patients, who are there for patients when they get out of surgery, who sit with the parents, and monitor the status. The doctors make the big calls, that’s true, but the nurses are the ones that have the most patient interaction. That’s what I wanted to do.

I love people. I love making people happy, making them laugh. I love making people feel loved. My favorite moments have been when I get to see the smile on someone’s face after reading a heartfelt card or letter that I’ve read. As much as I like talking about myself, I love when someone trusts me with their problems and they come to me for help. I love getting to build relationships with people and seeing how they grow and where they go. I firmly believe that relationships are the best way to live a fulfilled life. I love caring for people, being the “mom” of the group, making sure everyone is okay. I get a rush out of being the happy, energetic, enthusiastic self that I am in lieu of the world crashing down around me. I love that. People are important to me. Nursing is the best of both worlds: the science and the people, and I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be.

Today, I was going to class, taking my usual route, when I saw far up ahead, a large Honda Pilot turn into the parking lot. I was still accelerating and I watched the other cars to see if any others were turning in to the lot and then the Pilot didn’t continue into the lot. He turned. At this point, I was within seconds of the crosswalk. If you’re unfamiliar, Honda Pilots aren’t well known for their small turn radii, generally because they don’t have small turn radii. To combat this and try and straighten himself out, he had to keep going into the turn. Into the crosswalk. Into my path. I swerved to try and avoid him because at this point, I was in the crosswalk and I knew he didn’t see me. He completely blocked both my path and the slope that would have allowed me to seamlessly merge onto the sidewalk. I swerved around him to the left. Into a 6-inch curb.

Now, while some people would label me a tomboy because I like to go on adventures and I am not afraid of getting dirty, I was never the kid to spend a day learning how to jump curbs. Today was that day. I felt my butt slam into the seat after not feeling it fly off in the first place, and found my feet not where I left them on the pedals. My knuckles were white from gripping the handlebars as I took a timid sigh of relief.

I didn’t look back at the car until later, but by then they were more concerned with making a left turn. I didn’t curse or scream or throw up any hand signs, but if I could say one thing to the driver, it would be no, you actually can’t make that U-turn.

I was fully prepared to speed walk through campus. Keep in mind, my house is at least half a mile any path I take. I was going to be late, but I had come to terms that I would be sweaty when I got there. I was maybe 50 feet from my front porch when I heard someone call my name. “Corrin!” This isn’t all too uncommon, as I am very involved with many things and I tend to make friends easily. I looked across the street to see my friend Hannah riding her bike, waving, and preparing to take on the worst uphill on campus. I stopped, waved, and yelled across the street, “CAN I BORROW YOUR BIKE?!” She rode over to me with an enthusiastic “Yeah! What do you need it for?” (I love this girl). I explained my situation and she lent me her bike with a small caveat: “It doesn’t have any brakes. Well, it has front ones but you can’t press them too hard or else you’ll flip.” “Okay I’ll just use my feet!” I yelled over my shoulder as I rode away to class.

The thing is, Virginia Tech is not known for being particularly flat. We are situated in the New River Valley of the Appalachian Mountains in rural, southwestern Virginia. They do not know flat like I, coastal girl from Virginia Beach, know flat. As it happens on that fateful Tuesday or Thursday evening, I did not take this into account.

So there I was, riding along, I dodged a couple of girls already, getting back in the metaphorical saddle (unless bike seats are called saddles in which case it’s less metaphorical and more literal), going uphill, and then I went in the roundabout. And then I went downhill. During a class change. With a busy crosswalk ahead. I tried tapping the front brake to get the bike to slow down a little. Nope. I couldn’t tap my feet down because I was going way too fast and I was wearing flip flops (I had blisters on the back of my heels that prevented me from wearing any type of closed heel shoes for about 2 weeks). Oh. No. My last resort was to weave my way through the crosswalk, but as anyone who has ridden their bikes downhill as a child knows, the only thing that results from fast turns is scraped knees. So, as anyone else would do, I bellowed at everyone in my way,

“EXCUUUUUUUSE MEEEEEEE! MY BIKE DOESN’T HAVE BRAKES!!! IT ALSO ISN’T MY BIKE!!!!”

People not in the crosswalk stopped, and people in the crosswalk turned, saw the look of sheer terror on my face, and ran to safety.

I didn’t hit anyone, and finally got the bike to slow down with the temperamental front brake. I made it to class with 6 minutes to spare.

These days, I ride a bike that has both front and rear brakes, but my percentage of near run-ins has only increased. Only time will tell if I become chronically on time, but so far, I’ve only been early.