WashU first-year Farah Bader was selected to receive the Cochlear Graeme Clark Scholarship for recipients of the Cochlear Nucleus Implant who demonstrate high academic achievement, along with Saint Louis University (SLU) first-year Grace Fleming. Both will be awarded $2,000 annually for up to four years.

A year can make a big difference. Student Life’s Managing Multimedia Editor, Sanchali Pothuru, and Multimedia Producer, Molly Fletcher, revisit four sophomores interviewed during the students’ first year. By asking the same questions one year later, this follow-up dives into how they’ve adjusted to college life since their first semester.

So, you’ve been placed in a traditional suite. The world is over. You can feel the panic creeping in, and your roommates are random, so you don’t know who you’ll spend the next nine months with. Well, two random suitemates turned friends are writing this for you, so know it’s not all catastrophic.

I count some people I met during the first week among my closest friends, and I consider myself incredibly lucky to have met such a wide variety of people I can still wave to, even if our inseparability turned out to just be temporary. But it’s absolutely normal to realize you just might not be perfectly aligned with the very first people you met in college, and it’s really no big deal.

Two years later, I still remember my first day at WashU: the humidity and harsh sunlight, the sound of cars honking on Shepley Drive mixed with the chatter of groups of friends on their way to tour each other’s dorm rooms, and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed.

Last year, as a freshman, I felt like I was doing something wrong.

In a time where we have all been asked to balance safety and socializing, perhaps no one has felt the strain of this task more than the University’s freshmen.

So, you made it here. Congratulations! Years of hard work have finally paid off, and now your journey starts as a somewhat-adult, broke-yet-rich-in-education college student.

If the First Year Center and Campus Life intend to keep a nine-day orientation moving forward, there are many lessons to be learned from this year’s issues.

My college experience freshman year was not at all what I had anticipated it being. I initially expected to be working like crazy most of the time but spend my downtime with groups of friends. Instead, I found myself completely unmotivated to work and spending most of my time in my dorm room, alone.