“Kevin, aren’t you going to fall off of your bed with it being this high?” my mom asked worriedly as I moved into my lofted dorm in the McCarthy Honors Residential College located in the Village as a freshman. Not even 15 minutes later, my mom and grandma were up there taking pictures, so I’m guessing my mom was trying to find reasons for me to ditch on-campus housing and stay at home with her for another four years. As much as I missed my family throughout my first year at college (even though they were only a 30-minute drive away), my freshman year experiences at USC, and particularly in Viterbi, cultivated what would be an unforgettable first year of college.
Beginning with my housing at McCarthy Honors Residential College located at the heart of campus, the Village, I found myself surrounded by like-minded students who were all striving for academic excellence while cultivating meaningful friendships and discovering what being a college student fully entails. The third floor of McCarthy holds some of my most favorite memories spanning from surprise birthday celebrations, ice cream sundaes at the Village dining hall, impromptu and unexpected hallway interactions, and study sessions at the Bridge Lounge. All of my closest friends today are the same ones who were beside me discovering how to study effectively and when the dining hall would be serving popcorn chicken with macaroni and cheese. On top of all of this, McCarthy was located right next to Target, Trader Joe’s, and Insomnia Cookies, which became a late-night staple when studying for “midterms,” which were a new concept to me.
That brings me to the next facet of freshman year life: the community. Going into college to study engineering, I knew that the academic curriculum would be incredibly rigorous, but I didn’t know about the community within Viterbi that would cultivate a collaborative, uplifting, and inclusive environment. As a matter of fact, I am incredibly grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in the Viterbi Summer Institute, or VSI, a summer bridge program for minority students in engineering to spend a month of their summer living on-campus while learning about USC through upperclassmen Viterbi mentors and conducting research with an engineering lab. The program connected me with my fellow peers a month early, and I developed some incredible friendships with peers that I would already know going into my first academic semester. My VSI friends were just one small community within Viterbi that I became a part of. Within my major, civil engineering, I met friends in my CE106: Introduction to Civil Engineering class that would comprise of friends that I see in each and every one of my classes to this day and who I study with consistently for any and all civil engineering courses. My class teaching assistant, or TA, Araxi, for CE106, recruited a lot of us freshmen to join clubs like the American Society of Civil Engineers, ASCE, and the Engineering Earthquake Research Institute, EERI. These were even more niche communities within Viterbi that I would have never discovered if it weren’t for the upperclassmen who were so adamant and excited about including us underclassmen in these incredible extracurricular opportunities.
Now, I could never write a blog about the freshman experience without speaking about the academics, especially as an engineer. Academics reigned over my freshman year, just as they have every year of my college life as an engineer. However, it’s not nearly as bad as it seems, I promise. As I mentioned above, the community that Viterbi fosters offers never fails to ensure that students have the necessary tools to succeed. Whether that’s an upperclassman from your major who provides the PDF textbook for a class and past exams or a peer from your current class who doesn’t think twice about lending a helping hand on the upcoming problem set. I learned quickly that it was difficult to confront the academics completely solo. That meant that I had to find time to study with my friends, whether engineers or not. Even sitting down and “locking in” with friends of mine who were studying subjects other than engineering provided the necessary motivation for me to get work done. One part of the academics that will always haunt me was my first midterm. My first midterm in college ever was MATH125: Calculus I. Wow. I had never been humbled so quickly in my entire life (until the second midterm for the same class maybe five weeks later). I thought that I had prepared enough, but I was far from it. Midterms have always been a dreadful concept. They never stop being scary. But you always learn how to navigate studying for them. Each professor is different and so is each class, but learning your study habits is vital.
Overall, freshman year was a very, very fun experience. Part of it really is just discovering what works for you and what you want to get from your college experience. Freshman year is the perfect time to explore that, whether it’s through testing out all the libraries and joining clubs on campus or going to the football games and checking out the weekly farmer’s market. I encourage you to try new methods of studying and to talk to people and to never shy away from opportunity because these were all things I did and I can confidently say that my freshman year at USC was something pretty spectacular.
