WHO AM I?

My name is Brad Lewis. I am a freshman at Slippery Rock University. I was inspired to write after reading the Percy Jackson series. In my DREAM blog posts I am going to talk about myself, how hurtful the use of the ‘R’ word can be to others, and I will also discuss whatever my readers want me to talk about in my future blog posts.

College can be a very rocky road for some people. You can get scared and flunk out or just as easily drop out in the first two weeks of school and yet I am still here. I am now writing to you my very first blog post not to frighten you about college. I am just going to talk about my own personal college life in this blog. Whoever chooses to read this blog must know that I will eventually try to inform you dear readers about the true nature of college life. May our journey together be a great one!

When I was first arriving on campus I was very excited to live in the dorms. I saw college as a way to have a new fresh start on life. I was also a little nervous since I have never lived on my own before. I was more than confident that I could take care of myself. Here is a rather amusing story. My family got the phone call that I was accepted into Slippery Rock University the day before I was supposed to move in. We spent the entire day shopping for essentials that I will need to be ready for the dorm life.   The first building I lived in was building F. Building F is the farthest building to the campus. The hardest thing for me to do on campus so far was to actually make new friends, which I found ironic because in high school I made friends with a lot of people and was not afraid to talk to anyone. Why the big change? It is simply because I found that making friends in college is very different than making friends in high school. It is not that the professors do not want you to make friends with your classmates it is just like high school, they give you little time to get to know the people around you and sometimes you can be stuck in large classes.

My first piece of advice for new college freshman is to ignore everything your high school teachers have told you about college. They are most likely just trying to scare you. I think high school teachers do this to try to prepare you for reality, but it seems all of those teachers fail to realize their tall tales are just that, tall tales. That does not prepare anyone for the real world. You can have fun in college, but only you can be responsible for making it a fun experience. Sometimes in the beginning of the year, I got a very odd text message. The text said that they were a student in Slippery Rock and our parents knew each other. The message ended with the stranger saying they wanted to meet up. I will admit I was very skeptical about meeting this person. I was afraid they were not going to be who they said they were and end up being someone sinister. A friend eventually convinced me I should at least go to find out who the person was. The stranger did turn out to be a girl who was a student at Slippery Rock who is about my age. We arranged to meet at an event that is typical for college students to go in the fall around the time of Halloween. We met up at a haunted house, and she brought some of her friends. My plan was to be the big strong man who helped the my new friend get out of the house. I am sad to say that is not how it happened at all. We got lost in the haunted house a number of times, we both screamed at everything that jumped out at us, and there was even a section in the house with flashing lights that was messing with my vision. In the end, instead of me saving her from the haunted house, she had to save me! When I am not meeting strange people in public places or screaming and getting lost in haunted houses, I am probably just like you. I like watch television shows on Netflix and Hulu, play PlayStation and I joined as a member in two clubs. One of the clubs is called the Film Society. In this club we film our own short films and we sometimes will watch a film after every meeting. The other club I am involved with is Best Buddies. In this club, a student with a disability and one without are paired together to make a friendship. The clubs goal is to get people to stop using the much hated ‘R’ word, which is something I am going to be talking a lot about in future blog posts.

If you have learned nothing from today’s blog post let me tell you this “R” word is a very nasty word used to describe people with disabilities. The world would be a much better place if we could just erase it from existence. I very much enjoyed preparing this blog post! Please let me know in the comments section what you would like me to research or discuss in future blogs.

-Brad Lewis, Slippery Rock University

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