The other day my Russian TA said, “It’s a brave thing to take a new language. It’s scary.”

And she got me thinking. I would have been terrified to pick up Russian as a freshman at Bryn Mawr. I thought Russian majors were crazy, what with that weird Cyrillic alphabet and all.

And then I started thinking about all the things that I do now (besides take Russian) that I would have been terrified of as a frosh:

1) Go to Special Collections. I LOVE Special Collections, it’s a special section of the library filled with all sorts of cool old things, like old letters and journals. Haverford has a copy of the original Merriam-Webster’s dictionary and we have a bunch of letters written by John Quincy Adams.

2) Go to the dining hall alone. I used to only eat in the dining hall if I had someone to go with. Now I trust I’ll run into someone, or have a lovely lunch with the New York Times.

3) Take weight lifting. There’s a caveat to this one. I’m doing it with a friend. I don’t know that I could really do it alone. But I’m trying it and I feel like that’s something.

4) Start talking to a stranger at the Blue Bus stop. This happened last night and now I have a new friend.

5) Go to a Professor’s office hours for no particular reason. I now go and say hi to my major advisor and former professors pretty regularly. It turns out they like knowing what’s going on in my life.

My major advisor once told me that I miss the forest for the trees. I tend to get caught up in details and miss the big idea. So I was trying to figure out what the big idea in all these details is: and I think it’s confidence. After three years at Bryn Mawr, I’m just not as scared as I was when I first started here. I have a lot more faith in my self that I’m capable of trying new things.

What about you? Scared of anything weird as first year?