The Beginning of the End!

The Roommates of the MELK House (Molly, Ella, Lenore and Kayleigh)

We are officially halfway through the first week of senior year! It is crazy saying that, because the last time I blogged was the end of my freshman year, and I thought I had nothing but time. I did not expect four years to fly by so fast, yet here we are. I moved back at the beginning of last week, and it finally started to hit me that this is my last year at ONU with the people that have become my family. I had a really hard time finding my place here as a freshman in my first semester because it was really hard going eight hours away from home with no one I knew on campus. I thought I would never have the friendships here that I had back home, and now, looking back, I see that I have even better friendships than back home. I have a family here. 

This year I am living off campus with my three other roommates, Lenore, Ella and Molly. I met Lenore and Ella very early in my first year since we are all in the same major. We met Molly later on, and all clicked and have been best friends ever since. We always said we wanted to live together senior year, but that seemed so far away, and now here I am sitting in my senior year house typing this. 

This first week back has been extremely bittersweet. I'm excited to be back with all of my friends and to be close to the finish line of schooling. However, with that finish line in sight, it is making me realize how much I will miss being a student here at ONU and seeing my best friends every single day. I look forward to hopefully being a professional performer and hopefully running social media for a theater company one day, but I will always look back fondly on my time as a Polar Bear. 

At the beginning of the week, the senior musical theater majors met for one final bridge picture. This is a tradition we began our first year, and it has stuck ever since. Like clockwork, every year during the first week of school, our class would meet in the middle of campus on the bridge over the pond and line up across it, recreating the poses our freshman selves decided to choose. When we initially took it, I don't think any of us thought it would become a tradition, but I am so grateful it did. Getting to look back on the past four years of pictures and seeing how we have all changed, grown up, and become a family is extremely bittersweet. Although I am already getting extremely sentimental about this being my last year on the tundra, I still have many months left of being a Polar Bear and plan to use my time soaking in all the memories and documenting them here!

Bridge Pictures Throughout the Years!