Getting to know your instructors is extremely important, even if it wasn't so much that way in high school. Now it is important because they can help you in several ways. The can be resources for job or internship applications, they can write recommendation letters for you for many things, and they can use their influence in some other ways, too.

There are several things that I am interested in that a professor may be able to help me with. Obviously, as everybody is, I wish to have a job in the future. Also, in the near future, like the next year or so, I will be looking for opportunities in research, so I will need to find a professor that does research in my field of interest.

I think that the staff that I need, I will find in my classes or through professors that teach my classes. I don't imagine myself having to go out and look for staff that will meet my needs, but if I indeed do, then I would be willing to do that.

Everybody can benefit from having good relationships with professors and advisors. Even if it may not seem completely relevant at this point in time, I'm sure it will become quite clear to you further down the road. In addition to them helping you out, though, professors can be interesting people that are fun to talk to and get insight from.

I attended ClubFest and saw a bunch of organizations that I would have liked to join. Unfortunately, because I have a class schedule that doesn't really allow me to go to any meetings of the clubs that I want to join, I haven't been able to become very active in any. So in this blog post, I'll just talk about one of the clubs that I would like to join as soon as I am able: the club rugby team.

I've always thought that rugby was a pretty cool sport. It's not very popular here, though, as you might have noticed. So when I went to ClubFest and saw that they had club rugby here, I signed up. Not too long after, I got an email about the club and when they practice, have games, etc. I was kind of disappointed but not terribly surprised to see that they have practices during one of my classes.

I hope to be able to get involved with rugby during the spring semester. I don't really think that rugby has huge possibilities for leadership opportunities, and I am obviously interested in it for personal reasons. I think that involvement in this club might get me some new friends and also help me to continue to be active.

It's kind of unfortunate that I didn't have anything better to talk about as far as a club that I was actually a part of, but hopefully this spring I will be able to get more involved on campus. Until then, I guess I'll just have to do my best to make it to whatever I can.

Since my freshman year, I had one goal for my track career. That was to get to the state meet and run in it. My freshman year I got to state as an alternate, and I did the same my junior year. I knew that if I wanted to make my goal happen, I only had one year to do it.

My senior year I started to run a different event in addition to the ones that I had been running. Instead of just running 400s, I also was running 800s. And I was having a pretty good year. Our district was pretty tough, but as the district meet arrived, it looked like we were going to have a pretty good shot.

The district meet couldn't have come on a better day. The weather was pretty nice and everybody was feeling good. I was running two races; the 4x800 and the 4x400. Obviously I wanted to make it in both races, but I knew that if I were to make it in the 4x800, the first race, it would take a lot of pressure off of the 4x400.

Our leadoff guy was the best runner on the team, and as he passed the baton on to me, we were leading the race. I knew the kid in second place was a good runner, so I had to have a good run. And I did. I cut three seconds off of my best time and maintained the lead. I was as tired as I can remember being at that point, but I managed to stay on my feet to watch the third and fourth runners, yelling the whole time. We had made it. Our anchor had sustained an injury a couple of weeks prior, but he was able to run just fast enough.

We made it in the 4x400, too. It felt so great to know that I had finally done what I had been wanting for so long. Knowing that all of the work that I had put in since freshman year made the whole experience worth it. I can take what I have learned from this experience and transfer it to my college experience, too. If I prepare properly and work really hard at what I want to do, I can do it. And it might not feel quite the same as making it to state, but that doesn't mean it won't feel just as good.