July 19th
Buongiorno and ciaowdy everyone!
We met a couple of celebrities today!
Our day started off with the usual breakfast: unsalted rolls, charcuterie, assorted fruits, cereals, and juices. Though still as delicious as ever, we feel the change of pace in Castiglion Fiorentino will be a welcome one. Whether we were looking fondly back on our memories of Assisi or excitedly looking forward to new adventures, the day began with the knowledge that this would be our final full day in the city hanging over us all.
At 9:00 the student leaders gave us a presentation on academics in college and how to maximize learning efficiency. They emphasized the importance of planning everything from meal time to study time to free/down time. They also demonstrated numerous resources we could use to augment our academic experience in addition to our academic advisors, such as the degree planner, TA/SI and office hours, and advice from upperclassmen (like our student leaders 😁). A special shout-out to Tiernan for creating a website that combines data from ratemyprofessor.com and anex.us to give us a more comprehensive overview of our future professors! Bravo!
“Being locked in for life is a grad school thing” -Will Lourcey
Around 10:00 E. Lee Walker and Will Wynn arrived and gave us their wonderful insight into how they achieved their success and how we could become better individuals overall. While they mentioned many things in the stories they told, some of the key takeaways were that public speaking and problem solving skills are essential to leading a successful life, and the best way to improve those skills is to practice them. They taught us that we should articulate our speech as often as we can, because someone is always “counting our umms.” It is also important to know what your values are. Everyone spends their whole life trying to figure out who they are, but if they know their values, those values will guide that person’s decisions and put them on the right path. Some of us were concerned before the talk that we might be making the “wrong” decision with our majors, but our speakers disagreed. They said that using the “right and wrong” language to describe our career choice suggests a mistake, when in reality we are running an experiment to see what fits us best, and experiments do not have mistakes, they have results. There is no wrong choice when choosing a major, and that major will ultimately lead us to multiple careers down the road, not just one. Finally, our mentors reminded us that though something might have an answer, that is likely not the only answer. Ultimately we will get where we need to be in life, and there are many possible ways to get there.
As we were let out to lunch, many of us chose to stay behind to pick Mr. Walker and Mr. Wynn’s brains to gain as much wisdom as we could and capitalize on our short time with them. Since we were experts on Assisi by now, we targeted our favorite eateries to fuel up for an intense round of afternoon lessons. We began with an introduction to life mapping, where we tried to articulate our short and long term goals on paper. While we each may have been at vastly different points in planning our future, one thing is for sure: we are all ready and excited for A&M, so College Station better be ready for us!
Our afternoon lessons continued with an important discussion about personal health and well-being, recognizing that we are at a significant transition in our lives. We learned of numerous resources available to us on campus and we’re reminded of our autonomy in making these decisions as college students. From this we pivoted to an exposition of all the opportunities we have available to us, not only as honors students, but simply as freshmen at Texas A&M. We were exposed to the 24 FLO’s (Freshman Leadership Organizations) of A&M and completed the lesson with a basic introduction to the Capstone project we will undertake in our senior year. Based on the show of hands at the end, it seems we can’t wait to engage with our community in the fall!
Like a mirror of our first night in Assisi, we had a briefing to top off a delicious dinner, and to prepare us for our stops in Deruta and Perugia on the way to Castiglion Fiorentino. Per our nightly tradition, we ended the day like any other…with gelato! We made some new friends too: Massimo and Giulio and a few of us played fùtball with them! They were 13 years old and spoke very good English, having learned at the nearby Santa Maria’s school. Ultimately, we gave Texas A&M an excellent reputation in Assisi!
-Arda Arikan ‘27 and Luke Johnson ‘27
