Top 3 Things I’m Thankful For

Over Thanksgiving break, I got to thinking about how grateful I am to be at such an amazing school. Here are three things that make me feel lucky to be a University of Rochester student.

1. Beautiful campus

The tower of Rush Rhees Library is open to tours twice a year on Halloween and then again during Senior Week. I was able to go up to the top of the tower this Halloween and got to appreciate all over again just how beautiful our school is.

While just walking around campus can be a pretty amazing experience, especially during fall, getting to see the school from a different perspective reminded me of how awestruck I was the first time I realized this is the place I get to call home.

2. Lots of activities

When I was touring colleges, one of the things I looked for was the number of posters on each school’s bulletin boards. I love that at Rochester, there’s constantly something exciting going on and there’s an incredibly wide range of events offered all the time. Just in November, I attended a lecture given by a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard professor, seen two a cappella concerts, and gotten a hands-on crash course on Arduino programming and the science behind microprocessors. No matter what your interest, this school has something for you in abundance.

3. Great professors

Rochester is a small research university, but in some respects, it operates more like a liberal arts college than one might expect. Professors, for instance, take a special interest in not just teaching their undergraduate classes, but actually getting to know their students. Coming to college, I never expected that I’d be stopped in hallways to chat by some of my professors or that I’d see others in the crowd supporting student performances. But at this school, faculty members are genuinely interested in the students they teach and make up an active part of the University community.