After unpacking and saying goodbye to my family, I was immediately introduced to twenty new teammates — my new “family.” We ran our first 4 mile run, followed by meeting after meeting and hours of mandatory team bonding.
I couldn’t catch a breath as information was thrown at me left and right. I was exhausted from the very first day.
However, at the same time my teammates were continuously reassuring me that it would get better. And it did.
It didn’t happen right away, but as I got more familiar with campus and got to know my team, I started to remember why I chose DePauw.
When thinking about college, the one thing I knew for sure was that I was not going to give up running.
Cross country and track were a huge part of my high school experience and I could not envision my life without it. The greatest life lessons I have learned have come from this sport.
Being on a sports team has taught me self-discipline to time management to sacrifice. Now that I am in college, I sometimes have to spend my Saturdays up on Roy 2 or 3 studying instead of hanging out with friends. Sometimes I have to go to bed early because my body needs to recover from a hard workout. Sometimes I have to miss out on all the so called “fun” on campus because I am away competing with my team. Almost all the time I complain about how many things I have to do and how I don’t have enough time to do it all, but I know that it is something I love being a part of.
DePauw had already been on my radar for a while because my sister (Abigail Margulis) graduated in 2015, so it was a familiar place.
During my campus visit senior year, I felt a level of comfort that I hadn’t felt anywhere else. What sold me was when I met with Coach Kori and he told me that there was definitely a spot on the team for me.
Fast forward to August 15, 2018 when I moved into my freshman dorm at DePauw.
You can imagine everything I was feeling from the nerves and butterflies in my stomach to the excitement to start a new chapter in my life.
I was immediately welcomed into the community by the cross country and track teams. For all of the unknowns I was facing, it was settling to meet a group of people just as weird as my high school team and quite frankly me.
The unique thing about DePauw is that everyone does everything and anything they are interested in. As a freshman I dabbled in a lot of different things on campus, but found my passion in the PCCM working for D3TV and The DePauw along side my academics and running.
From day one of freshman year I had to quickly learn how to juggle all of the things I was encountering, but I had the help of all of my teammates. They have been there for me from helping me understand how Hoover works to telling me that it is completely normal to miss home in college when I was second guessing why I was here at this school.
I would never trade this experience for anything else because at the end of the day, my teammates are the reason I came out on the other end of freshman year with a smile on my face.