Student Activities Blogs

Meg Carley

An Endless Summer

Hey everybody! In the words of the rapper Mase, “welcome back.” It’s the first week of classes and you’re either already stressed out or thinking about being stressed out. Either way, the first week of school is always a little hectic. It’s a week of everyone getting into new routines, seeing old friends, meeting new people, etc. It can be overwhelming and exciting all at the same time. I hope all of you are adjusting well and really just enjoying being back in good old Storrs. I know I am.

For me, this past week has been a lot of catch up time with people on what they did over the summer. While one of my friends taught middle school boys in Massachusetts another worked 80 hours a week being a lifeguard and working at a restaurant. Hearing everyone’s different experiences was fun for me since I hadn’t seen or talked to some of them since May. For college students, summer is the time where we can forget about all the late night study sessions and professors that always seemed to talk for too long about nothing. No more having to stress about that ten page term paper or fifty page reading that you just never got around to. Freedom is ours.

For some people, summer isn’t just a time for going to all the cool parties and going to the beach non-stop. Rather, it’s a time for personal growth and achievement. This is what happened to me. This past summer I worked with an organization called Bike and Build. Bike and Build is a non-profit organization that raises money for affordable housing. They have seven routes that go across the country and for each route there are about thirty riders who each have to raise a certain amount of money to be able to go on the trip. Each trip is about two months and during those two months you have a handful of days off and build days where the group works with a local affordable housing group (i.e. Habitat for Humanity) and helps them with whatever they need done for the day. It’s a great organization and for nine weeks I had the time of my life. My group started in Boston, MA and ended in Santa Barbara, CA. We biked a total of 3,687 miles and I have to say that plane ride back to Connecticut was quite depressing considering it only took five hours. Don’t get me wrong though. At times this trip could be grueling, utterly exhausting, and extremely challenging. Every morning I woke up, some part of my body was sore. Everyday I biked I could feel pain in my knees and near the end of the trip I started to lose feeling in one of my fingers. Even though this sounds awful and you probably think I’m crazy for saying this, but I loved it. I learned so much about myself and what I’m able to accomplish that as time goes on I’ll forget about how hard it was and only remember how good I felt afterwards. It was an amazing summer and I only hope that everyone else had as good a time as I did.

Even though summer has come to an end you still have all those pictures that your friends took (they’re also probably plastered all over Facebook) and your friends that you spent all that time with are still around to remind you about all the good times you guys had. So yes, while summer break is over and classes have officially begun, you’ll always be able to have those memories, which in a way makes summer endless (and no, I’m not referring to the surfing documentary). So, while I know you’re all overwhelmed about new classes and new routines just remember that you’ll always have the summer and hey, there are always more good things to come. Just hang in there and “keep ya head up” as my man 2Pac says.