New Beginnings
Hey loves!
It's been a few weeks since I moved to Cambridge and I realised that I did not take a moment to sit down and reflect on the past weeks. I took a few minutes today to reflect on the past weeks and thought I would share my thoughts with all of you.
As someone who moved into a few dorms throughout her life, moving to college was (luckily) not as challenging - although I still struggle with packing the right amount of things. My (not recommended) packing philosophy is to think about whether you need something and pack it if the answer is yes. If the answer is no, pack it anyway since you might need it. I am sure that you can guess why this philosophy has gotten me above the maximum luggage weight more than once. But other than that, I did not really struggle with moving into a new dorm.
What I love about opening the door to a new dorm room is the endless amount of opportunities that comes with it. You can completely change the style of your room, invent new ways of organising your stuff, and just generally make a complete change. This can also be daunting, because it means that you have to take responsibility for all these things and work on them. But I love doing these things because I like getting creative with my decoration and changing up my environment.
I was quite surprised to find such a caring environment at St. John's College. (For those of you who are not familiar with Cambridge's collegiate system: the university's students are all affiliated with a college , where they usually live and receive some parts of their teaching) Everyone is always willing to help and people genuinely care about one another. I guess I stereotyped Cambridge a little as a just academic-focused place in my head - I am glad that I was proven wrong!
But the academic work has also started and it is quite hard. I am still in the process of figuring out how to deal with it and I hope that I will find a good way to do this. I am afraid that I will not be able to keep up, but I think that everybody feels like that when they start at a new school or university. The work just seems a little overwhelming, but I am nonetheless glad that I chose to come here. There are days when it seems extremely hard, but I am enjoying the content of my course.
Writing a diary in the evening of every evening has helped me to reflect on my achievements of the day and to feel better about my days. I would highly recommend keeping a diary because it also allows you to look back and see whether you have improved on some things and what you might need to work on. I keep an electronic diary on my laptop, because I bring my laptop anywhere and this means that I have my diary with me all the time. I use the free app "Diary - Record Repeater" and I love it because it is super simple and allows you to just focus on writing your diary entries. And no, this is not sponsored, but just my genuine opinion.
I have also recently started to upload more videos on my YouTube channel and I have tried out vlogging. It still feels weird to me to walk around with a camera, but I love looking back at the videos and to see what I did a few weeks ago. I hope to keep it up as a little memory keeper of my time at Cambridge. I linked my first vlog at the beginning of this video and you can find my most recent vlog at the end of this post.
Thank you all for your kind messages that you have sent me recently - I really appreciate it! If you would like to tell me something, message me here!
Lots of Love,
Elena
