Erick Paulino
Sarah Lawrence College

After a semester as an official college student, I am ready to put myths to rest, put my nerves away, and accelerate my desire to quench my intellectual curiosity to full speed.

My time thus far here at Sarah Lawrence College has been both exciting and fun. Being a student in a small private liberal arts college, I have found this to be both rewarding and different. It is rewarding in the sense that the small student population has allowed for a closer relationship with my professors than I probably would have had as an undergraduate at a much larger university. It's different because I come from a large urban environment, so the small student population is smaller than I am accustomed to.

However, please do not let the latter statement fool you: in my short time at Sarah Lawrence, I have begun to pave new avenues of intellect that I thought were once unattainable at the undergraduate level. Because of our Oxford-style pedagogy, it is truly a singular educational experience. My largest class this past semester had thirteen students and my smallest had three students. This allows me a deeper social and academic relationship with my peers and professors, while at the same time creates pressure to produce academically, connect dots, and draw conclusions.

I am a member of both the African and Hispanic Student Unions on campus and a member of the men's crew team. Participating in these and various others student activities has allowed me to meet some of the brightest, socially-aware, and intellectual people I have ever met. My experience here at Sarah Lawrence has been one where both my academic and social lives are constantly complementing each other and working with one another. Because they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, it becomes hard for me to recognize when my academic life stops and my social life begins; and as an entering college freshman with all sorts of doubts about the social and academic environments on campus, this has been truly satisfying.

Because of the teaching style here at Sarah Lawrence, I am fortunate enough to be taking classes that I find extremely interesting. This fall I was taking a course on Diaspora literature, another on the politics of the post-colonial African state, and a childhood psychology class on growing up South African in the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. Additionally, I did extensive research for each of these classes on related topics to present as my conference projects at the end of the semester.

Having given you a glimpse of my first few months as a college student, I know wish to journey back to a few months ago when I was a senior in high school applying to college. As a first-generation college student, and the first to graduate from high school in my immediate family, I was in the unique position of not having a family history of collegiate legacy or experience on which to model or fall back on. However, I knew that if historical figures such as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr. were able to obtain professional degrees during a time in our country's history when a greater amount of racial and economic odds were against them, I could most definitely do it today.

To this end I offer the following advice: -MORE-