By Crystal Pham
Happy Monday everyone! My name is Crystal and I am a freshman at UC Merced. I’m originally from San Francisco but I decided to go to UC Merced because I wanted to experience a new pace of life. I wanted to get away from the city and live in a small town. I currently live on campus with my two roommates, Kristina and Pauline.
When I was first applying for housing, I was very excited to see whom I would have as roommates. So in my search for the perfect roommates, I interviewed people on Facebook. After weeks of interviewing potential roommates, I decided to leave it up to the “system” to generate me 2 random roommates. When I received an email from school saying that Kristina and Pauline were my roommates, the first thing I did was look them up on Facebook.
After living with Kristina and Pauline for three months, I can come to the conclusion that they are amazing! We have two bonding activities that we always do: Sunday night girl talk and Bi-weekly dates.
Sunday nights are bittersweet because I have to leave San Francisco and go back to Merced but when I’m in Merced, I get to talk to my roommates for hours about all the crazy things that happened over the weekend as we watch Desperate Housewives.
Our Bi-weekly dates are also very fun because we’ll get all dolled up and go out to dinner off campus. When we are not off campus dining, we go around our campus at nighttime and take tons of pictures and even have mini dance parties in our room.
One of the most exciting things that I recently did at Merced was attend a poetry slam on campus. After the poetry slam was over, a bay area hip-hop group, Zion, performed most of the new songs on their album and it was an awesome concert!
These are some of the reasons why I enjoy living on campus so much because I get to build amazing relationships with the people I live with as well as experience new things such as poetry slams and concerts.
Besides spending lots of time hanging out with my roommates, I am also on the UC Merced Softball team and I am a member of the Christian Intervarsity Fellowship. Although the softball team is only club level, we still travel to other schools and have games. In fact, this very weekend is going to be our first away game at UC Davis. When I first joined softball team, my teammates and I didn’t talk very much but since then, we’ve had movie nights, study groups, and even participated in Merced’s Veteran’s Day Parade!
Back in San Francisco, I was heavily involved in a Christian program called Younglife. When I came to Merced I was afraid that I would not be able to find a group of people whom I would feel connected to but I was completely wrong! Christian InterVarsity Fellowship is like my second family, (besides Softball and my roommates.) The people are incredibly welcoming and I’m so glad I can feel connected to my campus on all these different levels.
Now that I’ve talked about all the things I’m doing outside of class, let’s talk about the courses I’m taking! I’m in an Intro to Sociology class, a writing class, and an Intro to Sculpting class. I’m doing well in all my classes and enjoy them very much!
