I’ve been homeschooled most of my life, class of one, and happily so. I like to learn at my own pace and do my own thing. College has been a pretty big switch for me, going from a class of one to a class of many and from being around my family a lot to being 12 hours away and surrounded by my peers 24/7. It has also been some of the most fun, the hardest work, and the most stress I have ever gone through. But I have enjoyed it a ton, learned a lot, both in my major and out of it, and I am really excited to see what the next years will bring.

Michigan Technological University, or Michigan Tech as we call it, is a small school in Houghton, Michigan (the NW corner of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan). The school is mainly known for its engineering program. More than half the school is engineers. But it also has one of the top three forestry programs in the nation and one of the top wildlife programs as well. It’s located in the middle of nowhere in the U.P., and when I visited last fall I fell in love with the place. I moved in during the last week of August , and I’ll admit, I was a little nervous. I was excited, ready to go and meet new people, do new things, learn new thoughts, but I was also scared. Scared that my roommate wouldn’t like me, scared that things would be too hard, too strange, too new, and I wouldn’t be able to adapt.

So I moved in, and after a week of orientation, I loved Houghton. I was living in a learning community of all forestry and wildlife majors, and we did everything together, from eating to going down to the portage for walks to Wal-Mart runs. We were all instant friends. I was having lots of fun and felt well prepared for my classes. Then classes started and the work began. I learned that in Vegetation of North America I would be learning to identify over 150 different tree species by bud bark and leaf. Oh, did I mention I’d be learning common Latin and family names?

While this seemed overwhelming, the “second-years” in our hall assured us that we’d survive, and they helped us to study every week when we flipped out before our labs. I have never used so many flashcards in my life. My forest landscape class gave me new appreciation for forest habitats and for sustainable forestry, a concept that I had never really understood.

The department that I am a part of is one of the smallest at tech, fewer than 200 students in a university of 7,000, so you get to know your peers and professors really well. I started working for the school ornithologist within the first month, and, with his help, started MTU’s first birding club, the Birdbums of Michgan Tech. I’ve met tons of amazing people. I traveled to Minnesota with the wildlife society and got licked by an 800-pound Black Bear. I attended a forester’s conclave and saw a tobacco-spitting contest and survived my first, of what I have been told will be many, Houghton blizzard.

College is a lot of fun, but it is also a lot of work. Since I took college classes as part of my high school curriculum, I am ahead of the curve with general education classes (math, English, etc.) so I am taking the first and second year of my major classes at one time. This means three labs a week, all of them outside, which works out to spending 10 odd hours a week outdoors. The CS (computer science) majors think I am nuts for enjoying it, but I love it. We travel all over the Keweenaw Peninsula and down almost to Wisconsin some weeks. We’ve hiked mountains, explored gullies and trekked across fields. The work comes once the fun of lab is over and the reports start. I wrote over 40 lab reports this semester. My friend Sean is in an additional lab class, so he is at more than 55 reports. But this became easier as the semester progressed. I learned what was expected, what I didn’t need to include, and what needed improvement. By the end of the term, I was turning out 10-page reports with charts and graphs in under two hours.

Living in a hall with 40 other people is often a challenge as we get on each other’s nerves quite regularly, but we also band together when we need to, and we have become great friends. If you attend college, and you can afford a year in the dorms, I highly recommend it, because it forces you to break away from your parents a little (not that I don’t love my parents, but I do have to learn to take care of myself eventually) and it helps you to form friendships and really connect with the student body. I have learned a lot sitting in the hallway till the wee hours of the morning, listening to others' stories and sharing some of my own. The key to enjoying college is to be flexible, lend a listening ear, and not judge people too quickly. Keep those things in mind, and no matter what your major, you will go far.

The coolest thing for me as the year comes to an end is looking towards this summer, when I’m going to be running my own research project and really understanding what I’m doing. Even though I’m only a year into my degree, I understand my field so much better. I feel like I can actually look at a piece of property for a species and be able to figure things out about their history. Next year, I’ll be attending fall camp, a semester of fieldwork and application of what I’ve been learning, and I cannot wait. I love stuff that is hands-on; to do the work and see how it all operates, and fall camp is just that. I highly encourage any of you that love to work in the outdoors, either with forests or birds or marshes or mammals to look into a natural resource related degree. The people you work with are amazing, the opportunities diverse, and the ability to wake up in the morning and love what you do is priceless.

Auriel is one of the founding members of the Ohio Young Birders Club and a former Youth Advisory Panel member. She recently became an adult supporter of the OYBC. Her blog is located at http://birdgirlmtu.blogspot.com.