MU Honors Program: Student Blog

Campus food 101

Campus food is important—you’ll be eating it for two years. I toured some schools where the campus food was a little questionable, but fortunately, Miami has great food! It’s not quite gourmet, but the selection and quality are pretty impressive, and Food Services wins awards every year. When I was looking at colleges, I made sure to pick schools that always had vegetarian/vegan meals (most colleges do, so that wasn't a problem), and it was another plus if all of the ingredients were listed somewhere. Miami's food information is online, and the menus actually show up on Blackboard. How convenient!

Where to eat on campus:

1.  Alexander! It’s too bad that Alexander is wayyyy down on Western because I’d probably go there every day. There are two buffet-style dining halls on campus that have a purely vegetarian option, and Alexander is one of them. Also, I think the salad and fruit bar deserves a mention—where else can you get plain yogurt and choose your own fruit? The Greyhound Market also has an impressive array of organic and vegetarian food.

2.  Bell Tower is closest to where I live, and I go there for probably 80% of my meals. It’s an a la carte dining hall, and there are so many options—well, except on the weekends because most of the options are closed. I’m a fan of their stir fry (choose your own veggies and meat/meat substitute), Miami Spice (pasta dishes), and their veggie burgers deserve a mention, too.

3.  I’d like to rank Panache higher, but it’s a little too expensive for me to eat there every day. If I had to describe Panache, I would call it a semi-upscale restaurant that takes meal plans. My roommate and I try to go there once a semester, and I have to admit that we’re predictable customers—we always go for the Penne Pomodoro.

4.  Hamilton just feels friendly. Like Alexander, it always has vegetarian dishes, but unlike Bell Tower, the dishes can’t be customized. It’s one of the smaller dining halls (probably the smallest a la carte place), but it serves a pretty dedicated clientele, which means that you always seem to run into friends there.

5.    If you want a sub, the best place to go is Scott, even if you have to walk halfway across campus to get there. Scott also makes mini pizzas, which I haven’t actually tried, but their cinnamon bread is great!

6.  For students who live on MET quad (that would include the two Honors freshmen dorms), Harris is the buffet-style hall of choice. Harris is also home to a new Italian “restaurant” (a la carte place), which I’d like to try sometime in the near-ish future.

I'm trying to find out what my readers want to learn about campus... it's a little hard when you only have a known sample size of 2: Jared (the other blogger) and Olivia (his editor/SO, who is also in one of my English classes). Would you prefer to hear more about campus, my life, random musings, or something else?

On gymnastics...

I’ve managed to make it through an entire semester without talking in great detail about one of the most important things in my life: gymnastics. Since no one has suggested a better topic, I think I’ve earned the right to devote a little time to the best sport ever!

After our annual home meet, we have a banquet that recognizes the seniors. It’s a tradition for the juniors to introduce the seniors by describing them by their characteristics, personality, and funny things they say. I’ll skip over our team’s inside jokes and jump right to a slightly revised version of my speech.

When I first started to think about this speech, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted it to be poignant and touching, humorous, serious, or something in-between. Eventually, I decided that my answer was “yes," and like a good English major, I decided to create metaphors for every event. My main goal was to make it through the speech without crying, and I’m happy to announce that all of us made it through in record time without ANY tears.

What gymnastics means to me, event-by-event:

Vault. I think it was the movie “Stick It” that asked who actually likes to run and jump at a stationary object. Sometimes there’s a little flipping and twisting involved, too. Therefore, I think vault is like the obstacles in life that you can’t surpass; you have to face them head-on. Sometimes you hit the board perfectly and fly over all of your problems. At other times, you really intend to deal with a situation, but you actually just smash into the table and fall over. Not so good. Oh well. Once in awhile, you’re really lucky, and you’re able to run to the side of the table (or obstacle) and bypass it altogether. (Of course, I’ve managed to embed the tape measure prongs into my foot while doing this, so this method isn’t totally safe!) The table is kind of unavoidable, and so are tough times in life.

Bars. Taking risks. If you think about what we do on bars… well, sometimes you wish you hadn’t started. We hold onto a bar and swing our bodies around, throw ourselves with reckless abandon from bar to bar, and fly 8 feet in the air and hope we land on our feet. I think of bars as representing the crossroads in life, when choosing one route means giving up another. You can’t let go for a straddle back and say, “Oops! Didn’t mean to do that! Rewind!” and sometimes you have to jump into a new situation with both feet (hands?) and never look back.

Beam represents balance, both figuratively and literally. Gymnasts are probably the best time managers ever, and we use our skills on beam to balance gymnastics with everything else in our lives. I think that’s what makes us so unique—we somehow have time for everything, and we manage to make everything work out for the best. (In my recent RA interview, I was asked how I can devote so much time to my extracurriculars and still do well academically. The answer? I spent 16-20 hours/week in the gym and another 5+ hours/week with my violin under my chin, and my schedule in college seems relatively relaxed in comparison!)

Floor represents doing what you love. Every time I compete on floor, I love all of the support that this team gives during the entire routine. When I graduated from high school, I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to function in a world without gymnastics taking up all of my free time, and somehow I managed to put off functioning in the big and scary “real world” without gymnastics for four years! Gymnastics has been the most amazing support system at college; it’s been the one constant throughout the vast majority of my life, and I’m proud to call myself a Miami gymnast. :) 

Wow! I may have to start writing about gymnastics every week if no one suggests another topic! (I know I had a ton of questions when I was looking at colleges... I'll tackle just about any appropriate subject...)

Everyday life at Miami

Hi. Remember me? I promise I haven’t disappeared… I’m just a little busy this semester and never got around to posting the entries that I had written. Time to start catching up!

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the benefits of being in Honors is that you have priority registration after the first semester—that means that you are almost guaranteed to get into all of your first choice classes! You can choose your favorite professor, the most convenient times, and the best location, and force adding is almost never an issue. While my roommate lucked out this year and only has TR classes (yes, that means she has a 4-day weekend), I wasn’t quite as fortunate… but I don’t have any 8 AM classes!

Because my MWF classes are a little irregular, here is a typical Tuesday/Thursday for me:

8:00- Rudely awakened by my alarm. Blindly poke at my snooze button from a half-prone position until it turns off. Fall asleep.

8:07- BEEP… BEEP… BEEP… open one eye, glare at the alarm, and hit the snooze again.

8:14- Check the time, roll over, and attempt to fall asleep again.

8:21-Get out of bed and get ready for class. Pack bag. Skim through a few passages in my books if necessary.

Note to readers: There is something very comforting about having a snooze button ritual. Setting my alarm for 8:21 just wouldn’t have the same effect! Also, I only recommend having such a ritual if your roommate wakes up before you.

8:50- Grab something for breakfast. I keep granola bars, Cinnamon Toast Crunch (with vanilla soy milk! I seem to remember that being on my list of favorite things!), and Cheerios in my room.

9:00- Run to King Café and buy something for lunch. Bring back to the mini fridge. I’m sure the people at King Café think that I’m totally weird because I buy sandwiches and sushi in the morning, but I don’t have time to stop for lunch.

9:15- Leave for class.

9:30- Class!

11:00- Class!

12:30- UA for a freshman class! (UA= Undergraduate Associate= undergraduate version of a TA. This can count for an Honors B experience, or whatever they call it these days. I’m old-school; I have “course” and “non-course” requirements. J)

1:45- Grab my sandwich/sushi/whatever on the way to…

2:00- Class!

3:30- Return to dorm. Take a brief nap. Extra sleep is never a bad thing.

4:00- Start reading. I’m majoring in English and German; reading is my life.

5:00- Go to the gym to coach. I started coaching when I was 15, and I currently teach two recreational gymnastics classes for our class program.

6:00- Finish coaching and go to Bell Tower for a sandwich or wrap. Return to gym to read.

8:00- Gymnastics—the sport in which you willingly throw yourself at and around inanimate objects! I’ll cover that later…

10:15- Return from practice.

10:45- Read.

Anywhere between 12-3:00- Finish reading! Bed!