Mykenzie’s Journey

Why Grinnell?

I’m from Syracuse, New York — it’s in upstate New York, four hours north of New York City, and it’s very pretty and near a lot of mountains. My high school probably has more students than Grinnell does. 

I wanted to go somewhere where I would meet people from around the world who had different backgrounds than me. I knew I wanted to go somewhere that was more diverse and where I would be exposed to a lot of new people. But I also wanted to be on a first-name basis with my professors and classmates. I wanted it to feel familiar.

I came to Junior Visit Day at Grinnell in February of 2020. That was when I decided that Grinnell was my number one choice. When I came to Grinnell, students around me were asking if I needed help getting around. They were asking what I needed or if I had any questions, and their enthusiasm for Grinnell was clear. Each student and staff member was very considerate and accommodating.

I love Grinnell’s individually advised curriculum. That’s actually why I wanted to come to Grinnell in the first place. I knew I wanted to be at a smaller school. I never even considered going to a large university. But when I read about Grinnell’s curriculum, I was pleasantly surprised that a college would offer that kind of flexibility and authority to their students. From there, my search narrowed down to schools with open curriculums. I wanted to feel like I was going into my advising sessions with my plan and not the plan that my adviser had for me. That’s why I came to visit Grinnell — because I wanted that individually advised curriculum.

I was very drawn to Grinnell for the academics. But when I came here and I saw the community, that’s when I knew that I wanted to be here. And I think that’s pretty common for most Grinnell students. They want to visit initially because of the academics, but the community is what makes them stay.

First-Year Experiences

Although I was a bit nervous at first about coming to Grinnell, I found a community here that I truly love. 

Because I grew up in a city, I was used to having a lot of different options, such as things to do or places to eat. It took me a little bit to get used to Grinnell and the Midwest. It was a culture shock in terms of people’s behavior. People in New York aren’t as friendly as the people in the Midwest, so I wasn’t used to going to the gas station and having conversations with the cashier or people waving at me at the stop signs. It was also an adjustment just because it was so much smaller.

But I find now that I like a lot of the things that make Grinnell different.

For example, in Grinnell, I get to walk everywhere — even to the grocery store. I like that I can see the entire night sky. I like that I can go to the coffee shop or the library and the staff members recognize me and smile. 

Still, it was very hard to get used to. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I think what made me stay and end up loving it so much was the wide variety of resources we have on campus. The Office of Academic Advising is amazing. And, all the clubs and organizations. 

After I became involved on campus and started taking advantage of the resources that we have, that’s when I really started to love Grinnell. That’s what really solidified the Grinnell experience for me.

I even miss things about Grinnell when I’m not here. For instance, I always miss the sunsets a lot.

Academics

First-Year Classes

My first year, I took a course called Introduction to Shakespeare with Professor John Garrison. I was so scared to talk in class. In high school, I kind of got to sit quietly in the back. I wasn’t really encouraged to engage. 

Being in the classroom in Grinnell was a significant change. It’s hard to get away with being quiet in class here. Initially, I was extremely timid. The other students in my class were older, and their ideas seemed much more sophisticated than mine. Besides that, I had little experience reading Shakespeare. 

But Dr. Garrison was very encouraging. After he found out that I could not understand most of Shakespeare’s language, he restructured the schedule to do a “crash-course” unit so I and other students could catch up. He validated my academic work and made me feel like I belonged at Grinnell.

That same semester, I was taking Calculus II. It was hard — the workload was heavy, and I was not used to doing college-level work. I was at the Math Lab every day. My professor was very accommodating, and I was able to get through it. I took it pass-fail. I wanted to challenge myself and I certainly succeeded in that.

So being in that English class with Dr. Garrison was very affirming for me. I still didn’t talk that much, but he made me believe that I could.

In my second year, I started coming out of my shell and talking, bit by bit. And now I talk in class all the time and I have no issue with it at all. 

The culture of Grinnell is a big reason why I’m able to do that now. 

Choosing a Major

I’m a psychology major with a strong focus in English. I actually declared my psychology major a bit late, but everything worked out fine, thanks to Grinnell’s individually advised curriculum. I ended up declaring after one Intro to Psychology class. I was initially hesitant because Grinnell’s psychology curriculum requires laboratory courses, but they ended up being really critical to my Grinnell experience.

I picked Professor Ann Ellis as my adviser. She is wonderful. I could not ask for a better adviser. She is a great blend of letting me do what I want and challenging me to do things out of my comfort zone. 

Activities

I started coming out of my shell in my second year and when I joined my book club. It’s called Overbooked. I’m the president of it now. We meet every week to read together and about once a month to discuss a book. I love reading; I’ve been doing it since I was a little girl. My first word was book. 

If I was talking to a shy prospective student, I would just say, take every opportunity you can have to try and make new friends. I think the level of difficulty of making friends is the same at any college in the world. It kind of depends on you. You have to put the effort in. But there are lots of opportunities here to make friends because it is very small. Plenty of students here are shy and their instinct is not to go and talk to each other.  Just take every single opportunity that you can to try to make friends — even asking to study together. 

It is uncomfortable to make the first move and join a club when you’ve never been in that position before. It is uncomfortable, but usually high risk, high reward. That has been my experience. 

You’ve got to be brave and put in the effort.

Internships

I’ve done a few internships. One of the most impactful was at a nonprofit in Syracuse called ACR Health. I found the internship myself, but I went to the Center for Careers, Life, and Service (CLS) a lot. They helped me prepare for my interview for the internship.

ACR Health offers support and harm reduction services for homeless people. They also have something called the Q Center, which is for LGBTQ teenagers and young adults. They offer support groups for the queer young adults and teenagers. 

In my intern role, I was leading those support groups. And the tricky part is that I was leading them for people ages 13 to 29 (in separate groups) when I was 19 years old. It was one of the most challenging but rewarding things I’ve ever done.

I learned that I really like to work with teenagers. They’re my favorite population to work with. I’ve been tutoring for years — high schoolers, middle schoolers, and college students in the psych department. But I learned that teenagers are, in my opinion, the most fun group.

Teenagers are very special — they’re coming into themselves and very rebellious. I found that it was very gratifying when a teenager came into a support group, and they were not talking a lot or kind of uncomfortable, and I was able to help them get out of their shell. I had some of them tell me that I was the reason they came back. Those little moments meant a lot to me.

It was also really difficult because I was leading these support groups for almost 30-year-olds when I was just 19. That was super foreign but valuable I think, because a lot of the times in your work, if you climb up the ladder, you’re going to be supervising people who are older than you. And that’s pretty unnatural. I had to be very strategic about how I led the groups because nobody who’s almost 30 wants to have a 19-year-old weigh in on their problems. I had to not pretend that I knew what they were experiencing but instead be more of a facilitator. 

Jobs

The CLS has been very helpful in my job searches. Every single interview I’ve ever had for a job, I’ve rehearsed with them, including my job at admission. And the fun thing about that is, most of the time the questions that I get in my interview role-play at the CLS were questions I get in the actual interview. I also feel pretty confident about cover letters because of help from the CLS. 

I love my job as a senior interviewer in admission. It’s my favorite. It’s a combination of all the things I like to do. I love educating people. I love to talk to students and learn about all of the epic things they want to do in their futures. I also get a lot of satisfaction from feeling that I’m being a positive addition to students’ college application processes. 

I’ve also worked in Disability Resources, another helping job. I was on a team called Access Leaders. We would review different buildings on campus in terms of their accessibility.

We reviewed the entirety of Burling Library and its physical accessibility. We collected a bunch of data. We looked at the furniture, we looked at the floor, we looked at the distance between the bookshelves, the maps: how efficient they were, if we thought they were user friendly. And we gave a presentation to the library leadership. When I go into the renovated areas of the library, I can see the changes being made. So that was cool.

I think the skills and experience I’ve picked up in my on-campus jobs will serve me well after graduation!

Research

I did a research assistantship with a professor at SUNY Oswego in the summer before my third year. I really wanted to get research experience because I was set on getting a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. I was mostly doing the basics — entering data, grading all the assessments, inputting the data, and doing beginning analysis. 

One of the best things about the psychology major here is that you get to do a lot of in-class research, so I had the same level of preparedness that other research assistants had after employment in research. I didn’t feel like I had to do a lot of catching up because I was just coming off a semester where I took Cognitive Psychology and I had to do an entire experiment on my own. We had to do a proposal, make consent forms, do the experiment, get the data, analyze it, and report on it. And I’ve done that in several classes. I felt like I had the right amount of experience to do it for real. 

That’s also a great thing about Grinnell — you’ll have enough experience for employment even if you don’t have a research assistant position. It was very nice that we get to do all of that in class.

When I came to Grinnell, I was convinced that I was going to get a Ph.D. in psychology. That was what I really, really wanted. And after getting to do the research in class and in my research assistantship, I was like, “Nope, I don’t want to do that.” 

I’m so happy I figured out that I didn’t like that before committing to a program for six years and investing all that time. I got to try my hand at it a lot at Grinnell. I found out that I really like helping people, which I’ve done in my campus employment as a course mentor in the psych department and a peer mentor. And I aligned a lot more with those jobs than I did with the research-y nuts and bolts type of thing.

Friends and Fun

I am an introvert, so I don’t really go to the big on-campus parties. My friends and I kind of fashion our own fun, to be honest. They are very similar to me. I thought it would be an issue not liking to party. In that vein, I’ve been very lucky. I’m part of a friend group with six other people, so I always have someone to do things with, and that’s been great. I really blossomed when I found them. That’s when college became fun for me.

There’s my book club. I’ve been asked by a lot of students, are there fun things to do? I’m like, well, define fun because my friends and I like to sit around and read. My friends and I also loved to do karaoke nights at the Humanities and Social Science Center in our second and third years. This year, we live in an apartment and do karaoke there. My friends and I also have movie nights every Friday and Saturday and we like to go to the library. We like to go to Saints Rest Coffee House and we occasionally take little weekend trips, sometimes to Iowa City. 

I love to go on hikes. We don’t have mountains here like in New York, but I like to go hiking at the Jacob Krumm Nature Preserve a lot. It’s really nice there, especially in the fall. I also like Rock Creek State Park. I drove 45 minutes to go to Lake Red Rock near Des Moines. I liked that a lot. It was really pretty. And honestly, Arbor Lake in Grinnell is fun if you just want to go for a quick walk. 

I love to go for walks around town, especially at night. I love to walk down the country roads past the cornfields. It’s very peaceful. I like to watch the stars over the golf course. It’s very open and wide here. And I miss that a lot when I’m home, actually.

Hopes and Dreams for the Future

I have no idea what I want to do after graduation, but my CLS advisers say that not knowing can be a good thing and something that gives me a lot of options. They’ve never made me feel like I should have things figured out. 

Every single person I’ve spoken to at the CLS has been super supportive, helpful, and reassuring. I’ve kind of been shopping in the career communities at the CLS, too, learning about what’s available. Every single person I’ve met with at the CLS has been really welcoming and receptive. 

I should mention I’ll be moving back home in Syracuse. I love my hometown and my family, and I plan to go back. I’m a part of a Sunday dinner family. My family and I are very close. And I have a grandmother and a great-grandmother that I’d like to have more time with.