Distinctive

By – Victoria Tillson Evans, Ph.D.

Fall down seven times. Get up eight. – Japanese proverb.

When I was 20, I thought I was invincible – until I broke my back. After poorly landing a back handspring and cracking my L1 vertebra, my life changed forever. But for the good!

I spent a month home from college lying on my parents’ couch. While I made sure I kept up with my homework through the new, amazing technology called email, and ate a lot of ice cream (we won’t discuss the 30 pounds I put on), I also took time to reflect on what I really wanted to do. 

What that involved was studying abroad in Italy. I researched programs, submitted my applications, and seven months later, I was living in Rome. That experience changed my perspective on everything, from who I was to where I wanted to live. I no longer wanted to become a stockbroker. I wanted to earn a Ph.D. in Italian!

Now that you, too, are about to go through your moment on the couch, I want to encourage you to view this as an opportunity to get off the hamster wheel and redirect your energy into exploring what else is out there. To get you started, my esteemed colleague, Nora Lessersohn, and I have put together a list:

For Personal Growth:

• Read books (especially literature). It’s good for your college applications, and your brain!
• Watch Ted Talks.
• Watch films on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 List (The Criterion Collection is available for streaming). 
• Learn to code through Udacity.
• Take courses through EdX or Coursera.
• Take a virtual museum tour. 
• Develop fundamental life skills, like cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry, financial literacy, sewing, ironing – all of those things that you’re going to learn in a crash course your first year of college!
• Pick up old hobbies you haven’t had time for once you started high school. Drawing, painting, or playing chess or Scrabble are great places to start. 
• Start a new hobby like growing a hydroponic vegetable garden, building an aquarium with a self-regulating ecosystem, organizing your home Marie Kondo-style, or developing an app. 
• Call or video-chat with extended family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc…). They love you and miss you, too.
• Write about what you love! Did you know that many of our world’s greatest works came out of enforced “social distancing”? Look at Nicolò Machiavelli, Sir Isaac Newton, Dante Alighieri, Ernest Hemingway, Victor Hugo, Albert Einstein, and many, many more greats!
• Hire a tutor on Skype or purchase Rosetta Stone to learn a new language. Wellesley College offers this online course in Italian.
• Create a YouTube channel showcasing your hidden talent.
• Go for a walk in nature.
• Learn how to meditate.
• Get out your old jump rump and try to beat this guy!
• Build a Rube Goldberg Machine (like this one in The Goonies) that opens the front gate for the postman.

For Your Admissions Process:

• Take virtual tours by watching college videos on CampusReel (available in your CustomCollegePlan account), YouniversityTV, or on colleges’ own websites.
• Email admissions reps to set up times to speak on the phone to ask questions.
• Do online test prep with a tutor or work with a test prep book at home.
• Browse the course listings online at the schools on your college list. The upper-level options will give you a sense of the direction your education will take. 

There are, of course, thousands of other ways that you can make the most of your time at home. Don’t view this unexpected change to your plans as a disaster, but rather as an opportunity to do something different and learn more about yourself. Just lay off the ice cream!