Julia Sullivan 2016
Julia Sullivan <juliasullivan29@gmail.com> 2014
{Note: Julia is on the far right}
I would like to thank you and the Rotary Club again for selecting me for a scholarship! It was so helpful when paying for textbooks and tuition.
I have attached a Word document that details what I have been up to since starting college. The photo is of my friends and I with the Hinman College mascot (Hinman is one of the on-campus living communities at Binghamton). I am the one on the far right.
Sincerely,
Julia Sullivan
I’ve been attending Binghamton University for about six weeks now, but it feels like I’ve been here for so much longer. This is probably because so much has happened in that short amount of time.
My biggest concern going into college was that I wouldn’t be able to decide on a major. I knew I was interested in mechanical engineering, but I was also interested in other fields and unsure of which career path to pursue. After only two weeks of classes, I decided that mechanical engineering is the field for me and I can’t wait to officially declare it as my major next semester. It is a very broad field, so I will need to narrow down exactly what I want to do sometime in the near future, but for right now I am right on track with where I need to be.
College academics are definitely more difficult than high school. I was expecting the material to be harder, but honestly I was not prepared for the hours of work that I have. At first, it was very challenging for me, as I was so used to a different kind of academic experience, but at this point I have a better feel for the way things work here and have adjusted the way I approach schoolwork accordingly. It is not so overwhelming anymore, but I definitely have to work much harder than I did in high school.
Because I am still getting used to the college experience and workload, I decided to only join one club for the first semester. I am a member of Women’s Student Union, which is an intersectional feminist group on campus that raises awareness of women’s rights issues and sponsors events on campus about them. I absolutely love this club, as I have always been passionate about women’s rights, and I have learned a lot about the different kinds of injustices experienced by women of different ethnicities, sexualities, and gender identities. At the end of the semester we will be hosting a Take Back the Night event, which is an organization that supports victims of sexual assault, dating violence, and domestic abuse and seeks to raise awareness about these issues and end them.