My class schedule was heavily stacked in the mornings, with only one class after noon, but my earliest one started at 7:45. Since I was used to getting up at 6am in high school, 7am wasn't too bad freshman year, but I was staying up a lot later than I had been. So with all my classes in the mornings, I had to figure out what to do with my afternoons and evenings. I applied for a couple of technology related on-campus jobs, and ended up with two, in the media dept and the IT dept. Back then they had LCD projectors on carts with laptops, for professor to use with the cutting edge presentation tool: PowerPoint. There weren’t very many projectors, so these carts got rotated between the classrooms daily, depending on which classes were being taught. I was the only one on campus allowed to fix both the projectors and the laptops, since I worked for both relevant departments. Between those two jobs, and being enrolled in both the Computer Science and Multimedia programs, was pretty well connected on campus for dealing with any technology needs. This also led to me brokering a lot more inter-departmental cooperation than they had ever had in the past.
Besides that, I got involved with a variety of different organizations on campus. First off, I went to a meeting for people interested in student government, intending to run for the freshman senate. With seven of us aiming for three seats, I was quick to recognize I had no chance there, so I opted to fill the uncontested position as the Pederson Residence Hall President instead. I had no idea what that meant at the time, but it ended up being my job to put on events for the hall, and rally students to get involved with campus wide events. Never has there been a residence hall president less suited to that job, but I did manage to survive the year in that role.
I also joined an intramural flag football team that fall, and started an indoor soccer team that winter. There was a club team for rugby, which competed in an intercollegiate league, but was student run and without a coach. I was not about to take up rugby, especially since I am not built for it, but I was intrigued by the setup, since I am not a huge fan of coaches. Any other sport with a club team, and I would have been all for it, but that was the only one we had.
After years of not being involved in any spiritual or religious organization, I started attending a number of different weekly events at the university. The on-campus congregation called Lord of Life met with about fifty people on Sunday and Wednesday evenings. That was a fairly hard group to break into socially, especially for someone who isn’t particularly outgoing. I found out later that most of the people had known each other for years, having met at nation-wide Lutheran youth events as they were growing up. My approach was a persistent application of brute force. I just showed up to all the events, and stuck around afterwards when people were socializing, even if I didn’t have anyone to talk to most of the time. After a few months that eventually worked, and members of that group played a key role in my social circle for the rest of my time at college. I also began to get more involved with committees for Lord of Life, and ended up helping put on a concert called Faith-Fest that year. It least in that instance, my stubborn perseverance had paid off, but in the following years, there was a deliberate attempt to make the congregation more welcoming to those who weren’t naturally outgoing and/or hadn’t grown up in the Lutheran youth movement.
Besides that, I attended a Bible study on Tuesdays and university chapel on Wednesday mornings. There was also a more evangelical organization, called JIF or Jesus Is Freedom, which met on Thursdays. My peer advisor Scott actually led that group my freshman year.
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