I sat down with my first-year roommate, Gwen, to talk to her about her experiences at Hopkins. She is currently a sophomore from San Diego majoring in molecular and cellular biology and psychology, who also plays for the varsity women’s soccer team.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What drew you to Hopkins?
I first started looking at Hopkins at the end of freshman year in high school. I wasn’t even considering this school until I saw the coaches on a list for one of the showcases for soccer. I thought, “Oh! This is a really great school. Why am I not already emailing them?” So, I reached out and from there it was a three-year process of emailing back and forth with the coaches. I knew I wanted really impressive academics and pre-med. Getting closer with the coaches just made it more and more obvious that this was the place I wanted to be.
What have you gotten involved in since being here?
A lot of the stuff I’m a part of is through athletics. I am a part of the Student Athlete Association Committee. I work with students, staff, and coaches to make sure we are all having positive experiences and we are staying engaged with school. I do a bunch of stuff through soccer. I’m on leadership council, so I work in tandem with our coaches and specific staff that work with our team to maintain that positive experience. I also applied to work in a psychedelics lab for next semester. They’re doing a ton of super interesting research with psychedelics in a clinical sense.
What’s your favorite part about being on a varsity team?
Being on a varsity team has been overall such a positive experience for me that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what my favorite thing is. But, if I had to sum all of it up, it would be the people. I’ve met my life-long best friends and my favorite people on the face of the planet. Everybody is so incredibly driven, ambitious, intelligent, and kind. Honestly, I go to practice every day and am just in awe of the people I get to be surrounded by. I could not be more grateful for everybody. Even my coaches; not every athlete can say that they have a positive relationship with their coaches, but I do. Everybody on this team is so close with one another. I’m from San Diego, California, and I flew all the way across the country to come to college. I was nervous that I wasn’t going to have people here, but everybody was just so welcoming, and I immediately felt like I had a family here at Hopkins.
I am so grateful for everyone. Every week, we do something called grati-tuesday during our planks as part of our warmups. We go around in a circle and say what we are grateful for and most of the time people just end up saying that we are grateful for this team and this is something that resonates with everyone.
What’s it like to be a student-athlete at Hopkins?
There have definitely been a lot of moments where I’ve doubted my ability to keep doing it. This semester, especially, I had a lot of challenging academic classes and I’m coming back from injury, so this was my first full season as a student-athlete at Hopkins. So, incorporating all of that means that I have to wake up every single day and make the choice to put effort into everything. Our team says we bring 100% of whatever we have because we all know we have challenging academics and if we’re stressed at practice, we aren’t going to play as well. Keeping in mind that you can’t give 100% of everything to everything and making sure we keep our lives balanced is a really important part of our team culture. We want to make sure everybody is at a healthy level of stress and try to help each other balance our time.
How do you connect with the Hopkins community outside of sports?
Whether that’s through a sorority or fraternity, a class, a lab, or another club they’re in, athletes are not a secret sector of people that keep to ourselves. We are still living the same lives as non-athletes; we still join clubs and on-campus and off-campus groups. Yes, we have this added responsibility. But we are also just as bought in to creating the full college experience.
Being from the west coast, what’s been your favorite part about Baltimore?
Every time I say this, people flame me for it. San Diego is known as the perfect weather; it’s 70 and sunny year-round. But I really enjoy having four seasons in the year. I was home for Thanksgiving, and it was 70 degrees all week. I flew back to Baltimore, and it was 35, so it was a bit of a wakeup call. I like it though, because I like being able to wear cute winter clothes. Baltimore is definitely different from California, but it’s a good different. Moving from one urban area to another, it’s so cool to see the different kinds of community they have in Baltimore compared to San Diego.
What tips do you have for someone who is considering schools farther away?
Don’t be scared of it not working out. It will. Everybody finds their people. It might take longer than others, but you will find your people. That makes going home hard because you don’t want to leave the friends you’ve become so close to. It makes the long trips worth it. You find your people and the things that make you happy. Being able to make your own life and separate yourself whatever high school was or home is, it allows you to build yourself up and make your own destiny. I was definitely scared but making that kind of jump was so worth it. To this day, I am so grateful that I am across the country. I get to experience so much more, and it makes going home that much sweeter.
What advice do you have for someone who is thinking about college athletics?
Everyone’s relationship with their sport is different and college athletics is not for everybody. Even if you are very invested in your sport throughout your high school career, you have to have an extra level of love and dedication to the sport in order to be successful in college athletics. I grew up around soccer players; they were basically all of my friends throughout my teenage years. Only a couple of them ended up playing in college because so many people are in athletics growing up, but not many of them have that extra spark that you need. College athletics is such a huge commitment. You don’t realize how fully consumed in your sport you will become. I spend hours a week watching game film, even more hours at practice and that takes me away from my schoolwork at times. There are people who aren’t really willing to make that sacrifice. You have to have this innate love of what you’re doing or else you’re probably going to burn out.
Would you say you’ve developed a similar type of love for things outside of soccer?
Leading up to those end-of-season weeks, it’s like do or die because we were in NCAA (National College Athletics Association) [tournament]. So, it’s either you win or you’re out. That was super, super intense. But, in those same weeks, I had a lot of academic commitments and midterms that needed my focus. In my mind, during those two weeks, I struggled to find motivation to get it all done. But every time I went to practice or into a team meeting, everybody was so locked in on wanting to be collectively successful. For me, it was like “Oh, these people are so bought into this, I can be bought into everything else.” These people do hard things and are still successful in soccer, so they drive me to want to be so much better in academic and other non-athletic experiences as well. It’s like a two-way relationship. These people are putting so much effort into everything they do, and I’m witnessing them be so successful at it in so many ways. It only makes me want to put in an equal, if not more, effort into everything that I do.
Is there anything else you want to share?
For the people reading, I just put my head on the desk because I don’t know what I want to say. I love it here. There have definitely been challenging moments. A lot of low lows, but also really high highs. It all balances out to be a net-positive experience. If this was a graph, it’s not linear, but it’s positive.
