"The Circle" Prompt #1

Just as Mae's professional career with the Circle began with a flurry of information, activity, and emotions, so too has my own academic career at Penn State. It's easy to relate how overwhelmed she felt beginning her job to how it often feels for me and many others too, but that's only part of the experience. Being a freshman is exhausting as well as invigorating, intimidating as it is inviting, and seemingly eternal as it is all too brief. Though the campus culture here isn't so "extreme", so to speak, as the one in the book, there are several similarities that relate to the "newbie" experience, as well as key differences that thankfully aren't as, say, dystopic , as they are for newbie Circlers.

One of the main similarities between the two is the vast amount of information being processed seemingly all at once. Mae herself is forced to work on two screens to handle the sheer volume of it all; that's something I can relate to, as I often find myself juggling work between my laptop, phone, and sometimes another computer to have everything laid out in front of me. However, whereas Mae has the dubious advantage of TruYou to keep all of her accounts, emails, and personal information in one place, we lowly students must constantly bounce from site to site to stay on top of our work. First, check webmail, the check ANGEL for homework until you remember that that professor actually uses CANVAS, only to find that they haven't updated it since syllabus week...and on and on it goes. Like Mae's campus tour, we're also all surrounded by entertainment and leisure activities to partake in, though nothing so illustrious as tetherball and self-massages. (Someone should get on that.) Our emails are constantly inundated with late night activities, weekend movies, invites to clubs...and yes, even the Thirsty Thursday parties are always around for us to go ignore our responsibilities for a night.

However, Penn State's campus can often be just as confusing and maze-like as that of the Circle's. Mae is dazed by the amount of activity going on between all of the different buildings, which are spread out and all appear uniform: sleek, modern, and trendily transparent. When I first arruved to start classes, I admit I was a bit daunted by the sprawl of buildings that I was somehow expected to navigate at 8 AM every morning. Though I fortunately had summer session to prepare me for all the walking, I wasn't prepared for the 20-minute walk from East to West campus day after day. It truly feels some days, as Mae would say, "vast and rambling", though after spending several months here it's finally starting to feel like home.

A final connection between the 2 campuses is the widespread community involvement throughout both of them. In Mae's case, the Circle has slogans such as "Community First" and "Participate" to foster a relationship between all employees and encourage productivity. Penn State itself is no stranger to community events, with THON, football games, and even impromptu ones like listening to the Willard Preacher and suffering on a crowded CATA bus bringing us together through shared experiences. (In the bus' case, sometimes closer than we'd like.) These slogans also remind Circlers to be more than just mindless workers, just as our traditions encourage us to go out and get involved.

Many of these experiences and ideologies are universal, existing for both the Circle and Penn State. Like Mae, many of us will initially struggle to adapt to them, though it's only a matter of time before we find ourselves getting comfortable, even if it's in a tiny dorm room instead of a cubicle in California.