Dear Malcolm,
My name is
Janessa Schwallie, and I am a mechanical engineering major. I grew up out of
state in Buffalo, New York, however within the past month, my mom and I moved
into a neighborhood right outside the town in Mooresville, North Carolina. I
decided upon engineering as a plan of study not only because I enjoy problem
solving (I brought two books full of Sudoku puzzles to my dorm), but also
because my past calculus and physics teachers were always so welcoming and made
my classes a lot of fun. That being said, I’m looking forward to all the new
experiences that college has to offer, from expressive and creative courses
(like this writing class) to clubs and sports games.
I have a pretty small family – my parents
are divorced, so it’s just me and my mom, my grandma, and my aunt. I don’t have
any siblings or cousins, but I’ve always grown up with a Bichon Frise in my
house (I’m pretty sure I’ve had four in total!). I’ve spent almost all my life
so far in Buffalo up until this summer, and North Carolina is a pretty big
change, the most obvious being the weather. Last year November was probably one
of the biggest snow storms I’ve seen in a while. I woke up one Friday to over
six feet of snow in my driveway, and when a snowplow came to clear it away, the
plow got stuck and a tow truck had to come to pull it out. Needless to say, I
didn’t have school the following week. I’m used summers that have a max
temperature in the mid-80s, so I’m going to have to get used to the humidity in
Charlotte, but I think I’ll be able to handle it!
I went to a
small private high school up in Buffalo, and I had roughly one hundred other
seniors in my graduating class. Although I played a lot of sports in middle
school, from synchronized swimming to basketball, I stayed away from the (very)
competitive atmosphere of my school’s sports teams, instead playing intramural
volleyball for two years. My junior year I participated in Science Olympiad and
worked in a small team to build a wireless robotic arm for an event. The club
that I enjoyed the most, however, was the Team American Rocketry Challenge club
I joined my senior year. I loved learning about the mechanics behind building a
rocket – for weeks I helped with cutting the fins and saw dusting them down,
gluing in the nose cone, and programming a small device called an altimeter to
record the height the rocket would travel. Despite it being the first year my
school offered the club, the hard work of my teammates and I qualified us to
compete in the national competition in Washington, DC this past spring, and I
appreciated every second of it.
My grandparents
having had moved down to North Carolina about nine years ago, I’ve spent most
of my summers since sixth grade around Charlotte and the nearby towns visiting
them. The summers after my seventh and eighth grades I spent several weeks at
UNCC in camps that several of my grandparents’ neighbors recommended. Both my
mom and I really loved the towns and weather in North Carolina and had planned
to move from New York for a while now, however since I wanted to finish in my
high school in Buffalo, I didn’t officially move to Mooresville until this
summer, despite having already come to visit my grandparents for most summers
and holidays. When it came to applying to colleges last year, I immediately
thought of UNCC because of how much fun I had at the summer camps, and when I
visited for a tour, I fell in love with it because of the campus and how close
it is to the city.
For the most part, I’m a very organized
person – I love using storage bins and I try to keep my bookshelves at home in alphabetical
order. When it comes to making plans to hang out with friends, I tend to be the
one to organize a night out for laser tag or a movie. I also really like to
bake desserts (I made a ton of Oreo cake pops for move-in day last week) and make crepes for my
family on the weekends.
I’m always up
for trying new things – from different foods (I tried pasta with squid once on
a school trip to France) to new types of music. Although I would consider
myself more of a left brain person, I’m looking forward to explore my creative
side in this writing course!
Janessa
Schwallie
