Dear Malcolm Letter

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