Resident: Matthre Hamilton
House: Williams-Pilot
I moved into my house this semester without knowing how I was going to cohabit with 16 other college boys in one house, but now I know, with the right organization and people that getting along with people from different backgrounds in the same house can be easy and beneficial. I have even found myself friends with everyone in the house and we go out and hangout all together as a house. One would think there would be one or two people that I wouldn’t like/didn’t like as much, but I’m happy to admit that this is not the case in my house, I like everyone in my house and I hang out with all of them. While I might be a little more distracted from my studies as an engineer sometimes (an offer to play Mario Party is hard to turn down) a big part of my mental healthiness I can accredit to the wonderful friends I have made at SSF.
Before I went to SSF I also did not have very healthy food habits, I would eat out a lot and have a hamburger almost every week at a Wendy’s. Therefore, I probably weighed more than I should have, around 180 pounds. And when I heard of the “freshman 15”, the common occurrence of freshmen gaining quite a bit of weight the first year of college due to stress/eating habits, I was very worried for my health. If I gained 15 pounds, that would almost put me at 200 pounds which I really did not want to happen. Thankfully, I found upperclassmen who worked out at least 3 times a week and I started eating healthier foods cooked by the house, so I lost 5 pounds so far plus gaining some extra muscle due to some of the weight training I do at the gym. I’m even now considering joining a hip-hop fitness class with couple other underclassmen, however I have yet to decide if I have the time to do hip hop fitness every week, since I have a rough schedule consisting of Calculus and Chemistry.
Having people to look out for you and give you good college advice is essential to a successful college experience in my opinion. In SSF I get plenty of college advice and tips from the upperclassmen who have already been through it all. I already have made a few made a few mistakes in college so far: I didn’t study until the last second for my first exam, I didn’t have my resume up in time to apply to an engineering group, and I didn’t bring a suit initially. However, I learned from all of these mistakes, and the chemistry test mistake would have been much worse if my fellow friends in SSF did not wake me up and make me realize that college tests, especially in UF are actually a whole lot more difficult than a high school test. If I wasn’t friends with the upperclassmen at UF, I probably wouldn’t have caught the mistakes I made this semester and I would probably have made the same mistakes next semester. Therefore, I am getting a better education and developing professionally better in SSF than I would living anywhere else.
