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Meet John
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Meet John
Background
- Hometown: Holland, MI
- High School: West Ottawa High School
- Year: Sophomore
- Major: Creative Writing
- Minor: Philosophy
Advice for Freshman
Live on campus your first year, and take some risks. Live community style if you're used to being alone, and live suite style if you want to get to know a few people really well. Take a few classes outside of your majors just for fun, college can't be all work!
About John
: I was born in Lansing, MI on a sweltering afternoon at the end of July. I didn’t live there, though, and my first (and second, and third) home was in Midland, MI. I moved to Colorado for a summer, but then it was back to Midland. My dad took a job in Holland as a counselor at West Ottawa High school, and when I was four, going on five, we moved to what I still consider my hometown. Holland is relatively small, and doesn’t have a thriving night life or anything, but I’m still very glad I grew up there, as I had a lot of time to myself to read, draw, play video games, and just explore my interests. Elementary school was relatively uninteresting, but Middle school was awesome. I continued to read, continued to learn about things that interested me, but started playing music and listening to a lot of music too, learning about the wonders of punk, jazz, and epic fantasy metal.
Anyway, High School was where I flourished, getting really involved with my HS band program, rocking out on my tenor saxophone, enjoying my classes and making lots of friends. I was involved in things like West Ottawa’s Gay-Straight Alliance club, I helped found the first Roleplayer’s Guild for nerdy people like me, did Jazz band, Pep band, Marching band, theatre, learned how to speak French and Russian fluently, and on the side, wrote a lot of stories. See, I love making people laugh, and one of the best ways to do that is through storytelling. Along with my love of writing, it seemed natural that I’d major in creative writing.
So I came in as a history major. I’ve always loved History, and I heard that WMU had a fantastic History department (which they do) and thought I’d come up on a tour, since I figured I should see the colleges I applied to. The tour totally blew me away, and I knew I was coming to Western for sure. Western excels in all the departments I was interested in, namely history, theatre, music, philosophy, foreign languages, and writing. Eventually, the Medallion Competition came around, and I very luckily scored that, and there was no way my parents, though adamant fans of MSU, could say no to a free education at a fantastic school.
Anyway, now I’m here at Western, and it’s so much better than I could have ever built up in my imagination (which, in the doldrums of High School, I did.) I found out that I couldn’t deny my love for literature anymore and fully embraced my major change after a semester. I spend a lot of my time writing, but I still make sure to keep up with my old hobbies, namely reading books or comics, playing video games or paper and pencil roleplaying games, writing music and playing it too, as well as hang out with my friends. College is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me, and I’m sure it’ll continue to be totally awesome.