Dedication
...ities. Unfortunately all good things come to an end some time and she quit gymnastics. Until further review, this seems completely uncharacteristic. When asked why she ended her gymnastics career she explained, “In a period of a year and a half I dislocated my wrist, hurt my knee (partially torn meniscus), and got a herniated disc in my back. When I went to the doctor for my back he said that as a 16-year-old girl I had the back of a 90-year-old man. He also said that if I hurt my back again, I could do permanent damage. Knowing the damage I could do to my body eliminated most of the fun in the sport. I had always promised myself that when I wasn’t having fun I would stop, so I did.” For a span of about a month she did not know what to do with her time, so she joined student council and the diving team while getting more involved in NHS. Heather works too hard at life to fail, so she completed all of those tasks with diligence and the results showed. She ran numerous successful events with NHS and her student council experience helped her learn how to accomplish things with a group. Her diving career became a success just as her gymnastics did earlier. During her second year of competitive diving she set the school record for points won in a meet. She worked hard throughout high school and finished with “a 3.9 something.” All of her work certainly paid off when she got into the then college of her dreams, the University of Richmond. “I was accepted early decision into Richmond and went there. For a year.” Heather fell in love with the campus and she had the opportunity to dive at a top college. I was ordered to not retrieve the mail for an entire week while she awaited her response for admission. At first she loved everything there; she had the standard awestruck freshman feeling. Eventually that feeling subsided and she saw the same stereotypical people all around her. My sister and I shared the same perspective that the people seemed fake and robotic. BMW and Abercrombie must have some partnership with the University because I could not walk five feet without seeing either company’s insignia. Heather described the weekends as “drunken orgies”. “The people were not very friendly and they were very conscious of their economic class. I felt I didn’t fit in socially and I had not met very many friends. The classes were very good, and I enjoyed the professors, but I wasn’t having fun. I didn’t want to pay $30,000 to have an ‘okay’ time.” Once again, Heather was not having a good experience. She dove that year for the Richmond Spiders and helped the swimming and diving team become Atlantic 10 champions. She contemplated what to do throughout her entire second semester. Her resolve shone through when she decided to finish the year there and put some sort of closure on her time there. Richmond showed Heather what she did not want to be, a careless valley girl with permanent access to Daddy’s credit card. She decided to change scenes. Heather had not enjoyed her college career so far and decided to look for greener pastures. She transferred to the University of Delaware for her sophomore year and is currently enrolled there for her senior year. When asked about the differences between her experiences at both schools she replied, “I am much happier here at Delaware. I have met a group of friends who I really like and have become involved in other activities such as my job as a [resident advisor] and [hall director] as well as Relay For Life.” It seems to me that Heather feels she needs to do as much work as she possibly can. She currently works as a hall director at the University. This job requires her to supervise a group of RAs (she has seven) and also supervise the buildings (she has two). All in all she needs to ensure that about three hundred students follow the schools...