Occidental College
Campus Conversations
Living la Vida Loca
Blogger: Enrique Aguilar
Picture this, you are lying down on your twin bed, listening to music, and relaxing because midterm week (I’ll talk about that later…oyy) is almost over. Sounds relaxing, right? Right. Now, picture yourself arriving at LAX with one of your parents with no hotel room reserved, no transportation, nor even the slightest 
clue of where to go. Sounds scary, right? RIGHT. Exactly two months ago, that was me... and my mom. My dad decided to let us discover on our own that we needed him to plan out the entire trip for us. Given that my mother and I are both the most stubborn people on this planet, we decide to embark on a fun journey to California on our own. As soon as we stepped out of the airport we felt the warm air and saw the beauty of LA that everyone speaks of (lets ignore the smog for a second). After about two minutes of living on cloud 9 (smog), we were hit by reality and realized that we did not have a hotel reservation or any way of getting around.
8 taxi rides, 4 hotel rooms, 10 calls, and a 30-minute walk in 94-degree weather later, I finally arrived at my new home. In case you were wondering, my name is Enrique Aguilar and I’m a first year here at Occidental. I come from Highland Park, which is a suburb right outside of Chicago, Illinois. Surprisingly, there are A LOT of people from Chicago this year so I love to have the casual “Chicago is the best” conversation with my fellow Chicagoans. The rest of my time 
I take advantage of the diversity here at Oxy and learn about everyone else’s hometown, culture, beliefs, etc. I’d like to think I’m open to talk about pretty much anything, so the conversations here are very interesting. For example, the other day I went to an open house for a new club starting at Oxy called “I <3 Good Sex”, need I say more?
Anyway, lets get to the good stuff. Why Oxy? The better question is, why not Oxy? The weather is amazing, campus is picture perfect, faculty are amazing, everyone is nice; I can go on forever. I did not need these 60 days to know this much about Oxy, as soon as we finished the tour last summer I was sold. It’s funny to see the tours happening on my way to or from class thinking that at least one person amongst the group is thinking the same way I did last year. I remember coming with the Schuler Scholar Program as one of the many college trips we had over the course of tw
o years. I had my eye set on Pomona College before coming to see the schools in California and did not expect to even care about any of the other schools we were going to visit on the trip. The first school we visited was Occidental College and from then on it became my number one; I couldn’t be happier with my choice.
Time to get serious, midterms. Now that we are eight weeks into college it is time to take my first set of college midterms. So far, I’ve already taken my Psychology and Theories of Sexuality exams and am pretty confident that I did well on them. I had an “ah-ha!” moment when I realized that in order to do well in college you actually have to study beforehand, so I spent all of Tuesday studying for them. (I’m taking this studying thing one step at a time.) Arrested Development was filming on campus and it was a little distracting, but hey, I can’t complain. That’s all I got for now, I have to start studying for my CSP exam. Can’t wait to write some more in the future! Wish me luck!