Misericordia University is full of amazing stories to tell, and our students are willing to share them! Continue on our journey across campus to meet some of our unique students! This week, our journey takes us to the dancing of Jessica Hanly, the transition to graduate school for Johnna Miller and the liberation of new hair through Asia Thompson. Stay tuned for next week's issue!

Dance has been a very good stress relief for me. It’s a lot of fun and I’ve made a lot of great friends through it. It’s a good break from school and work and life in general. My last competition really affected me. We were on the floor and looking up at the lights. I just remember thinking, 'Remember this for the rest of your life because you are never going to do this again, this is your last competition.' I just kind of laid there and soaked it all in...then continued to dance, of course.

-Jessica

It was definitely eye-opening, transitioning from a business undergraduate to a physical therapy major. At this point in the game, I’m in my second year of graduate school and I don’t think I’ve had a free moment since I’ve started PT school. Everything becomes so fast paced and it becomes a completely different dynamic entirely, especially my involvement in my community and social aspects. In my undergraduate, I was overly involved in everything. I was a leader in multiple groups, and that was something I loved: event planning, organizing, fundraising. Then when you get to PT school, there’s very little time for something like that, so I think my current struggle is now that I’m comfortable with being in grad school, it’s trying to reestablish myself. That I can do this, and be a leader. How can I get involved to give back to my community now that I got my feet wet and I know I can juggle everything. IT was just such a big stepping stone and it was something I had to learn to acquire and then overcome in order to balance everything within my life equally.

-Johnna

I was twenty when I shaved all of my hair off. It all started because my hair was really long and I decided to cut my ponytail off at home, and I’m like ‘oh yeah I kinda like this’ so I decided to go to the beauty parlor to get a Halle Berry cut, like one of those really short haircuts, So when I got there the woman gave me the haircut and I was like ‘oh you might as well keep going.’ So she ended up shaving it all off. Like boy short. It was kind of liberating because then I wasn’t attached to my hair anymore. So then I got on the train and went home and then my mom came home. She cried for about an hour, asking why I cut all my hair off. And I couldn’t come up with an answer for a while. I said ‘I don’t know, I just felt like it,’ but then I realized that society puts this pressure on women to look pretty all the time and to be attached to the hair that grows out of your head, and for it to look a certain way, not how it looks when it comes out of your scalp. So I realized I was really happy I shaved all my hair off because it gave me a connection to my hair that I hadn’t had before. I saw it at every stage of growth and realized what texture it was without heat damage. It was a liberating experience.

-Asia