As a kid, I hunted earthworms, sailed the high seas through adventure novels, and spent countless hours chasing my friends down on a glossy maroon bike. My days were filled with sunshine, my nails caked with dirt, and the occasional scraped knee from tragic bike crashes. In an attempt to put my energy to productive use, my parents convinced me to take up the guitar, selling me on the vision that I would be shredding and playing insane riffs in days.

However, I soon realized that I’d never be the next Slash and my interest in the guitar quickly started to slump. As I grew frustrated, I refused to practice and the guitar would often collect dust after weeks of not being used. I tried multiple hobbies, including guitar, martial arts, and photography, but nothing seemed to stick and I found it difficult to maintain the discipline to practice and improve at my hobbies.

As I grew older and started to listen to classic rock, I picked the guitar back up and it became an outlet for my boredom and creative desires during the pandemic. Over the next two years, the guitar became my new best friend – I would spend 3-4 hours a day chugging through artists I admired, including Led Zeppelin, Dire Straits, and The Beatles. During high school, I also started to find a passion for classical economics, which meant that afternoons on the guitar turned into late nights reading through old books I salvaged from my local library.

But when I arrived to college in Houston, which was over 1000 miles from my home in Virginia, I suddenly had a major lifestyle shift. I had to pare down my book collection from 20 to three, and couldn’t bring my guitar due to flight luggage restrictions. Even if I wanted to continue my hobbies, I found that classes and navigating life by myself swept me up and led me to instead spend hours in the library, at dinner with all of my friends, or camping out in the laundry room to secure a washing machine. This really hit home when I went home and picked up my guitar, only to find that I was struggling through warm-ups and that the finger callouses that I had worked so hard for had disappeared. And as I further adjusted to college, I found that my hobbies got even further stamped out by preprofessional endeavors and my quest for internships. My mindset slowly shifted and I started to see non-career-oriented activities as a waste of time and energy.

I’ve really only begun to piece together this entire story – where I lost my hobbies – over the last month or so, as internship and job recruiting has ended for the rest of my time in college, and I find myself with an excess of free time that used to be filled by networking, info sessions, interview preparation, and late night stressing. In the first few weeks after I signed my offer, I was often rotting in bed staring at the wall, or taking pointlessly long walks on campus. The constant running around for networking and internship recruiting gave me something to do and helped me feel productive in the “cult of busyness” that’s pervasive at Rice. But I quickly began to rediscover myself and realized that my excess of free time meant that I had time to take on opportunities and fun events that I had to pass up on earlier. For example, when running into old friends, I was able to spend the time to catch up and even make plans with them, allowing me to maintain connections with people I cared about but that I didn’t see very often. And while my earlier adventures on campus had mostly been near my residential college (Martel), the Academic Quad, or near the business and economics buildings, I pushed myself to study in new places and have learned to appreciate more of the beautiful Rice campus. I’ve also enjoyed exploring Houston, and every Saturday I hop off at a new place along the Red Line – so far, I’ve been to a restaurant in Midtown, a downtown coffee shop, and Houston’s historic Julia Ideson Library. My hobbies have also started to slowly come back into the picture. I enjoy spending my days trying out new coffee orders at Chaus or Brock while listening to classic rock, retaining my love for guitar. I’ve also been listening to new artists in blues, jazz, and hip-hop, and when I get home, I fully intend on re-earning my callouses.

Looking back, the most rewarding part of my recruiting process was definitely the job offer, but also partially the fact that I’ve gotten to rediscover myself. By losing a big part of my identity, I got to grow up a bit and re-calibrate myself to my interests, rather than sticking with the same routine of hobbies and activities that I enjoyed before. In a way, my shift represents a return to my roots as an explorer – in rediscovering myself, I ditched the practice routines I used to follow for hours and instead discovered new parts of the world around me (although this time its coffee shops and musicians instead of earthworm colonies and creeks).