With a school-canceling cold snap, burst pipes and flooding, LSU’s spring semester started strangely. Now that class has been back for nearly a month, the Reveille interviewed students to find out what they did over winter break and how they’re settling in.
Some traveled home for the holidays, near and far.
Animal sciences freshman Tamia Thomas returned to Pennsylvania. She spent time with her family, she said, and stayed up late into the night talking with her sister; it’d been so long since they saw each other in person.
This semester, Thomas said she’s looking forward to the weather.
“The energy here is more vibrant and up during the spring semester,” she said.
Freshman Sunny Day also went home for winter break, but for her, the trek was much shorter. Day is originally from New Orleans; her parents still live in the Garden District home she grew up in.
She said her favorite part of the holiday was reading with her boyfriend beneath her favorite tree in City Park.
“It’s really big, and it’s been there my whole life,” she said, smiling. “The park’s right down the street from my house, so I’ve like grown up there.”
The tree is an oak, a lot like the ones that decorate LSU’s campus, Day said
“The sun just always comes through it perfectly every time I’m there,” she said.
Day, a French and English double major, said she’d just been accepted into one of LSU’s study abroad programs when she spoke with the Reveille.
Next summer, she’ll go to a small town in the French Alps’ Ubaye Valley, called Barcelonnette. There, she’ll earn credit for two French courses by working in a local small business, she said; past students worked in chocolate shops, book stores and bicycle shops.
The town of Barcelonnette was founded in 1231; today, fewer than 3,000 people live there.
“It really seems like a sweet community,” Day said. “And that’s like what drew me to it.”
Over the course of the spring semester, she’ll meet with the faculty who run the program and the students who’ve been accepted, she said.
Psychology junior Parker Zito had just returned from a study abroad program when he spoke with the Reveille.
For the last five months, Zito lived in Marburg, Germany, a university town about an hour north of Frankfurt. He said he wasn’t able to take any psychology classes while he was there; instead, Zito attended two German classes, an English class and another class on Israel and Palestine.
Zito said after a month or two in Germany, he began to feel less like a tourist and more like a resident. By that time, he had an ID and all his papers. Coming back to the U.S. after five months, he said, was a “reverse culture shock.”
“I got adjusted to one thing and then, coming back, had to readjust to the other,” he said.
Zito said he’d relied on public transportation in Marburg, and it was a relief to have his car back. He also said his stomach took some time to readjust; the food in Germany was less “processed.”
Wildlife ecology junior Gabby Milton also did some adjusting over the break.
“I got my life back together,” she said.
Milton’s a transfer student. Before coming to LSU, she attended Baton Rouge Community College online. Fall 2023 was her first semester at LSU, and her first semester of in-person college. Milton said the change was challenging for her.
She had to relearn how to study, how to take notes in class and how to use Moodle, which took about half the semester, she said.
Over winter break, like Thompson, Milton caught up on the things she’d been putting off.
“I went to the gynecologist,” she said with a laugh.
Milton had been too busy during the fall semester to go to the doctor, she said.
Milton also said her Baton Rouge apartment complex had been invaded by Zydeco hockey players over the break.
A new hockey team formed in Baton Rouge in 2023—almost 20 years after the city’s first hockey team, the Kingfish, moved to Victoria, British Columbia.
Milton said two of the Zydeco players moved into the two apartments on either side of her. One day they happened to come into her work, and they hit it off.
Later that day, Milton said she and her friends decided to go to The Queen casino with the hockey players on the spur of the moment.
“It was like, I know I’m about to start school,” Milton said, “so I know I have to have a good time.”
While Milton’s LSU journey was just beginning this school year, kinesiology major Tommy Nguyen’s was coming to a close.
Nguyen’s a senior. He only has a few months left before graduation, and he said he’s still not sure exactly what he wants to do after.
As a kinesiology major, he studied on the pre-physical therapy track.
One of his classes this semester is an English course, he said, and for some reason there are a handful of other pre-PT kinesiology seniors in there with him.
On the first day, his professor had each student talk about their major and their plans for the future.
Nguyen said most of the other kinesiology seniors had already applied for physical therapy school, but the professor hadn’t gotten to ask him about his plans yet.
“I don’t really know what I’m gonna say,” Nguyen said, looking down at his feet.
Gap-year possibilities came to him. Nguyen said he wanted to take time away from school when he was done with LSU, to get some kind of job, some kind of experience, but he didn’t know what.
“It feels like I’m growing up fast,” Nguyen said, “and I’m not 100% ready for it.”
Memorial Tower, viewed through a window in Hill Memorial Library on Feb. 2, 2024, on LSU's campus in Baton Rouge, La.
