My first year at Dartmouth was anything but ordinary. I left for spring break after my second term and haven’t returned on-campus due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. And although unusual, 2019-2020 has inspired my exploration of different types of writing. I started in the fall, a lost little fish swimming in the big Ivy-league pond, exploring existential questions and tangential religious beliefs and parallels to pop culture in my Indian Buddhism class. I also wrote scientific briefings for the online as well as print issues of the Dartmouth Journal of Science. I also participated in Dartmouth’s First-Year Writing Program, in which I developed diverse skills ranging from formal literary analysis to interviewing and ethnographic journalism. I formally interviewed famous authors, artists, and musicians, looking for threads of what made their genius – but also what made them human, and I found that these two aspects were inextricably linked. Maybe lockdown prompted me to try to find answers to some of life’s complexities, maybe I have something of human connection for which to thank this year.