I have been working on this post for about 2 years now. 100 reasons why I love St. Thomas! It is not for lack of reasons that it took so long, because I could pretty much go on forever about reasons why I love St. Thomas. It really just took so long because I am a college student! ‘Nuff said! Here it is, my final blog post. As always, email me with any questions about life as a Tommie at schm9587@stthomas.edu and best of luck on your college search!

1. It feels like home. I belong here.

2. Holly, my Admissions counselor, is the best! We are friends and her personal attention and care were a big part of my college decision.

3. Tommie the mascot looks like my cat, Tilly.

4. The beautiful campus! Ah so pretty!

5. Location, location, location! Beautiful, homey neighborhood but the opportunity and excitement of a big city. But still in the beautiful Midwest.

6. The sandcastle thrones down by the river

7. The Catholic Women’s Floor! It is so awesome! Dowling 6 North!

8. The library

9. The hot chocolate in the caf!

10. Purple and Gray school colors!

11. Sand Volleyball

12. Academic Excellence!

13. The fact that I am challenged everyday

14. The beautiful Chapel

15. Getting to go to Daily Mass

16. Everyone here is so nice and Minnesotan!

17. The Arches

18. Tommie Ambassadors

19. Free T-shirts (all the time)

20. Free Food (really all the time)

21. Friends that will last a lifetime (awww)

22. Big Dorms!

23. Rev Dease, the President of St. Thomas, says the first Mass of the school year and it’s amazing

24. We have a Harry Potter Room in our library

25. Sunday morning brunch

26. The gourmet cookies that appear at most gatherings. It’s a two-way tie between chocolate-chocolate-chocolate and white chocolate cranberry.

27. Cheesy Eggs!

28. The view of the city skyline from my dorm room window-talk about picture perfect sunsets!

29. Sometimes we get to go on field trips for class (Geology, COJO 111, museums)

30. I can have a water bottle in class. That’s a big deal.

31. Dinner at the St. Paul’s Outreach houses

32. Target Headquarters only a bus trip away!

33. Food at the Minneapolis campus-make your own stir fry!

34. Tommie Tuesdays

35. Liturgical Choir

37. Seminarians at Football Games

38. The guy the seminarians throw up in the air after we score at football games

39. HOMECOMING!!

40. Candy at the Homecoming Parade

41. Eating gourmet sandwiches in the AARC Fieldhouse during Admissions events

42. Comfy chairs in the library

43. Snow Days (don’t happen very often, but once every 4 or 5 years we get a break!)

44. Voice Lessons with Dede. Except when she makes us talk in alien voices because that is difficult to do. But it’s also pretty hilarious.

45. Snowmen. Especially snowmen families.

46. TommieMedia and its epic greatness

47. Ping pong in the Student Center

48. Study Monday Mass on the quad

49. The happy, helpful, all-around awesome people at the Admissions Office who show future Tommies the greatness that awaits them!

50. My professors who are more than happy to talk to me during office hours and read drafts of my papers until they are sick of my topic. But they still don’t complain!

51. The window table on the fourth floor of the library

52. The yellow leaves on Cleveland that make a yellow-brick road in the spring

53. The actual yellow-brick road painting in the basement of Dowling

54. Intramural soccer-we lost every game (except for one, by forfeit), but we still had fun and got to meet people!

55. The new caf has pie.

56. The new caf also has a soft serve frozen yogurt machine.

57. Getting to have chocolate milk whenever I want!

58. The Christmas Concert of all the choirs and bands

59. Choir trips, especially the international ones that we get to go on every three years!

60. Going on walks along the river with a good friend

61. Running down Summit to the Cathedral-talk about a beautiful route!

62. All of our sidewalks in the quad that go every direction. There is basically never a time when you need to walk on the grass (though that doesn’t always stop us!).

63. The popcorn machine at T’s

64. Playing the silverware game in the Caf. The goal is to get the piece of silverware through the opening without having it touch anything. It’s quite difficult actually.

65. Nutsi/Nertz tournaments!!! (The most intense card game I have ever played)

66. Handing out suckers in the Student Center on Valentine’s Day for the Students for Human Life Club.

67. Listening to a friend’s story of how he and a bunch of his friends go to different burger places and try to complete the eating contests there. For example, at one place they had to eat two double-decker burgers and a large fry. Or maybe it was two fries. All in less than 30 minutes. 7 out of 10 succeeded. I don’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted. I think both.

68. Our weight room

69. The treadmills in the cardio room. I don’t really like treadmills at all but these ones are quite excellent.

70. When professors tell stories of getting an email from a former student saying “I learned this from you and this is how it applies to my life now.” That’s a sign of a great teacher.

71. The opportunity to study in ROME for a semester with the Catholic Studies program

72. Exploring the St. Paul area and eating at random little restaurants that double as convenience stores.

73. Making cookies with friends and using a hair dryer to melt the butter because the bowl was too big to fit in the microwave.

74. Trying to throw my sheets in the laundry and then realizing how difficult it is to make your bed when that bed is lofted. And then deciding that having two sets of sheets maybe wasn’t the worst idea ever, as this minimizes the need to do laundry…

75. Finals week! Really! There is such an energy on campus and you really have a lot of free time on the days you don’t have finals.

76. Singing at Commencement Mass with Liturgical Choir in the amazing choir loft at the Cathedral.

77. Walking to the Grandview Grill for brunch and getting chocolate chip cookie dough pancakes.

78. Walking to Whole Foods and buying ridiculously expensive organic lotion with a friend because she really needs some.

79. Collecting leaves when they turn red

80. There is one professor that I had freshman year and she still remembers my name a year later. She was one of three professors and I was one of 115 students for one semester, so that is extra impressive.

81. This same professor comes to events with her husband and kids. If that’s not a proud Tommie professor, I don’t know what is!

82. The men’s basketball coach is also a psychology professor, and one of the best, so I hear.

83. Whenever the seminarians have candlelight processions to the Mary Garden while singing. It’s so beautiful!

84. I found a gem in the library: a copy of the Imitation of Christ with the translator’s signature and a handwritten note from the translator to a friend on the inside front cover. How cool is that?!

85. The Writing Center and their extreme helpfulness when I was writing a 10 paged research paper on statistics for my Public Policy class.

86. The pens at the Writing Center. They are just so perfect! And free!

87. In the Honors Classes, there is a small budget allotted for treats/breakfast for one day during the semester. One time we got bagels on our Final and another time we all went to Coffee Bene for our class and got free coffee!

88. Tommie Ambassador tour guides. They are faithful, whether rain or shine!

89. The Show’d Up Band which consists of Father David Smith and some other gentlemen, who play bluegrass and other fantastic songs on stringed instruments around campus. They recently performed with the Chamber Singers at one of their concerts.

90. Cheese sticks/cheesy bread at the caf!

91. Flannel Fridays!

92. Racing the slow elevator up 6 flights of stairs in Dowling. The person on foot usually wins.

93. Asking the Catholic Men’s Floor men to come over and help us disassemble our lofts at the end of the year. They were very good at it!

94. The time when there was built-in air conditioning in a room in JRC because someone tried to open the window and accidentally punched a hole in the glass.

95. Public Safety’s general niceness/availability. I always feel safe.

96. The purple bowling balls in the bowling alley

97. The ice cream sundae bar at the Binz

98. Shaking the branches of the flower trees in the spring and standing beneath them to experience the flower petal shower.

99. Evening ice cream outings to Izzy’s and Menchies.

100. Being here has changed my life in the best way possible. I wouldn’t be who I am and I wouldn’t have the future I am heading for if not for St. Thomas. I know I made the right choice!

Bag of frozen peas. Check.

Video camera. Check.

Five Nerf Guns. Check.

One elaborate prank. Coming right up.

Before I delve into the meaning of this very exciting list, I must explain something.

I live in a house of Christian women. We have meals together twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. During these meals, a dear friend of ours, Megan, gets off of work and walks past our house to her car, which is usually parked in our driveway. One Monday night we finished dinner and she hadn’t walked by yet. We decided it would be fun to throw some frozen peas at her from the window (we’re on the second floor of the house. I should also mention that Megan receives love from pranks, so she was not going to be offended at this). We had everything ready and were waiting for her to walk by. One minute, two minutes, five minutes passed. No sign of her. We cleaned up our dishes a little and the next time we looked out the window, she was getting into her car. Foiled! We abandoned our plan.

Well, at least some of us did…

On Thursday, an elaborate prank began brewing in my mind. We could revisit this prank during the Thursday night dinner. But it would include much more than frozen peas…

All day Thursday, I thought. I schemed. I wondered. I imagined. And so it came to be. With the help of the RA of the Catholic Men’s Floor, we acquired five nerf guns. We had three guests over for dinner and all of them agreed to take part in the prank. And so it began.

Scene: Our house. About 6:00 P.M. We finished up our dinner and began to assemble the supplies.

Stage One: A white piece of paper with blue tape, spelling out “Megan”. If you think this sounds creepy, you’re on the right track. The goal was to confuse the prank-ee, to make her wonder what was going on, to prepare her for Stage Two…

Lauren and Jenny: Shhhh, she's coming!Shhhh!

Which was Theresa, one of our housemates (and my roomie!) who stood a the window on the second floor, a bag of frozen peas in hand. Her job was to toss a handful of peas out the window as Megan walked by, and then to duck. Then the prank-ee would be even more confused and wonder what was going on. And then…

Jenny has a bucket on her head. But Lauren and her are ready.

Stage Three: Nerf Gun ambush.

The five of us stood around the corner of the house, nerf guns locked and loaded. When Megan stepped into our line of sight, we attacked! She was caught completely off guard and it was a very successful ambush. Megan loved it and threw the darts back at us, and then we thought it would be fun to shoot Theresa’s car because the darts stuck to her windows pretty well. Fun was had by all AND we got it all on video because Ellie, another housemate, was across the street, hiding in a car, videoing the whole thing. And then she got in on the ambush as well.

Mary, Megan, and Jenny. Look at that happy prank-ee and those happy/crazy pranksters!

The group of pranksters holding the prank-ee. Note also that Theresa is in the upper window, faithfully at her station, peas in hand. So much fun!

So here’s a tip to all you incoming Tommies, the class of 2015. Don’t be afraid to plan some elaborate pranks on your best buddies. And it might be a good idea to add a Nerf gun to your packing list…

In my Philosophy 220 class, Logic, we’ve learned how to make valid arguments and how to use quantificational logic. We’ve also learned how to pull arguments out of english texts which is apparently a good thing to know for law school and for reading anything by St. Thomas Aquinas. I have been blessed to take that class with one of my very best friends, Megan, as well as two other really good friends and a bunch of awesome seminarians!

One of my political science classes was Political Science 205: Public Policy. This class was always interesting. Our teacher was very engaging and we looked at the U.S. government very in-depth and explored the effects of policies on our country. It’s super interesting! We learned about problem definition and how it’s often hard to pinpoint what the actual problem is. For example, imagine there is a child with low test scores. There could be many reasons for this: does he have a learning disability? Is the teacher not so great? Does he have a not-ideal home life? Is he distracted in class because he doesn’t have breakfast? These are the kinds of things we discuss and this class has definitely opened my eyes to the complex problems around us and how we try to solve them.

My other political science class was called Political Thought. I really enjoyed this class because it was a mix of philosophy and political science. We read Plato, Machiavelli, Thucydides and some other ‘ancient’ writers, and then we read contemporary political theorists like John Rawls and Robert Nozick. The discussions in this class were always interesting, especially when we tried to figure out how to make just laws in government when governments were just beginning. It’s a bit harder than you might think! We also talked about morality at the end and wondered how governments can make laws that affect the practice of morals without overstepping its bounds. It’s a pretty fine line, it seems. We didn’t have any tests in this class but we got to write a lot of papers, which I prefer, so I really enjoyed it.

And finally my other philosophy class was actually both philosophy and Catholic Studies: Faith and Doubt. This class was taught by Dr. Rota, a professor I had last semester for Philosophy of the Human Person, 115, which is a gen ed that everyone will take. I highly recommend him. In this class, we explored arguments against the existence of God, such as the Argument from Evil, and then we looked at other philosopher’s writings on the subject, particularly those who did believe in God. We read a lot by one author named Eleanor Stump and sometimes we got to read the Bible for homework, which I thought was pretty cool! At the end we had group presentations and my group presented on the argument from Divine Hiddenness, which is basically: if God exists, why doesn’t He show Himself? We agreed with the philosophers who concluded the following: if He made Himself so apparent that it would be unreasonable to not believe in Him, then He would be suppressing our free will, and He wouldn’t want to do that.

I also read an article by Laura Garcia who wrote about Saint John of the Cross and the Necessity of Divine Hiddenness. She went through St. John of the Cross’ Dark Nights of the Senses/Soul and explained how through trials and suffering, the soul becomes purified and has a greater capacity for God, so God needs to hide Himself at least a little bit in order for this to happen. It was so awesome and interesting and I am so thankful that I was able to take this class!

Overall it’s been such a blessed semester and I must admit I’m a bit sad to go back to Iowa for the summer because I want this semester to last forever! But I know there are other things in store for all of us and so we must go on our separate ways. I will be working at a waterpark (concession stand! woohoo!) in my hometown this summer, saving up money for next semester when I will be in ROME! Until next time, I will be studying away! Feel free to email me with any questions about St. Thomas-such an email would be a welcome study break. Take care everyone, and God Bless you!

I hope everyone is having a restful, blessed break to celebrate the Resurrection of Our Lord! Easter in our family has always been a very joyful celebration with lots of super fun traditions. 

In our immediate family, we have a candy hunt on Easter morning. We go to the Easter Vigil Mass on Saturday night and then, first thing on Sunday morning, the three of us (myself, Lauren, and Michael), race downstairs, snatch our Easter baskets, and run around our house, grabbing all the Easter candy we see (my parents hide it/set it in high places). It’s pretty much a race and Michael usually wins because he is the boy and he’s more aggressive. But it’s okay because we end up trading afterwards (Lauren and I like Kit Kats and Michael likes strawberry Laffy Taffy) so it all works out!

Our family after the Easter Vigil. We are all laughing hysterically in this picture because the camera was on a timer and kept falling and my Mom does a 'pitiful' run from the camera to the couch, as my nephew Jack puts it.

Then, we go to our aunt and uncle’s house in Marshalltown, Iowa, and have a FEAST (this year I got to make Challah bread and cupcakes!), then we have an Easter egg hunt with all of our cousins. We each have 10 eggs and there are 10 cousins (one goes to college in Texas so she couldn’t come back-there are usually 11) so the adults have to hide 100 eggs in the yard! Usually we find almost all of them and then we’ll find another one around Christmas. The chocolate is not-so-good by then.

All of the cousins lined up for the Easter Egg hunt! It felt like the Hunger Games. But everything feels like the Hunger Games once you've seen it.

The terrain for the Easter Egg hunt

My beautiful Grandma and some of us collecting our eggs.

This year was another blessed, beautiful day to spend time with the family we see less and less as we get older. We also watched the Masters, another tradition, which was pretty exciting. In case you didn’t see it, it came down to a face-off between Bubba Watson and Louis Oosthuizen and then Bubba won by one stroke! He had to hit it out of the woods at one point and Louis had a double eagle-the last time anyone got a double eagle at the Masters was in 1935, so it is a big deal!

My lovely cousin Brittany and I!

Action shot of Knockout/Lightning (they call it Lightning in Minnesota). We played basketball for an hour after lunch, another awesome tradition.

Now I am back home with my parents and Lauren and Michael are back at school-they don’t have tomorrow off like we do. I played my mom in ping pong (and barely won!) and we are having popcorn and watching King of Kings, which is a movie about Jesus. It’s a pretty awesome way to end this Easter Sunday. Tomorrow at 10 I have a summer job interview and then at 12:30 I am headed back to St. Thomas! I already miss everyone so I am looking forward to going back, but it has been very nice to be home. Take care, everyone!

What do we do at these meetings? Well, I am going with the Catholic Studies Rome Program, so we get to sit in the beautiful classrooms of Sitzmann and eat excellent pizza from campus. They have fancy chicken and tomato pizza, it’s the bomb!

Beautiful Sitzmann!

We also listen to very nice and smart people from International Education and Catholic Studies who educate us on what to expect, how much everything will cost, what classes we will take, and how much gelato we can afford to consume. They also tell us about dates of travel! In Rome, the semester is a bit later, so we leave at the end of September and get back at the end of January. Myself and two of my best buddies, Megan and Maureen, are hoping to leave EARLY to go to SPAIN to partake in a CAMINO, which is a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St. James! How cool would that be?! We are still figuring out logistics…or we will be figuring them out soon. But we’re basically going and it is going to be so awesome!!!! We hike all day with big backpacks and sandals and we sleep in youth hostiles and go to Mass and converse in Spanish and other fantastic things.

Maureen and I! And picture of Megan will be coming shortly.

This weekend, all of the Fall 2012 study abroad-ers will be having a big Information Party on Saturday morning, and my mom is coming! That will be reassuring seeing as I have a history of booking flights for the wrongs days and leaving my wallet at home…so I am relieved that she will be there. Plus I’ll probably get a free out-to-eat meal out of the visit, which is of course much less awesome than my mom’s presence, but nonetheless always appreciated since I am a poor college student.

I still have to fill out an Italian Visa Application and book a flight, but other than that, the adventure continues on! St. Thomas is excellent at taking care of us as we embark on these foreign seas, so I am not too worried about getting lost in the shuffle or anything. It is a wonderful thing to go to this University!

Meanwhile, Easter Break is just wrapping up and I have about 6 weeks of class left, so I will be happily working and living the joyful life of a Tommie until we meet again. Take care, everyone, and Happy Easter!

Next semester, here's where I'll be!

I ended up sending my Letter to the Editor into our local newspaper and it got in, which is pretty exciting. Here’s the link to it in case you want to see it online, and I’ll also put the text below. St. Thomas has publicly come out in opposition to the Mandate so I am glad to get behind St. Thomas and support the decision! It can be pretty fun to be a semi-informed citizen. Have a great day, everyone!

Mandate is an attack on religion

Lizzy Schmitt

WATERLOO — The Health and Human Services mandate forces all insurance plans to cover sterilization, contraception and abortion-inducing pills. The mandate still includes religious organizations like Roman Catholic hospitals and other companies whose employees are morally opposed to these things. This mandate violates the First Amendment right to the “free exercise” of religion and must be stopped. It is wrong for the government to force anyone to provide something to which one is morally opposed; it’s called the freedom of conscience.

This attack on religion, on morals, on faith, is unprecedented. This is more than abortion or contraception, more than political parties. This is about the fundamental liberty of freedom of religion. The government has gone too far, and we the people need to put a stop to it.

It is time to take action. On Friday, rallies for religious freedom will be held all around the country from noon to 2 p.m. There will be a rally in Davenport, and all of the rally locations can be found at standupforreligiousfreedom.com.

If you cannot attend a rally, you can write to Rep. Bruce Braley, Sen. Charles Grassley or Sen. Tom Harkin to urge them to stand up for religious freedom. The time to act is now.

My Grandpa is the former head of a construction company. He’s Mr. Fix-it and we all received pocket knives when we turned 12. Just today he was soldering his pipes together with a blow torch because they were leaking. He’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy and he’s a bit difficult to describe. He just says what he thinks and usually it is hilarious. He’s grumpy in a good-natured, joking way. So here are some of my favorite Grandpa-isms:

Scene: We are playing cards (as always) and Grandpa didn’t deal enough cards to everyone.

My brother Michael: “Grandpa, you’re so good at dealing.” (sarcasm)

Grandpa (with his head down, smirking): Shuttup.

Scene: We are still playing cards and Michael wants to go use Grandpa’s computer. He asks him for his password.

Grandpa, completely serious: Claw hammer 2.

And then we all laugh hysterically. What a weird password! Only a handyman would think of that.

Other sayings: “Great Lands of Fire!” (instead of great balls of fire)

(imagine an exasperated tone) “You buy em the books, send em to school and they tear out the pages!”

My mom remarked that some guy in a picture had long legs. Grandpa: “Long enough to touch the ground!”

While we’re playing cards, I accidentally give mom a card that makes her get 3 of a kind and therefore saves her a bunch of points. Grandpa scolds me for giving her the card.

I say: “Well what do you want me to do, hang onto it and have 10 extra points?”

Grandpa: “Yes. Eat it! For the cause!”

(he is a former Marine)

And so these are my Grandpa-isms. Who needs Hawaii when you have him to keep you entertained? I love you Grandpa!

Grandpa with my sister Lauren and I. We were teasing him for having his eyes shut in pictures so he's making sure they're open in this one.

Grandpa and I!

I hope everyone out there is having a great spring break, or had a great spring break. Can’t wait to get back for the last quarter of sophomore year!

I took the liberty of typing up the very scene. If you haven’t seen the movie, 1. you should and 2. I will try to sum up what brings this scene about: Metroman, the superhero, has been good all of his life and Megamind, the villain, has been evil all of his life. Metroman was tired of the same old charade, as you will read below. So, during one of the usual fights with Megamind, he decided to fake his own death. His monologue begins while he, with his super-speed, takes a break during one of their battles.

Metroman: “So, using my super-speed, I decided to go clear my head.

Then I realized. We had done this same silly charade our entire lives! I tried to get my mind off how I was feeling, but I just felt stuck. I began to realize, despite all my powers, each and every citizen of Metro had something I didn’t: a choice.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve always had to be what the city wanted me to be. But what about what I wanted to do? Then it suddenly hit me!

I do have a choice! I can be whatever I want to be! No one said this hero thing had to be a lifetime gig! It can’t just quit, either. That’s when I got the brilliant idea to fake my death.”

If you watch this scene in context, it is much more exciting (around the 1:08 time), but you can get the picture from these little lines. In my Political Theory class we are reading Plato’s Republic and on Friday, our professor, Dr. Maloney, was wearing his Socrates hat and getting us to think about what a state should actually do.

In the book Plato’s Republic, Socrates just introduced something called “The Myth of the Metals.” Basically he wants to trick the people of Athens to make the most efficient city state ever. When everyone is born, they will be either gold, silver, or bronze, depending on their talents, and the gold and silver people will become Guardians (protectors of the city) and Leaders while the bronze will become the merchants and farmers. People are sorted based on their talents and work ethic and general smartness. We were trying to figure out what was wrong with this, and the  main objection we came up with is that a lack of choice makes you unhappy.

This movie proves our point exactly! Why else would a superhero not want to be good anymore if not for the simple fact that he never really wanted the whole superhero gig in the first place? It is not inconceivable to think that this is transferable to ancient Greece. A Guardian might rebel against being a Guardian not because it’s a bad thing, but because he or she simply never wanted it. And that would be enough to cast doubt on the whole system!

Who would've though you two

had so much in common??

And so, dear readers, take heart in two things: 1. the rich liberal arts program here at St. Thomas (namely the philosophy classes) truly prepare you for a lifetime of learning and 2. never underestimate the lesson of a good animated movie, even if it is directed towards 10 year-olds.

One of the lessons I have learned since coming to college is that it’s okay to disagree with your professors on their views about different things. This was and continues to be a bit of a difficult lesson to learn for me personally because I tend to want to agree with everyone and to make friends rather than rile people up! But, as I am majoring in politics and religion, the two things you don’t talk about at the dinner table (so they say), it seems that these dreamy days of peaceful agreement are numbered.

I am taking two political science classes this semester and both of them are teaching me how to respectfully disagree and assert my own opinion. Just today my professor was suggesting that in the democracy of American politics, the middle class was tyrannical, and, though I could see the point somewhat, I just found myself in strong disagreement and I was able to politely ask clarification questions and form my own belief. This was a big step for me because in my fallen human nature, I am still working on separating the political views the person holds from the person’s actual character. Both of my professors are very good about telling us it’s okay to disagree, and one even said she would be worried if we did actually agree with everything she said, which was reassuring.

Another example of politely disagreeing has been through the HHS mandate that is currently taking up quite a bit of airtime in the news. Through signing petitions, emailing my representatives and, of course, praying, I’ve been able to join with thousands of other people and make my voice heard, putting those political science classes to work! There is even a potential for a peaceful protest at the St. Paul capitol next month.

Here’s St. Thomas’ statement about the HHS mandate from the University’s Facebook wall:

“Thank you everyone for sharing your voice with us. This comment comes from Father John Malone, vice president for mission at St. Thomas.

As a Catholic institution, the University of St. Thomas objects to the Department of Health and Human Services regulation because it intrudes on religious liberties guaranteed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As a religiously affiliated organization, we ought to have the freedom to make our own decisions on such matters.

The university supports the position that has been taken on this matter by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, the Catholic Health Association and Catholic Charities U.S.A..

There have been recent developments in the controversy and the university is following them closely.”

All in all, college has been a very great time for me to explore the wonderful political system of the good ol’ USA! Time will tell if I get any better at peacefully disagreeing with my professors and classmates…it either has to happen now or after I graduate!

Take care, guys, and feel free to email me at schm9587@stthomas.edu with any questions about the wonderful life as a Tommie.

Iowa hosts the first caucus in all of the nation, so there is a lot of media coverage. Iowans get to give the first glimpse of who the candidate might be, and caucuses continue throughout the country during the year until the party decides on one candidate. This was my first caucus ever, since now I am old enough to vote, and it was so much fun! I am from Black Hawk County, and our caucus location was at the University of Northern Iowa UNI-dome, which is an indoor stadium where all the sporting events take place. It was a huge gathering with somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 people and two presidential candidates, Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich, came and spoke. The other candidates were in Des Moines, Iowa because that was where the media was, and since there were interviews after the caucus, they didn’t have to drive back to Des Moines like Michele and Newt.

We met in our Ward and Precinct, so it was all the registered Republicans in our neighborhood. The caucus is not mandatory but people still go because it is exciting. Each candidate had a chance to talk, or someone talked in their place. We nominated people in our precinct for positions to go to the State Convention for the Republican Party, then we voted for whichever candidate we wanted.

I am a big supporter of Rick Santorum, a presidential candidate from Pennsylvania, so I voted for him. My mom and sister did, too, and my dad and brother voted for Mitt Romney. Here is a picture of the ballots! These ballots are actually from my friend Isabel’s family. Two of them voted for Rick Santorum, two for Newt Gingrich, and one for Ron Paul.

Lime green sheets for voting!

After the caucus, we went to McDonalds randomly and got some ice cream. I don’t recommend the egg nog shake, it is kind of strange, but strawberry is always a winner! Then we went home and waited for the results to come in. By 10 p.m. there was about 92% of precincts reporting and there was a super close tie between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Then I went to bed, but the final results came in during the wee hours of the morning and Mitt Romney won by 8 votes! It’s the closest caucus ever!

Now the candidates are off to New Hampshire and South Carolina to continue to campaign for the nomination. It will be an exciting time! I’m so blessed to be able to go back to Iowa and take part in such an exciting tradition. I also got to shake hands with Minnesota’s own Michele Bachmann, who is super tiny in person! And also very pretty. She decided to end her presidential campaign as she didn’t do so well in Iowa (she pretty much got last place, if you don’t count John Huntsman, who hardly got any votes), so it was fun to meet her while she was still in the running.

Take care guys! Happy voting!