Tommie Ashlyn Hill, the name that has followed me around for 21 years.

The name that would

make people do a double take whenever a teacher called role; the name that is written on my birth
certificate in Gainsville, GA on March 30, 1993, and the name that will be written on my diploma in May.
That name has taken me from GA to VA to Richmond to Chesterfield to Midlothian and finally to
Bridgewater.
At a young age I had a passion for learning that stemmed from my curious nature. That curious
nature landed me in a Governor school for Pre Engineering in my High School years. I learned how to
work well with a team, how to plan my time properly, and how to use a band saw, which is one of my
favorite skills. I learned all this by doing multiple projects ranging from building a chair out of just
cardboard, to building a hoover board. When that journey was close to an end I couldnt wait to start my
next one at Bridgewater College.
In the beginning; Bridgewater wasnt in my view. I was ready to leave the nest and fly miles and
miles away to become an independent person. Sadly my parents didnt have the same idea, so my hunt
for Virginia schools began. I went to big schools like Virginia Tech, and realized that wasnt for me. Then I
tried Liberty and that wasnt right for me either. On one hot summer day in 2011, I finally found my
home. When I first saw Bridgewaters campus I fell in love instantly. The nice stone buildings, the
beautiful trees on the mall, the open and welcome feeling that the campus itself gave off amazed me. I
was only on campus for 5 minutes and I knew it was for me. After that summer visit, I knew I would
spend the next four years of my life preparing for the real world there. In the beginning, I didnt know
anything about Bridgewater, like the fact that it was a Liberal Arts school or that it was a dry campus. I
didnt know what either of those things meant, but I found out soon enough. I didnt think going to a
liberal arts school was important but as I look back I see that it gave the school a sense of togetherness.
The small classes, and small community grew on me and made me feel important. I was Tommie Ashlyn
Hill at Bridgewater, not just a number like in big schools.

In this reflection I will show you the journey and growth that I have had at Bridgewater College,
and the core values that I learned along the way. I will focus on my intellectual growth and discovery of
my true love Psychology and an old love Art. And thanks to the liberal arts I was able to do both and
bring them both together. Ill also focus on my academic citizenship and how that helped me see that I
need a sense of community responsibility. Another core value is the physical and mental wellness of
each and every student and graduate. As college students this is something that many of us struggled
with, but with the help of Randy Hook and the Wellness class we were able to develop some good
behaviors. In the beginning I didnt really understand how important it was to go to a Liberal Arts school,
but after 4 years of convocations and multiple general education classes I finally see why. I like to
believe that I have become a well-rounded person because of Bridgewater. If I hadnt had the chance to
branch out beyond my major I never would have been able to problem solve and learn to work well with
a community. The convocations showed me how many things were actually out there in the world, to be
completely honest my eyes were closed when I went in college. Our sense of community encouraged
me to branch out and learn about my fellow classmates and foreign exchange students. I started to see
that there was way more than what my little neighborhood in Midlothian, VA had to offer and I was
ready to learn.
When I first started at Bridgewater College I was in the Multicultural Club and BSA. I was invited
to join these clubs, so that I could see all the different cultures that were coming together to make up
the class of 2015. In the beginning I felt really out of place, because I really didnt think I had such an
amazing culture to bring to the table. While it seemed some of them were really close to their African
and Indian roots. This of course started to open my eyes to all the differences that this world has to
offer. Along with their culture I started to notice that different people had different upbringings. For
example: a girls phone had broken and she had no idea what to do, instead of calmly handling the
situation on her own, her mother drove 4 hours to handle it for her. I was raised to handle such things

on my own, and if I needed help figuring things out I would always call and get advice. After a semester
in those clubs I decided to try my hand at something I have always been interested in, but never had the
chance to do, event planning.
EP was one of the best clubs I joined, hands down. EP showed me how to work as a group and
solve problems on our feet, and also it showed me how to manage my time. There were events every
weekend in hopes that BC students would come together and share a laugh and have some delicious
treats. This group was just one of the many ways Bridgewater kept the sense of community strong on
campus. If someone was bored and wanted to make new friends EP gave them a gate way to that. I felt
so proud of my school when we would pull of a successful dance and see that a lot of people came and
enjoyed themselves. I hope to take the skills that I learned in EP and one day apply them to a job. The
organization skills and time management are both things that employers look for in workers, and
because of this club I have both.
In the beginning I focused a lot of my time on clubs because those were the only thing that
really interested me. I had come into Bridgewater with the hopes of being am Environmental Engineer,
an idea put into my head because of my four years in Pre Engineering, so I was a Biology major. After a
week of classes and meeting up with my advisor and talking about the major I knew this wasnt for me,
and my grades showed that. My lack of interest and sense of direction had me struggling to keep my
GPA up my freshman year. The Biology class was all about plants and I thought this is great since I
wanted to be an environmental engineer. But as the class went on I never found my passion of it. The
only class that I was really interested in was my General Psychology class.
I took my first psychology class my fall semester of my freshman year and it was a night class. I
thought it was going to be a drag being in class at night after everyone else was relaxing, but the subject
made me eager to come back to the class every Monday and Wednesday. In high school I was never

introduced to psychology so I came into college and stuck with what I knew, and boy was that a mistake.
If it wasnt for the liberal arts I would have never found where I belonged. By my sophomore year I was
enrolled in psychology classes, and on the path to child development. I believe that this all started
because of one class, the class that everyone in the psychology department dreaded but I loved so
much. That class was Biological Psychology with Dr. Brian Kelley.
The human brain is one of the most important organs in the human body. I never really had a lot
of interest in the brain but Ive always wanted to know what made humans behave the way they did.
When I was a sophomore and took the Biological Psychology class I discovered that the brain is really
where I need to focus to answer all the questions I had about humans and their behaviors. This excited
me, this was the class that made me want to do better and actually do research and work. In this class
we discussed a lot of different parts of the brain and what behaviors they correspond to. We even
dissected brains and were able to see all the structures that were on the inside. Every day was a new
adventure to me, and I couldnt wait for more. The lab was the best part, since I am a hands on and
visual learner. So being able to see the structures and making the cuts helped remind me where they
were and what they meant. Dr. Kelley was also a big part of why I loved Psychology and joined the
major. His teaching methods, of telling a story to correspond to a structure, helped me realize that this
could be fun and educational.
After I took that class I wanted to learn everything I could about the brain, which lead me to one
of the hardest class for me, Neuro Anatomy. In the beginning I was completely overwhelmed by all the
information that was being thrown at me. And it stayed like that until we started working on portfolios.
Our big end of the year project had us labeling 40 different structures on the brain. We had to be able to
identify the structure on two different cuts of the brain; there was a total of 3 different cuts that we
could choose from. There was also four different types of brains we could use: human, sheep, cow, and
pig. Each structure had to have a disease that harmed it and we had to explain why the structure was

important. After hours of researching everything started to click, I knew where a lot of structures were
and I was able to tie human behaviors to different brain structures with ease.
A big intellectual growth for me was getting on my own path and deciding to take up
psychology, which lead to my biggest growth, research. During the Biological Psychology class, we had a
big project that had to do with mice and a drug. We were in groups of 4 and we had to come up with the
project ourselves. About three of us were really interested in doing a project on learning and memory, a
simple way to explain that is the maze and food experiment. The mice will go through the maze and find
the food, and then they will do it again and again until their time is the fastest it can be. You have then
conditioned the mice a behavior, going through the maze, by rewarding it with food. I learned a lot more
about this by writing a paper for Neuro Methods, which I applied to this class. After hours of sitting
around I came up with the idea of alcohol and social interactions with mice.
I wanted to see if given a choice would mice choose to be drunk or be social with other mice
while sober. I learned that mice are social creatures just like humans, and just like humans drugs effect
mice behaviors. This research took days and when it ended my teacher was so excited about the results
that we continued it my junior year. This opened up doors for my group and I, we got a grant for it and
we also went to VPA, a psychology convention. That was one of my proudest moments, the research
that I came up with and spent multiple nights in the lab was being presented to other psychologist.

Boxes we used to condition the mice

The mice we used, in the box we used.

As a group we had to put in many hours and even get certified for animal testing. Which actually
lead me to writing ethical subject testing paper. After reading all the right was to test on different
animals it got me wondering why we used mice in our experiment instead of humans. I soon found out
that animals were easier to test, and it was very unethical to test underage drinking. So we stuck with
mice and moved on to the next step. Learning how to fill out an IRB, which is the paper work that needs
to be done and approved before a person can start doing actual research. We also learned how to do
this in Neuroscience Methods and Research Methods. Since I would like to continue doing research in
my future being able to do such a paper work and understanding the whole process of it will help me in
the real world. Employers love when workers come in with productive skills like that, so they can
oversee and even correct things with the knowledge they already have. The intellectual growth and
discovery that occurred in my sophomore and junior year also helped shape my community
responsibility and academic citizenship.
My research that I did on alcohol and social interaction stemmed from Bridgewater being a dry
campus. Many students that did want to drink would have to leave the campus and find other places to
drink, which can be dangerous if they dont schedule a DD or arent in a safe location. I wanted to see if
the EP events were actually helping people, their social events brought people together on the
weekends but if people were more interested in drinking no matter what event was occurring they
would choose to drink. In the end the experiment showed that mice would rather drink then be around
other mice and be social. I decided to see if this correlated with EP events and students going out to
drink. So I did a little survey to see what people would want to see, and got EP to do those events. If the
number of people increased compared to other events, then I would come to the conclusion that being
social is more rewarding. In the end students didnt come to the events and still went out drinking. This
of course concerns me, but as we got older most students became less interested in drinking. With this

information we decided to test the mice again but as adults. Surprisingly mice continued to choose
alcohol over social interaction.
I felt that it was my responsibility to show my fellow students this information in hopes to
showing them how drinking can lead to some antisocial behaviors, so I presented this information in
multiple classes with the help of my partner and psychology teachers. Of course my responsibilities
didnt stop there, another class that really reminded me that as a student I need to share and help this
subject was Social Problems. I took this sociology class my junior year for interterm, and in the beginning
it was just a class for fun but it really opened my eyes. One of my favorite projects that we saw was the
green house we went to in Harrisonburg. The whole house was environmental friendly, and it was even
built from old pieces of other houses. They didnt drive cars, they grew their own food, and even were
working on big projects like building a bike lane throughout Harrisonburg.
That visit completely moved me, I had always had strong ties to the environment since I did
want to be an environmental engineer in the beginning. It also ties in well with my paper on genetically
modified food, since they were growing their own food there was no risk of all the harmful hormones
that are in genetically modified food. So seeing people that really cared enough about the environment
to design their living styles around it really encouraged me to help the environment as well. I actually

encouraged my family to start their own little garden and this year we had a lot of tomatoes, peppers,

and even water melon.

Bridgewater is already starting to go green by having multiple recycling stations around campus,
and we even have a water bottle station the gym where you can neatly refill your water bottles. This is
big reason why I have such pride in our campus, the fact that we as a community care so much about
the environment and even have clubs that help it is important to me. So to bring that home I decided to
start small and get my house to recycle, this of course wasnt an easy fait because recycling cost more
than just throwing it all away. So I decided that if the boys wanted it bad enough than my father would
get it. I showed my brothers how recycling helps the earth and that it could be fun, sorting the items and
play basketball while doing it. Within a few weeks we got recycling, and after that I was motived to get
schools around here to do the same.
As I started to get more schools around to recycle I learned that a lot of them already had bins
and such, but not a lot of the students knew how important it was to recycle. Many of the schools

believe that having a person to come in and talk to them about recycling was a great idea, so just they
plan on having that next year. Surprisingly this was all easy for me because my mother knew almost
everyone at the surrounding schools, and so getting them to hear me out was cake. And once they
heard what I had to say they passed it along at meetings. That was a very important lesson for me,
networking and have connections is very important in the real world. If they hadnt known my mother
and given me the time of day then I would still be trying to get meetings with them. Once I realized this I
started talking to my professors more about networking and branching out. Which brought me to my
senior year internship with Staunton Youth association.
My love for kids has been with me since the young age of 16 when I decided to start working at
daycare, which I still work at today. I believe that children are very important and that they need to be
pushed to develop into the people they want to be not the mold society has made for them. To learn
more about children and how to help them thrive I took a Developmental Psychology class my junior
year. That class helped me understand the importance of child development at a young age, and how if
those things are messed up that it can cause children to have problems as they get older. For example if
a child isnt talk to and dont develop a language than they will have trouble speaking and learning it
later on in life. An example of this is the case study about Genie, who was left in a room chained to a pot
and never had social interaction with humans. After learning all about it I used a lot of what I learned at
the daycare I worked at watching children behavior and understanding why they do the things they do.
For example young kids around 5 and 6 dont understand that everyone doesnt know what they know.
If they know why they are crying they believe you know as well and will get upset at you when you dont
solve the problem. This was a great skill to understand since I had to handle many kids this age.
I also learned about a lot of disabilities that children have that can affect their everyday learning.
One of those disabilities was ADHD, which is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity disorder. I wanted to learn
more about it so for my Memory and Cognition class I did a literature review on that topic. I found out

that ADHD actually has two different forms, inattentive ADHD which is called ADHD-I, which means you
have a hard time focusing or staying organized. While the second one is combined as known as ADHD-C
which is the combination of hyperactivity and inattentive. This disorder is all caused by impaired
function of the frontal lobe, which is the section of the brain that makes decisions. With this information
I was actually able to understand the children with ADHD at my daycare better. I was even able to help
them do their homework and actually stay focus enough to retain the information. One child actually
brought me a test to show how my help had gotten him, his first A of the year! My love for children is
one of the reasons I found psychology interesting.
I had shared this interest of children with my teacher and in result he found my internship that
had to do with children. Staunton on Youth association was a coalition that was trying to prevent drug
and alcohol abuse in children. I sadly didnt get to do much with this coalition because of my class
schedule, but one of the projects I got to work on was comparing surveys of Staunton and Harrisonburg
schools and whom had more drug problems. I have happy to see that Harrisonburg and Staunton we
both at low risk, but it wasnt at 0% either. This of course hurt my heart to see that children are getting
into such things, but that is the reality of it and knowing the problem is part of solving the problem.
After seeing what the coalition was all about it really pushed me into my career choice, case
management. Children out there needs someone that will keep them on track and out of trouble. I hope
to use what Ive learned at Bridgewater to better their futures.
Taking action is trait that I developed at Bridgewater, and knowing what I know about the drug
rates has caused me to want to do something about it. When I first came to Bridgewater for orientation
a lesson that they taught us that has stuck with me for these four years is the bystander effect. Seeing
someone hurt and walking away from them is just as bad. I never really realized it but I have done it a
few times in my life. In my mind I thought since I couldnt help someone else would and it didnt make
me feel guilty. I know now from my classes at Bridgewater that majority of the time no one steps up

because they are all thinking what Im thinking. However if one person stands up multiple people will
start to do the same. Again the since of community at Bridgewater College has shaped me into a better
person that is willing to go out and help other with the skills I possess. In that sense I believe that my
ethical values have developed over my years at Bridgewater, and I hope to continue to make ethical
changes in my life.
I like to believe that those ethical changes has helped me spiritually increase my wellness. I have
never been a big spiritual person, but the New Testament class allowed me to be a little more open to it.
Another class that helped me on a spiritual and physical level was Yoga. Yoga had interested me for
some time now but I never really got into until I had to take a physical education class at Bridgewater
and I am glad that I did. The class helped me learn how to center myself with its breathing techniques
and helped me learn to push myself with its many forms and stances. Thanks to that class I am more
flexible mentally and physically. Mentally I am able to clear my mind and focus on many things at once
and not feel overwhelmed. I am also able to relax myself in stressful situations and handle the situation
in a rational manner. That skill is very important to have while working with children and the case
management field. Thanks to the liberal arts I was able to take this class and better myself.
Another class that helped me better my wellness was the freshman wellness class we had to
take. The main project of having a journal and setting a goal for the end of the semester surprisingly
taught me how to plan better. It showed me that when you set a goal you will have some setbacks and
relapses but as long as you keep pushing forward youll be able to accomplish your goal. My goal was to
give up soda because thats all I would drink in the KCC, even though they had given us healthier
options. I felt that drinking soda was something I needed to stop and learn to drink it in moderations.
Now in my senior year I rarely drink soda or sugary drinks, thanks to the KCC I am able to have water and
hot tea with a lot of honey.

As my favorite song goes I was just a small town girl living in a lonely world, but I took a
midnight train to Bridgewater. And by coming to Bridgewater I have truly become a well-rounded
person. I am now able to connect with multiple cultures and work with just about anyone. Ive learned
to put differences a side and focus on similarities. Also Ive learned that there are multiple ways to
handle situations, and just because I wouldnt handle them that way doesnt make it wrong. Coming to
college I felt that I was prepared for it just because I took Advance Placement classes, but Bridgewater is
way more than just a school. It is a strong community that teaches us how to explore and go out of our
comfort zones.
Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Harmony, is what Bridgewater stands for and I can truly say that
all of that is true. Goodness, is represented in all of us from being able to leave your laptop in the library
or KCC for hours on in and it still being there. To truth which we pride ourselves on, with our peer
represent honor counsel that fairly hears out each student put on trial and brings them to justice. To its
beauty, which can be seen all around from the beautiful buildings to the smile on the students faces
while they are in their favorite class. And lastly harmony, one of the most important traits, because of
harmony we able to be such a good liberal arts school. Bring Psychology and Art together is a great
sense of harmony. Throughout my four years my pride for my school has grown and showed me my
path in case management. I hope to take the sense of community I got from Bridgewater College and
share it where ever the world may take me.