OC volleyball seniors have record breaking performances!

OC volleyball is coming off of a record breaking week! The Yeowomen set the tone of the week by coming back from two sets down to beat OWU. During the course of the victory over OWU senior Amanda Wysk became the kill leader at Oberlin breaking 1,00 kills! Under the leadership of Wysk, Frackman and Jacobson the Yeowomen beat Allegheny College in five sets on Sunday for the first time in school history! Anna Frackman had a stellar week, which led to her breaking the 1,000 dig mark and becoming 2nd in all-time kills with 882!! The leadership of the seniors this week has set the tone to round out the season. Jacobson, Wysk and Frackman have set the standards high in their four years at Oberlin.

Trip to Wisconsin!!!!!!

Hi everyone!

Anna here. This past weekend, our team had the opportunity to travel to Wisconsin (my home state!) to play some new teams and see a part of the country that many of us had not seen before. We drove through the night on Thursday and arrived on Friday morning. We had four matches between Friday and Saturday. Unfortunately, none of them went our way, although we definitely learned some important lessons and found some areas that we needed to work on in order to be ready to beat teams like the ones we saw this weekend.

On Saturday night, we had a rousing round of The Game of Things in the hotel, which none of us had ever played before. Sunday we got to go to beautiful Devil's Lake State park in Wisconsin and go canoeing on the lake and hiking up the surrounding bluffs. The weather was a bit chilly for swimming (though Meredith and Maggie braved the water) but it was great for canoeing and hiking. Later we went to Madison and got to have dinner at my house to celebrate my upcoming birthday (I turn 21 on Wednesday). It was great to be able to show my college friends around my neighborhood, and we had a good time eating homemade food and Culver's frozen custart, a real midwest treat, and buying wisconsin cheese to take back to Ohio. We arrived back to Ohio in the early hours of Monday morning, and we are all busily resting up and preparing for classes to start tomorrow! Hope everyone had a great Labor day weekend!

OC VB summer check in from Laura!

My family took a vacation to Egypt this summer! We started our vacation in Cairo. It was an adventure because our bags got lost and we didn't have them for two days! We toured the city visiting the Muhammad Ali mosque and experienced real Cairo driving. Drivers don't obey lines, run lights, and honk constantly-- quite an experience! We left Cairo on an overnight train where we met our bags. The individual compartments where very small and it made stops ALL night but the views out the window were amazing! We made it to Aswan the next day. We saw an unfinished obilisk, toured the Nassar Dam and the Philae Temple. We flew to Abu Smbel the next morning. This was my favorite temple! It was created by Ramses to show his Southern neighbors that his empire was powerful and to portray himself as a deity. We arrived on our cruise ship that night and begun our cruise down the nile! My favorite part of the cruise was the Egyptian night. Our group dressed up in Egyptian clothes and the workers played instruments and showed us how to dance. We toured a few more temples in Luxor and Edfu. On the last day of the cruise we toured the Valley of the Kings where all the pharaohs were buried in luxurious tombs. There were sixty two temples but we were only able to tour three. I remember that day was VERY hot, almost 125 degrees! We then toured a HUGE mortuary tomb for the only female pharaoh. Our last stop was the temple of Karnak which is the largest temple devoted to any deity in all history. We flew back to Cairo the next day to see the great pyramids. We went inside the second largest pyramid, the walk down was super steep and it was very humid! We saw the sphinx as well and went to the sound and light show.

The rest of my summer was far less exciting. Most days I hang out and play around with my friends and sisters. We go hiking often and spend days tubing and discovering new watering holes. But I also had two jobs, one at a nursery and one at an ice cream shop. And I volunteer at my local dog and cat shelter two or three times a week.

I visited Rosie last weekend! We made vegan fudge, went thrift shopping, and watched this crazy Japanese movie called Tampopo.

I can't wait to get back to school and see all yalls beautiful faces!

OC VB summer check in from Kristen!

Hey Guys!

This summer has been great so far. I’ve been working as a tennis instructor for kids at different YMCA summer camps all over Atlanta. Most of these kids have never been introduced to the sport, and it’s really exciting to be able to teach them something new. Some of the kids get really excited about it and are so eager to learn. Those are the ones that make my job fun. But in between dodging kids dangerously wielding tennis rackets and nursing bruises from misplaced tennis balls, I’ve been working out and hanging out with my friends. We’re all big music fans, so you can imagine our excitement when we saw a little impromptu jam session going on at the square in Downtown Decatur. It was a local band just kind of hanging out and having fun with whoever else happened to be there. It’s the kind of thing you see in movies and stuff, but it’s pretty magical to actually be a part of it. We liked them so much that we went to a show they were playing in the area. It was so much fun, and it reminded me how great local music can be.

This week has been the most exciting by far, though. I’ve been vacationing with my family in the beautiful US Virgin Islands. I’ve been taking this time to relax on the beach, soak up some sun, and hang out with my family. It is sooo beautiful here. The water is crystal clear and the sand is white. It’s impossible to not be happy here. I’ve most enjoyed the days when we went on sailing trips. We sailed to the British Virgin Islands and to different snorkeling spots. This was my first time snorkeling ever, and it’s really cool. I got to see all sorts of sea creatures. I am terribly afraid of critters in the land or sea, so I expected to not enjoy snorkeling too much. I thought I would just be a big scaredy cat. But once I started, I was mesmerized by the things that I saw. It was like swimming through my own little aquarium. I saw schools of fish and massive sting rays. I was really freaked out when I saw a huge shark lying on the ocean floor. Our boat’s captain told me that it was a nurse shark and it didn’t have any teeth and mostly slept during the day, but still, it was pretty frightening. Turtles are one of my favorite animals on the planet, so I was really excited when I spotted a sea turtle. I followed it around the reef until I got tired.

This has been a fabulous vacation, but I’m excited to be headed home soon. There’s only one more week before I load all of my stuff in the car and head up to Oberlin. I couldn’t be more excited. So I’ve got a week of packing up my life and saying goodbyes ahead of me. And then I’ll be saying hello to Oberlin and my new family there.

Hope everyone’s summer is going great!!!

OC VB summer check in from Maggie!

After a whirlwind semester studying abroad in France, a return trip involving a lost pass port and a lost wallet in two different cities, I made it home to Carefree, Arizona. Right away, I began working for my cousin doing data entry, which has been an awesome job that has taught me a lot. After three weeks of Arizona where I successfully re-adapted to American things like eating dinner before 9 o’clock, smiling at strangers and tipping at restaurants, I went to Michigan for two weeks to work at my cousin’s office. It was really cool because all of my extended family is in Michigan and I got to hang out with a lot of cousins.


After Michigan, I came back to Arizona for a few more weeks. Thanks to summer storms, I was able to take advantage of the landscape and do a lot of hiking and horse back riding. My favorite hiking story was at the Grand Canyon. A friend from France who spent a year at Oberlin was visiting the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley with some friends so I drove out there to hang out with her. We decided to hike for a few hours down into the Grand Canyon. When we stopped going down and started going back up it was 110 degrees and we thought we were going to die of sunstroke (not really, but that’s what it felt like). However, when we reached the top, a huge storm had come and the temperature dropped to about 60 degrees and it started pouring. We could not believe how we went from baking to freezing so fast.


Next week I will begin the three day, cross country adventure of driving from Arizona back to Oberlin. It should be a blast involving tourist traps, lot's of playlists and 1,500 miles of interstate 40.

OC VB summer check in from travelling Amanda

Hey all,
My summer is going great so far! I’ve been traveling a lot, hanging out with friends, and relaxing as much as I can before the busy school year starts. Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve done and what I still have left to do.

In June I went to Mansfield, Ohio to support Liz during Miss Ohio week. It was fun, intense, and crazy to see how much work all the girls put in. After that, I went home with Liz and spent a few weeks in Connecticut. We mostly just hung out, but the more exciting parts of the trip were attending the PGA Tournament and going to Cape Cod for the 4th of July weekend. While there we did lots of fun things like hitting up the beach, going whale watching, seeing fireworks, and some shopping.

I came back to Wisconsin around mid July, but right away went up north with friends. For those who don’t know, “up north” means that you stay in a cabin, cottage, or camp somewhere in Wisconsin north of where you actually live (I think the unofficial cut off is that you must be at least north of the Dells for it to count as up north, but that’s just my opinion). Since then I’ve had about a week’s worth of birthday celebrations because getting all of my friends together on one day is almost impossible due to where everybody lives and crazy work schedules.

Currently I’m coaching a volleyball camp and I don’t have any other big plans until August. I can’t wait though because in the span of a week I’m having a friend visit from Ohio and we’re seeing a concert, I’m going to Minnesota for a weekend, and I’ll be hitting up State Fair which is always a fun time. The only bad thing about this summer has been the severe weather. My area has seen two rounds of tornadoes and severe flooding. The first caused us to lose every tree but one and we needed a new roof put on, and the second caused unprecedented flooding in several counties that is still not all cleaned up yet (perhaps you saw on Yahoo or something about the sinkhole in Milwaukee that swallowed an SUV…not good).

All in all my summer has been amazing. I hope to have a great next 3 weeks free of scary weather and then I’ll be seeing everybody back on campus!

OC VB summer check in from Meredith in the exciting city of Rye

Hi all! My summer has been pretty busy thus far. Like some of the other girls I've attended my fair share of concerts including Carole King & James Taylor, Passion Pit and Tokyo Police Club, Jack Johnson and most recently Dave Matthews Band. I've been trying to take advantage of my proximity to both the beach and new york city.

My town, Rye, is right on the water and we also have a theme park here, Playland and the beaches attract people from all over. It's especially fun to go out to the beach on the weekend nights when Playland sets off fireworks! I've also spend some of my free time with my dog Cody, this is his first summer with my family since we adopted him in September. On milder days we'll walk down to the beach and along the pier. However it has been so hot lately he'll just accompany me on a lounge chair in the back yard. I've been going down to one of the private beach that I belong to almost every Saturday and Sunday. LI sound has been so nice I've gone swimming everyday in it... it could be that I'm paranoid I won't be able to if oil reaches New York!

Last week I met one of my friends after they got out of their job in NYC we went to Bryant Park for a picnic dinner and they had an outdoor yoga class going on, there must have been 200 people doing yoga it was funny to watch but we were tempted to join in...it was too bad I was wearing a skirt!

This is my second summer working as a camp counselor at one of the many country clubs in Rye it's been fun for the most part but definitely difficult on the 100 degree days. My group of girls are between 7 and 11. I'm most excited for tomorrow which is tie dye day! Today was fun even though it rained, we made up our own version of California Girls to sing at the closing ceremony and the girls are very excited to have our own original song to do.

Other than that Rye has been under Coyote watch, they've always been around in Rye because we're near the water and have lots of marsh land and small nature reservations where deer live. But recently the Coyotes have gotten more aggressive and bigger! They've attacked a couple kids in our town but the kids have all gotten by with stitches and rabies shots. This morning I even saw three deer in my neighbor's yard, and I live on a main street! And we have a saying in Rye
"where there are Deer the Coyotes will come". But after I saw the Eclipse movie, I'm hoping it will just turn out to be Jacob Black coming to hang out with me haha!

Overall I've had a pretty fun summer, it probably helps that now I'm feeling tan and fit! I can't wait to move in and get to see everyone again! Enjoy the sun!