“I first came to the U in the fall of 2021, but I dropped out in the first few weeks because I was offered a piano restoration apprenticeship. After about a year and a half, my mentor moved out of state and my piano tuning business was going super well, so I decided it was time to go to school.

It was a little odd to get back into the school mindset, but it wasn’t too bad. I have always been a pretty good student and enjoyed learning. I decided to study mechanical engineering because I have always liked math and science. Pianos are very mechanically complex and after spending so much time working with them, I felt like I had a really good grasp of how the mechanisms worked together. I wanted to continue learning about that.

My apprenticeship taught me a lot of time management skills and general responsibility. In a field like mine, reputation is everything, because you need people to want to call you back every year. The pride I have learned to take in my work transfers over to school in a lot of ways.

I have loved the ways my social circle has expanded since coming to the U. During my apprenticeship, I worked in a small shop and my friends were people I had known in high school. I really wished there was a place where I could meet new people all the time.

When I came back to school, I decided to live at Lassonde Studies because of the piano. When I would hear people playing, I’d ask if I could join them, and these piano duets became common.

I also started a food club at Lassonde. Where I lived, there were a lot of students from different countries who would cook amazing food from all over the world. They were always offering to share, and a friend in student government explained that by creating a club, I could request funding from the university. We used the money to buy hundreds of dollars in ingredients to support these students in sharing their culture with their peers in Lassonde.

I really lucked out with the people I lived with last year because they were all super cool and are what made my on-campus living experience so good.”

—Alon Meir, a sophomore studying mechanical engineering