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"IT HAS BEEN A LONG DAY," says Vania Crevier, when we meet for the first time at Holloway Commons. It's 11:30 a.m. and I laugh, figuring she's being rhetorical. "No, really," she protests. "It's been a very long day." Crew practice began in the dark at 5 a.m., team breakfast at 8, class at 10. After meeting with me, it's on to a grab-and-go sandwich, strength training, a cardio workout and homework. And it turns out she hasn't slept since Sunday. Technically she's working on a 72-hour day. Long indeed.

Yet she appears none the worse for wear. Looking at her and listening, you get a sense of what Bette Midler must have been like as an 18-year-old. She is outdoorsy looking, rosy-cheeked and spirited in the extreme. In every way imaginable, she defies the stereotype of freshman as wallflower. Her first-year experience is the stuff from which advice books are made. "The first week was fine," says Crevier, a native of Ketchikan, Alaska. The trouble started in Week Two when she tried to take up skateboarding and ended up in the emergency room at Wentworth Douglass Hospital in Dover. When her parents visited campus for the first time, only 10 days into her collegiate career, they saw their child—whose given name means "God's gracious gift"—in bandages from head to toe. They also noticed that her blonde hair was dyed brown and her left nostril was pierced with a gold stud.

Vania Crevier '09 The trouble started in Week Two, when she tried to take up skateboarding and ended up in the emergency room.

But the saga didn't end there. Crevier's foot swelled with infection and at some point 20 days into her freshman experience she swears she heard doctors murmuring, "We might have to amputate." She also had some other "freshmanesque" issues with hall neighbors and a few transitional difficulties. "Being from Alaska I had never really heard African-American as a term and in one of my classes I used the word 'black' and it was like a whole hush went over the class. I had no idea what I'd done." Also, where she grew up, people said "Uff da." "You'd get punched or tackled in football and it would be, like, 'Uff da!'" Crevier's contributions to the "Secret Lives of Words" class have been an eye-opening experience for all, including the professor.

In fact, Crevier is the rare UNH freshman who can say she has played football on tundra, logrolled for prizes and was trained to shoot a rifle in elementary school. "In eighth grade we went on a survival training exercise where they dropped us in the forest with a match and a tarp." So, she is Alaskan and different...wheelchaired (for a time) and different...and a teetotaler and, well, very different. She's also a devout Christian and lives in a single room in a dormitory full of freshmen. She was, in short, a statistic waiting to happen.

But when I meet with her in mid-November I find nothing of the sort. She's still going to crew and is on track with a double major (guidance counseling and English teaching) and double minor (psychology and theater) completely under control. She's still recovering from her skateboarding wounds but has kept her commitment to crew. She is just back from taking a week off school to help her brother through a family crisis (which is why she hasn't slept for a few days, to make up all the work she missed). She recently found out from an orthopedic surgeon that she's missing a piece of her knee, which may hamper her in continuing to play soccer, hockey and log roll. She is taking pills the size of hockey pucks to help regrow the missing stuff. Finally, she expects to hear shortly whether she won the part of the narrator in the UNH theater production of "Into the Woods."

All this and Crevier—I kid you not—looks like she's the most blessed person on Earth. "I love it here," she says. She likes going a million miles an hour, thrives on it actually. She admits she blew it with the nose ring, disappointing her parents, but she adds that she managed to come up big when she was able to truthfully answer that, no, she did not get a tattoo as well. She has stayed true to herself while grabbing the university for all its worth.

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