Hello everyone!
Guess what I just heard? This weekend is recruit weekend (and general prospie [prospective student] weekend—yay for those who are hosting!) and one of the recruits we have here (Elly) has told me that she read my blog before coming. This pleases me immensely. I’m of use to people!
But enough of self-laudatory nonsense. I’ll get right down to… well, talking about myself again, but I suppose that’s what I’m here for :)).
First, some administrative issues. It was brought to my attention that my blogs are riddled with grammatical mistakes. This doesn’t surprise me, as it takes a while for me to write them, I don’t spend as much time on editing as I should (who does?), and my blogs are really long as compared to normal length blogs. Thus I am taking a poll—shorter blogs, less errors? Or longer blogs… and if errors bug you, you are free to correct me.
Ironically enough, I’m a fantastic nit-picker when the incentives are great enough. For example, in Chemistry Professor A. awards extra credit to whoever can find errors in his lecture notes. Thus, since I’m one of those people who takes notes in class and then spends two hours a night copying out all the notes again from the more in-depth lecture notes (yes, I belong to the style of learner entitled “obsessive note-taker”) I get to find all sorts of little things. Like a lack of period, or wrong comma usage. I’ve learned more about grammar for Chemistry class than I have in the past two years of English class.
Moving on, Fall Break was fantastic! I am almost all caught up on my work now! (Heh heh. I was just talking to Abby, one of my dormmates, and she was telling me how saying ‘I have homework’ is superfluous at Wellesley. She says that when people ask what she’ll be doing after class/on weekends/all the time she should say “I’ll be breathing,” because that includes doing homework as a matter of course.)
Moreover, it was marvelous because while I got maybe 2 ½ days of homework done, I also had a day and a half of fun. I’ll describe all the great things I did! (ha ;))
So, Friday night I headed out to Boston to go visit Sarah, my swimming friend at MIT. She told me to “dress to party,” just in case. That created a conflict for me, because I have no party clothes. I asked my mom; she said to wear jeans and a cute shirt. I looked in my closet, only to find that I don’t have the popular jeans right now (skinny jeans; yes, I’m very behind the times) and I don’t really have a cute shirt that isn’t somewhat formal. So that was axed.
Then I met Cara in the bathroom and she was heading to MIT as well! So I checked out what she was wearing… tights, ornamental sandals, and a cute dress. I did have a dress, and I did have tights, so I thought I was all set. Unfortunately, I have a few dresses, but they are all formal dresses. And while I have tights and those are great (my mom made me bring them, actually), I have no shoes. Like, none. I have sneakers which I wear all the time since my feet are wacky and need orthotics, and I have very no-nonsense sandals that also provide foot support. I also had knee-high boots. I went for those.
So I ventured down the hall in an all-black get-up looking approximately like Trinity from the Matrix except my trenchcoat was a raincoat and it wasn’t very shiny. I was kindly offered a tank-top by one of my swim team members (all these people weren’t just sitting around watching me like I’m portraying them; I was knocking on doors because I was slightly afeared about how the Matrix look would go down) but I really don’t like tanktops and hadn’t worn one since elementary school, plus I didn’t have any skirts. At the point, Cara’s group had left, so I gave up and went to buy tokens for the bus. Turns out the token machine doesn’t give change, so I ended up spending twenty dollars on accident. You can imagine the self-pitying “woe is me” refrain running through my head right then :)).
However, I decided that I was going to do this, and so I boarded the bus with all the scary people who went partying and were thus dangerous. You can imagine how surprised I was when, what do you know, these were the same people I go to school with and so (surprise!) they didn’t actually undergo a sudden transformation into fearful inhuman beings. (You can see my prejudice about partying here. May I say that I rarely partied in high school, plus am naturally wary of dancing and places with dark lighting, so I hope you can excuse the flamboyant paranoia.) The girls were all very friendly and I got to MIT safely and read my book for Education class until Sarah showed up. Yes, I did stow the book in my bag. It’s a good thing I wasn’t going with people I knew, because I know at least at home I’d be lambasted to death for such a faux pas ;).
Happily, Sarah did show up, and she’d just arrived from a dancing event at her sorority, so she was tired. Guess what this means? Muhahaha—Monica didn’t go partying! This kind of makes me laugh, because I went through quite an affair for nothing, but then again, I’ll be less apprehensive the next time. Naturally anxious child right here. I make myself laugh.
Instead, Sarah and I returned to her room, and I met her roommate, and we looked at food on the foodporn website (I highly recommend) and talked about swimming and school and ate Ben and Jerry’s ice cream together. I had a great time and returned home at three am and went to sleep happy. I’m not sure what this goes to show, but maybe it can say that for people who don’t like partying, going out can still be fun. I enjoyed my experience at MIT, and I met up with Cara and the other girls with her on the bus back, and they’d enjoyed themselves partying too. Lots of options, lots of choices, yet still much to explore!
And that was Friday night :). Saturday morning I did homework, and Saturday afternoon, lo and behold, I did something fun again! I went on the Natick bus to Target, where I bought myself some skinny jeans and sweaters (see, I’m learning, right?). An event that really struck me was when I saw a girl drive up to Target and run in, while all of the Wellesley girls were waiting for the bus. It reminded me of how I used to drive up to my hometown Target and not have to be bussed anywhere and when I lived with my family instead of a roommate and a schoolful of girls. Just a blast of home that startled me, because I often think of Wellesley as almost a different world from the one I left last year after 18 years of schooling and living…
Well, that and the fact that there were men around surprised me :). It was funny to have guys holding the door open and being polite just because I am female. It really is a different world, in some ways, being at an all-girls school, and more significantly, being at college. I like it and I’m enjoying myself a lot, but it’s a funny transition that can hit you at the oddest of times
And so that was Saturday night :). Sunday morning I went to go shopping again, this time for winter coats. I happen to have cousins who live near Wellesley; I’d never met them before coming here, but once I arrived my aunt got in touch with them and they contacted me. So a few weeks ago I went out to dinner with their family (mother, father, and two elementary-school girls) and this Sunday they took me to the mall. I did some fabulous shopping (Sears had very good deals, and I finished within an hour), which is funny because before I came here I never cared whether I did fabulous shopping or not. Since I’m not a fan of shopping (it takes too long and one has to spend money. I hate spending money), I always made my mother buy me things, and I wasn’t too cognizant of cost. Now that she’s not here to buy me things, I have to do it myself and with my own money. Now there’s a belated trip to elementary adulthood.
Monday night was the next fun episode, when I went to Tiffany’s house to eat dinner. Tiffany is on the swim team with me, and lives in Wellesley, so she picked Allison, Carrington, and me up and we made dumplings and ate chinese food with her family. It was fabulous Chinese food and was made even more fabulous by the fact that I always ate Chinese at home and Wellesley is not exactly on top of the ethnic food department. Not that we don’t get the occasionally ethnic food, but nothing beats homemade :).
Tuesday was work, and that brings me to here! Well, the real week, which started Wednesday. I’m so into school again by today (Friday) that Fall Break seems ages ago, but it was a really fun break and I’m glad I stayed. It would have been fun if I went home too, but I liked the experience of doing things with friends while also getting work done. Though the trade-off is family time, neither friends nor work would have gotten accomplished at home.
But great things have already happened during the work week! We got our Midterms back, and I did well, so that sets me off on a good track to begin with. And while I was meeting with my Chemistry teacher (he holds the tests hostage until we come and talk to him about it, a policy that I like) I asked him if I could work in his lab next semester, and he said yes!!! This deserves several explanation points, because doing research is awesome for figuring out what I want to do with the rest of my life and for graduate school and for meeting people and for getting paid/credit and figuring out whether science is the path for me. Thus, exciting. I am very happy to be probably working in Professor A.’s class next semester.
In other fun school activities, we were assigned a project in Writing class to interview a musician so that we can blog about them. I decided to interview my youngest sister, Nicole, back home, and my other sister Leslie was doing homework at the same time so they both were able to get involved. I call my parents at least once a week, so I get to talk with them a lot, but I rarely talk with my sisters except through inconsistent email. It was special to hear a little about what was going on in their lives… especially since Nicole’s fourteenth birthday is tomorrow :).
In other news, swimming is still fun, I’m hosting my recruit Erin tonight, and I can’t believe I still don’t have a picture of my roommate to show you. The problem is that Molly (my roommate) and I are involved in different sports. Thank goodness we are both involved in sports, or this wouldn’t work out at all, but Molly does crew so she gets up very early, occasionally at 4 in the morning. Whilst I am a very late sleeper due to swimming, the earliest time I get up being 6:30am ;). Thus I go to sleep later than she does (again, if I didn’t have sports, then we’d be going to bed at even more incongruous times) and wake up later than she does. Plus, I study in the libraries and return to our room only to sleep, so we rarely see each other and are rarely awake at the same time. I find this very ironic, since as athletes I expected we would wake up at approximately the same time (plus, I wasn’t expecting that another sport would wake up earlier than swimming. Crew’s training times are a tiny bit insane.) However, crew occurs during the fall and the spring, so when my season starts ramping up with meets, hers will be winding down, so hopefully we will have more time together then. By the way, this is a unique situation as far as I can tell (while there are many varsity athletes on campus, we are definitively a minority; plus how likely is it you’re going to get a swimming and crew athlete in the same room?) so this isn’t applicable to all roommates… I just thought I’d let you know why my roommate has not figured prominently in posts thus far!
Finally, since I’m nearing the end of this rather lengthy post, I’d like to respond to something I saw on the Wellesley College News feed. Our college president, President Bottomly, recently responded to an article in the New York Times called “Single Sex Education Is Assailed in Report.” I’d like to address the issue of attending an all-girls school briefly, since it is an issue that affects me.
Wellesley College was my last choice in colleges when I started applying last fall. This was due entirely to the fact that Wellesley is an all-girls college, and there is a sort of stigma attached to that fact in our society (as can be seen by the publishing of a report like the one mentioned above.) I obviously saw the error in my ways, and upon visiting in the spring ended up loving the school and happily attending. However, the reasons I chose to attend had very little to do with the whole female/male debate, and actually had to do with the small class sizes here, superior academics, possibility of joining the swim team, and friendly, driven, and supportive environment.
My reasons for deciding to attend Wellesley lead me to make a case for keeping all-girls schools as an option available to students, but not for the traditional reason. I do think that all-girls schools don’t hurt girls’ prospects in life. In the fourth paragraph down of the article listed above, the following is detailed: “…the strongest argument against single-sex education, the article said, is that it reduces boys’ and girls’ opportunities to work together, and reinforces sex stereotypes.” The thing is, I do not feel sex stereotyped. The idea is ridiculously foreign when applied to the situation here. Girls traditionally work in the kitchen, at home, and with the children. Girls at Wellesley eat in dining halls, we live in dorms, and we are WAY too busy doing academics and outside activities like working at the library and swimming to even babysit children (let alone see anyone but students on campus). You know what I personally do with my time; I’ve detailed it in the past blogs, and I cannot see myself being sex stereotyped in any way I can interpret the term. Further, while I may be missing out on the “opportunity to work together [with boys]” I cannot see this as destroying any chance I have to succeed in the future. We all learn our social skills and apply them to people; I can’t see why I’d have to learn a different set of skills specifically for interacting with boys; that would be true sex stereotyping.
Considering the positive effects of attending an all-girls school, I was told upon visiting Wellesley that an advantage to attending was that “one doesn’t notice the sexism until it is absent [like it is at Wellesley].” While I have noticed a bit of this in comparing college to high school, generally I feel my high school wasn’t too sexist to begin with. Then again, I was about to do a comparison today about the sex ratio in my science classes (in high school we had very few girls to guys in my physics class, for example) when I realized that obviously they were all girls. Oversights like this one indicate that I might be other benefits I am overlooking in attending this all-girls school, due to the fact that since I am in an all-girls environment it is difficult to do a proper comparison. Regardless, like the above-mentioned article remarks, regarding single versus co-ed education, “the results are equivocal,” so while one can’t claim that this is the better educational path, one also cannot claim single-sex education is worse.
I’d love to argue that girls’ schools are far superior to co-ed schools and that is why we should keep them open. That at least is a traditionally opinion, though it is rather extreme. However, I chose to attend Wellesley not because of the all-girls aspect, not despite the all-girls aspect, but because it is, irrelevant of the topic, a great school. My primary focus was academics, and I feel that I would be performing approximately equally if I were at a co-ed school. I went to a co-ed public high school, and I’m now attending a private all-girls college. I can’t say my behavior has radically changed in the six months in between.
Thus I’d like to make the argument that all-girls schools should be kept open a) because they don’t hurt girls and could maybe help girls, but b) because, more importantly, all-girls schools can be fantastic schools that one would want to attend regardless of the gender issue. I found that focusing on what I valued the most, academics, proved more important to me in my college choice that my previous fixation on gender.
All I can say with absolute assurance is that I love it here, and I urge future students to learn from my biased experience. Don’t consider schools in the context of gender, but as a cohesive whole.
Have a fantastic Friday afternoon, and as always, comments are infinitely valued!
Sincerely,
Monica
