It’s been such a long week! It’s so strange to realize I’ve been here just a month. And yet I feel that a month is all that’s needed to get the rhythm down. I know where all my classes are (even the tricky ones like Chem that switch classrooms every other day), I know the names of all my professors (again, Chem likes being difficult. I can’t pronounce it yet, but my Professor’s name is Prof Arumainayagam), I know when I’m working, I know where everything is, I know what to eat… amazing, how quickly we can adapt.
Speaking of which, it’s Friends and Family weekend; the college has their first-year understanding down pat! Just when we’re all settling in, a lot of us have friends and family coming to visit and see how well we’ve adjusted. My family is not coming, as they live in Minnesota and I have two younger sisters at home (and they need to be in school :)), but it’s nice to see loved ones trailing after their Wellesley girls like complacent ducklings. All the parents I’ve seen have been happy to see how well their girls have settled in; I even spotted one filming one of my classes, for what purpose, I can’t guess!
Hm, other unusual events this week… well, last Sunday was Flower Sunday! Each of the first-years (Little Sisters) gets paired with an upperclassmen (Big Sisters). The Big Sister gives the Little Sister flowers on Sunday morning, and then they both attend a ceremony in the chapel (where they receive more flowers.) It was a lovely ceremony and one I would recommend attending. After that, the pairs stream off to lunch, flooding the cafeterias… where they chat and eat with other sister pairs, before separating in order to do homework (that’s what weekends are for, obviously.) I have pictures of both, by the way—both my upperclassman and I (Erin was my Big Sister), and the ubiquitous studying here—literally, you can go any place with a table and there will be someone with a laptop or book open. Funnily enough, study places are so important to me that I’m writing my essay for my writing class based on the optimal study locations. Which is a bit of challenge, since my writing class is all about music, but I’m writing about the musicality of silence, so I made it work :).
Since I’m now chronologically backwards, I’ll mention some things about my week. Official swimming started on Monday (Yay! We’d been doing informal and captain’s practices, but now we’re official and watch technique movies and doing other official things.) so that was very exciting. We are in testing week for swimming, so essentially we have to swim different distances and get timed doing so. How well we do determines what lane we are placed in for the season, and also gets put into a computer system to determine our future workouts. I had never had a system like this at home, but the computer can plot an entire season’s workout and tell us how fast we are supposed to be swimming at a given point during the season. I’m excited about it, especially since we’re finally done with the long-distance timing and can get to the sprinting stuff. We swam a mile yesterday for time, and let me tell you, a mile in the water is about 3-4 times as long as it is on land :).
Transitioning to mealtimes, I eat every dinner with the swim team. After practice, we all head over to the Lulu (the Campus Center, the Lulu Wang Campus Center, the full name I’m not aware of… it has many titles) and scarf down food as a group. It seems to be a trend on the swim team to eat a lot of peanut butter, plain (the kind people at the deli bar set out bowls of peanut butter due to this interesting habit) and I have picked it up as well, so my dinners are always accompanied with a banana and a bowl of the stuff. (Keep in mind I never ate peanut butter at home.) My diet has also changed in that now I eat a lot of salads and a lot more tofu than I did at home, since I am a vegetarian (except I eat fish, so only mostly) and cooked veggies are less available here. Look at all the unexpected changes that occur at college… but then again, I can’t say the differences are bad, only that the delicacies are different. A remark to the high schoolers out there—make sure you feel comfortable on campus, but don’t be afraid to keep an open mind!
I’d also like to give a quick shout-out to my lunch partners in crime—Connie and Cathy. They are involved in the after-school Chinatown tutoring program, where they go to Boston’s Chinatown a few hours once a week and help the fourth graders there with schoolwork and other activities. I thought the idea was fascinating, plus it’s paired with Harvard so it isn’t solely a girl-only event. Speaking of the girls-only thing, I’d like to point out that there are many possibilities of getting off-campus, and that a lot of my roommates go all the time. It’s free to bus into MIT on weekdays, and it’s very cheap to bus into Harvard. There has been much attending of frat parties, and other events like Boston’s Museum of Fine Art’s Boston night yesterday. Plus with the organizations that are paired with MIT and Harvard, like the Chinatown tutoring, and the fact that Wellesley students can enroll in classes at other schools, there’s lot of ways to make this a co-ed experience if you wish. I personally haven’t made it out to Boston yet (I profess I am scared of both the bus and the wasted study time—but I’m a first-class nerd, so don’t mind me) but I’ll get there eventually, and I’ll let you know. Otherwise, there are a lot of lectures and activities going on on campus; or just playing cards with friends until midnight works as well!
Transitioning to nerdiness, classes are awesome here. I’m finding I’m actually really enjoying my Chemistry 120 class, which was a bit of a surprise. I’m a possible science major (chemistry, biology, neuroscience, biochem, you name it and I’ll say it’s a possibility) mostly because I’ve always been told that doing “hard-science” is how you advance in life. (I have also been told being a doctor would work, except I have no desire to be a doctor. I do have a huge amount of respect for the pre-med students though.) However, Chem 120 is actually fun. You know those people who always tell you that labs take up a ton of time and that taking Chem 120 is crazy since it meets four times a week? (This is unusual in college, by the way. Most classes meet twice a week. Also, labs are three and a half hours long, which is also the length of a seminar class, and they are both considered to be exorbitantly long.)
Well, they are right, but because I’m with the same group of 31 people for a substantial period of my week I’ve gotten to know them better than those in my other classes. We even had a study group last Saturday to work on our lab. The sciences are good, people! Don’t be discouraged—they are fun once you know the basics!
In other news, my job at the library and singing lessons are going well. I don’t know if I mentioned these before, but I’m working at the library six hours a week and taking private voice lessons! Both of which are quite pleasant. I’m getting to know some of the people in the library, plus what’s going on. For example, this was me sitting at the Clapp Library desk yesterday:
Patron: Could you check this book out for me?
Me: (to myself, but out loud) So, what do I do here…. Oh, click on the Checkout button… alright, now I scan the barcode… Alright, here you are!
Patron: You forgot to desensitize it.
Me: Ah, yes, *sheepish smile* well, it’s good you know more than I do!
Well, that scenario and constantly calling out to the student manager (Daisy! I have her name down.) asking what I’m supposed to be doing in any given situation :). It’s a lot of fun though, and I’m enjoying it.
As for the voice lessons, I had my first one last week on Monday, and after this week’s thirty-minutes session I screwed up the courage and went looking for the practice rooms. I found the music library along the way as well, and am quite pleased with myself. For anyone interested in private lessons, it’s good to know that your financial aid package can transfer over to lessons if you take music classes at Wellesley. So I’m getting free lessons since I’m taking Music 111x next semester. And I’m totally not as engaged in music as a lot of people here… Rebecca, one of my friends, for example, is in the Brandeis-Wellesley Orchestra, while Tiffany is taking both piano and harpsichord lessons so that she can play with the Chamber Music Society. And there are acapella groups and more orchestras and many music organizations plus lessons for all levels… I’ve never sung before, but it’s very easy to get involved if you’re interested!
To finish up, I think I’ll list out my schedule for the afternoon :). This weekend we have two swimming recruits with us (they are prospective students, affectionately dubbed “Prospies” (ps, that’s not my turn of phrase, but I don’t know who to credit I’ve heard it so many times)) and so the swim team as a whole is taking them to classes and showing them around. Plus, this is the swim team’s big Alumni weekend, so we have a pool party going on, plus normal swim practice and other swimming and sports activities. In other words, this weekend’s all about swimming, and so I worked out with morning with the team, ate lunch with the team, am showing around one of the Prospies in an hour, am going to go to swim practice with the team, going to dinner with the team, going to the pool party with the team, and try to cram some studying in there. Lots of swimming, lots of busy, lots of fun. Last note after this week: College life is good, guys. Life is good!
Pictures!
