Good afternoon everyone,
I hope you’re having a marvelous Friday!
Fridays are my days off from school, but even so they’re busy :). Still, Fridays at college are such a different experience from high school. In high school, Fridays represented the end of a long, continuous week when all the homework had built up to a towering level, and Friday night was the respite before the weekend work began in earnest. Here, the work doesn’t build up during the week, only to be eradicated over the weekend, but rather gradually climbs and is tackled in little bits along the way. I feel like a mountain climber with a pickax, stabbing away at my little pile of ice that keeps on growing and growing…
Rambling metaphors aside, it’s been a great week in Monica-world. On Wednesday, I went to my second lecture by the sports psychologist and author Dr. Amy Baltzell, this one on dealing with negative emotions. I really enjoy her lectures because she delivers them in a way that you can drift in and out of her specific points, focusing on your own problems and applying her messages. I quite liked her emphasis on managing negative emotions, and recognizing all positive emotions. Since then, I have actively been focusing on my outlook, and correcting it, and have quite enjoyed the last two days (not to mention the whole week!)
Thursday was wonderful. After Neuro 101, I followed my professor out and hiked up the steps to the fifth floor of the Science Center (talk about an energy barrier to attending office hours.) Once there, I spent a great hour and a half asking questions of and listening to Professor Conway. I had originally meant to ask my questions and skedaddle, but then my neuro peers came up and asked questions too, and Professor Conway has an interesting method of doing office hours in that he invites everyone in to talk to him and then tells us to take turns asking the questions. This style means that I get to know some of my classmates, learn the answers to questions I hadn’t asked, and can spend hours sitting quietly in an office without feeling pressured. It was very fulfilling—and I’d make an excuse about how much of a nerd I am right now, but it really was very fun for me.
Monday too I had a long chat with a professor—this time my writing teacher from last semester, musician Professor Johnson. I entered into her towering office, filled with books, instruments, and the sounds of singing twining around her door (her office is across from the auditorium in Jewett, our fine arts building), and talked with her for an hour about grammar and fiction. She inspired me for the moment to try and write something besides this blog and schoolwork every week; who knows how long it will last, but that long chat with her, which she gladly offered to repeat, was a cherished occasion.
I have also decided to carve twenty minutes out of my schedule every day to practice singing, which is becoming very rewarding. I have a new teacher, Marion Dry, and I like her style of teaching. Not only does she try many methods to try to teach me a concept I don’t understand, but she compliments, too. I think that sometimes at Wellesley we forget the power of the compliment—I’ve had to remember to compliment and critique in equal measures when I teach swim lessons, because it’s hard to remember that not only are we here to improve, but we’re also here to enjoy what we can do.
School, too, is progressing nicely :). I have to remind myself how lucky I am this semester; this is the best collection of classes I will have for quite a while (not to mention I got into some highly competitive classes). The coursework is challenging, but the material all meshes and a lot of it is designing and reading up on experiments. For example, my work for this week is as follows: read a research article for Bio 112, Bio 113, and two for Neuro 100, read the pages in two different biology textbooks, a neuro textbook, and film textbook, and create experiments and do statistical analysis for our last experiments in Bio 112, Bio 113, and Neuro 100. It’s all the same work, but in different contexts, and it all builds on itself—by the end of this semester, I’m going to know how to write a killer first-year research paper.
And swimming is happy, happy, happy! We’ve progressed along nicely to taper, which is sports terminology for workouts getting easier because a lot of mostly-fast yardage is replaced by a little bit of very slow and very fast yardage. I’ve had to adjust my diet, sadly (darn. I love being able to eat mountains of food,) but it’s nice to have that extra time between sets to talk to teammates, and that extra time after practice to eat slowly before class starts. Tiffany has cut her hair for the occasion (not the Wellesley chop, which is shorter), and is now ready for NEWMACs, our final meet next week! It’s so strange to realize that next week we’ll be done with swimming forever in our freshman year. It seems like just days ago that I was doing parametric sets and insane underwater power racks!
That’s mostly been my week: swimming, singing, school, satisfaction :). Tiffany says that happiness isn’t something that can last for a long time, and rather people are content for the most part, but I like to believe I can keep it up for forever—well, at least until exams start :). I have to go now, since our lab research group is meeting for surface-study irradiation discussion and Indian food. It’s a good mix.
Wishing you all well, and here as always for questions!
Cheers,
Monica
Ps, my camera should be up and working by next week! Look forward to some pictures of my new lab partners :).
