Sitting in the Commons

Hello readers!

I hope you all had a great time Trick-or-Treating last night, if you consider yourself still young enough for such activities :). I unfortunately do not, and I don’t even have a younger sibling on campus that I can “escort” around! However, campus was quite happy to provide a Halloween mood for me, given:

• Munger Mash at my residence hall,
• Halloween-themed treats at the dining hall Stone-Davis (I heard they had deep-fried oreos? Brings me back to Minnesota’s State Fair every year, which features anything you can imagine deep-fried),
• disturbing decorations everywhere,
• carved pumpkins (the squirrels haven’t eaten them yet, which astounds me),
• a Rocky Horror Picture show beginning at midnight (for which Rowen, my neighbor in Math 205, bleached her hair—she played Rocky last night)
• many cool costumes on campus,
• and candy is almost all of my classes :).

Moreover, I’d finished my math test by Thursday morning, so I was finally relaxed enough to enjoy the festivities :).

This brings me to a point I was thinking about yesterday, which is that the Wellesley experience is so wonderfully individualized. Previous to Wednesday of this week, I was in exam-studying mode, which for me means holing myself up somewhere very, very quiet and studying for hours on end. Tiffany calls it “cave-ing,” and all of my friends know how difficult it is to extract me out of my hiding spot once I find one. This experience, which is composed of solitary concentration with many breaks for classes, is enormously different from others’ at Wellesley, and even very different from what I can easily make my own experience with different choices. This idea was brought home Thursday night, when I decided that since I had finished my two exams, I was going to do math homework in the common area of the Science Center. This resulted in my homework probably taking four times longer than it would have if I’d been by myself, because I got to talking with Suman, and Alison, and Genevieve and Katie, and Emily, and Kristen, and then listening to Emily and Emmy study for their neuro exam, and buying yummy things from the neuroscience bake sale. I had a wonderful time at the expense of not getting a lot of work done—and the fact that I can change so much about my life just by making one choice—to sit in Sage Lounge rather than in a corner somewhere—is amazing to me.

We were having a similar discussion in Advanced Strength Training (my Physical Education class) yesterday, at around two pm in the afternoon. We’d finished our mid-semester testing (my vertical jump improved), and so were upstairs on the indoor track, taking turns flipping a 1-meter-in-diameter-tire that Coach Meg had found around the 200-meter track. Besides being endlessly entertaining, during that particular workout I learned that one of my classmates, Kaden, was taking only three classes, but was holding down four jobs. And in math class, I spoke in Rowen, and learned that she was very involved in Shakespeare society and stage-directing several plays at the same time here. And I was talking to my Supplemental Instruction tutor, a senior who discovered that she only needs four hours of sleep over the summer, and so has decided to take MIT classes and do all of her homework until 4am in the morning, which is a lifestyle choice as well. Tiffany is swimming and constantly practicing music, as well as being a Spanish major and taking pre-med classes, and from all of the interviews I’ve conducted and people I’ve talked to, people are able to fit an insanely impressive amount of choices into an environment that’s fixed in terms of taking around four classes (44 hours a week).

Well, I suppose that’s what happens when you get a bunch of happy overachievers together in a school, and they’ve got all this time on their hands :). Everyone goes after their interests, and soon enough we’ve all filled our lives with completely different activities that we’re all passionate about and proud of. College really is all about choice, then, and I really couldn’t imagine anywhere else I would want to be.

…

All right, readers, that’s apparently all the reflecting my brain can handle for the day :). The problem with having fun (and doing work, actually) is that it doesn’t really lend itself to reflection—it’s much more enjoy the moment, lose track of time, live and do. And so, in that vein, I have two anecdotes from this week for the rest of this post. Hope you enjoy them, and if not, remember I’m always open for comments about topics you’d like me to discuss! 🙂

• Tuesday was TANNER CONFERENCE! During Tanner, many of Wellesley’s students elect to give 15-minute oral presentations to share their summer internships with the Wellesley community, both students and the public. As students, we have no school, we are provided snacks throughout the day, and all we are encouraged to do is go listen to the amazing things our peers did over the summer. I’ll be presenting at our spring conference, Ruhlman, which is aimed more at research internships, but I didn’t present at Tanner… which meant I was able to go see all of my friends’ presentations! Pictures are below—they all did a great job, and as always I remain impressed at all that Wellesley students do :).

• Thursday is my busiest day of the week, and from 5:30-6pm I spent a particularly enjoyable office hours with Professor Keane. I’m taking Cognition with her, and because I find myself enjoying the topic so much, I’ve started going to her every week with a possible experiment in mind so that we may discuss it. Though my presentation of information and formatting of thought needs much improvement, Professor Keane was still able to understand my general ideas, and for a full half an hour we focused my thoughts until I finally had a concrete experimental question which I can flesh out for next week. Keep in mind that Professor Keane is a busy woman, my developing experiments has nothing to do with what we’re doing in class, and that both of us were fully engaged during this interaction. I love this college, readers, I really do.

That’s all I have, readers :). I hope that you take advantage of all the chocolate around, and that you all have great Fridays!

Best,

Monica