Last Day

Its the last day of year 2009, and first I just want to wish everyone a happy new year. On Friday we'll all get up, and sure, life will be the same. The fact that the calender says 10 instead of 09 doesn't really change anything, and with this in mind I never really understood the big deal about New Years.
Sitting here thinking about it now though, I finally see at least some part of the point.
New Years is a big reminder to us that time keeps on going. Whether I'm working during the semester, or vacationing during the winter or summer, I hardly ever take the time to remember that fact. By the number on the calender switching from 09 to 10, a physical change is made that reminds me that all of previous time, not just this last year, is gone and never to be had again. So I'll think this New Years about what has changed, and just by writing this while scratching the surface of memory I can remember that quite a lot is different.

Pardon my lack of originality on that, I'm sure somebody has even told me a lot of these thoughts before, but some things are a lot more potent when you discover them yourself.

I hope all of you out there discover something, and of course, have a great time this New Years. I'm happy to be spending mine with my girlfriend and her family, especially after I went elsewhere last year.

Good night, and make the best of whats left of 2009!

Joe

Christmas is Long Gone, and Here Comes Boxing Day!

My response to Christmas? "Meh..." I wasn't really feeling the holiday spirit this year 'round. And the lack of the said spirit brought me to wonder about this "Boxing Day" that is celebrate in oh, just about every country outside the United States that celebrates Christmas. For those interested. In any event, whilst wondering about Boxing Day, my mind also tinkered with the idea of why American class a sport that hardly involves any footwork as "football"! Just why? Why would you name a sport with such a contradictory name, and not to mention, go against the accepted naming scheme that is present worldwide. Hmph... If you haven't figured it out, I am talking about "soccer." I love and enjoy the sport, and dare I call it my favorite?! Yea, it is my favorite. If you ever see or meet me, invite me to play football (American term - soccer). So, yea. Christmas was not all it's cracked up to be, and some football* would have definitely made it better. Nevertheless, on the bright side of things, I'll be off for several weeks (no winter classes), so that means more posting on here to burn time. Haha. Speaking of time, look at the time... I think I should head to bed.

Night, All.

*America's soccer equivalent.

Frohe Weihnachten indeed!

A beautiful, beautiful Christmas with my family:

All of my siblings (3) and siblings in law (2) were there, plus my grandparents. A 10 person German dinner - Sauerbraten, potato balls (the best my mom ever made), red cabbage, rye bread, and plenty of pickled vegetables. Absolute heaven!

Winter 2010 will be my first semester since Fall 2008 in which I will NOT be taking courses. I'm trying to figure out exactly how to spend the time. I've finished the entire back of a sweater and have started the front. I've also started Wuthering Heights, and, judging from the number of books I've received for Christmas this year, I will have an enormous amount of reading material for the next month (Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein, a book of Shelley's shorter works, and a book of critical essays about Frankenstein, to name a few - can you tell I love Mary Shelley?)

Even though I'm still having nightmares about missing my finals, my grades keep making me happy. 2 A's and 2 A+'s! Two more to go...I think I might get a B in CHC, but I suppose that's alright. I'm banking on an A in Jane Austen though.

Some perspective:

I went back to my high school to visit some of my teachers on Wednesday. Freaking weird. It's bizarre how people who are only 4 years younger than me (my high school is 10-12...hooray overcrowding...) look SO YOUNG. I suppose 15/16 is young, especially growing up in Rockland. All of the students who don't know me thought I was a substitute teacher, which was pretty hilarious. Some of the teachers even thought I was a faculty member - I got the whole head nod that meant "I'm supposed to know you but I don't but I should pretend I do because I think I might have met you at some point and I don't want to be rude," which I do to a lot of people in Macaulay.

I never really embraced the whole high school situation, but to the seniors reading this, if you love it, make the most of it. It won't be the same when you go back. (And kids, the reality of going to college is that, despite whatever popularity you have, you will talk to, at most, 10 people you went to school with. Unless you all go to school together.) This isn't meant to be depressing - more of a carpe diem sort of thing. Make the most of what you have!

Merry Christmas!

-Katharine

Frohe Weihnachten!

Ahhh Christmas. A Wii for my dorm room (YAY!) DVDs, and Zoombinis Logical Journey (possibly the best computer game ever and I now have a version that actually works on my laptop). And of course, I've been compulsively checking esims to see if any more of my grades have been posted (they haven't). Crossing my fingers that my last two will be as good as the first two!

Enjoy your break - I certainly will! I don't even know what to do with myself until January 28th, but that's kind of a nice feeling.

Hope your holidays are as good as mine!

-Kaitlyn

So, I Managed to Miss My Final...

Hmm, you are probably reading this because you were intrigued by my title; so, let me satiate your enthusiasm by telling you what happened. I had my Stat213 finals scheduled for this past Friday at 9am-11am, but for some odd reason, I figured the final started at 2pm (and I had that in my head the whole week!). So come Friday - alarm blaring, and sun streaks beaming through my window -, I get up well-rested and ready to tackle my Stat final... but wait, the final was already given! I do my morning e-mail check, and I see a mail in my inbox from my professor informing me that I missed the final. No Way. Panic ensues as I beat myself up mentally.
I run out the dorm and head to Hunter, while e-mailing my teacher on the way, and tell my adviser the horror story. Charlotte, my adviser and one of the best people around, tells me the worst case senior is that I will have to take it at the end of the Spring term - I cringed as the words left her mouth. So, I e-mailed my professor again (this time to another e-mail address I found at her office door). It was a time of quiet and waiting...

She e-mailed me back! Yes, success! And I was informed that I can make up the final on Monday (yesterday). And so, I set three alarms to make sure that I was up. Monday at 3:45, I walk out the room - mission accomplished! Final test completed (but not necessarily aced) :(.

It's fun to be done

So I finished my last final on Monday, and have spent the last couple days decompressing from that. I was going to finish that paper--a comparative analysis of redistributive land reform in Zimbabwe--on Sunday, but then I had a lot more to say than I thought I would, so I ended up writing for a few hours on Monday, then spent another hour doing my Works Cited pages, and then I had to rush it off to school and then go home and then go to a birthday party and then sleep and then yesterday morning my family left for Virginia. And now it is break and that is good and there shall be much relaxing and Christmas and presents and all that good stuff. This means no real internet, though, because our house down here doesn't have Wifi (I'm typing this in a Panera a few towns over). It's quite a relief to be done; now I'll just be checking eSIMS every chance I get to see my grades. Now I've just got one more semester to go... scary...

DONE FOREVER

Just kidding. Only for the fall term. But let me tell you, it was absolutely beautiful weather outside when I walked out of that Hist/Mem final exam and knew that it was all over. YAY.
Now that classes are over, I'm not quite sure what I will be doing during my break (which ends on Jan. 28). I might learn how to drive - uh oh :) Today I'm going shopping with high school friends - everyone is back from college so I can see them again - and then tomorrow dinner with the same group. Lots of ice-skating and resting coming up, and I'm fully going to enjoy that. At the same time, I am totally excited for my spring term. I've picked out some interesting classes - Intro to Womens Studies, Greek and Latin Roots of English - and I'm excited to see what they're like. Don't worry, I will keep you all totally up-to-date on all of that.

Finals final finals... it's all anyone is talking about right now, well, that and the excitement of winter break right around the corner. Of course there are also some lucky one who are done already, but I'm trying not to think about them because it would just make me jealous.

For me, finals week has actually been oddly pleasant - instead of running around between classes, lab work, and trying to do homework, I've just been at home, studying, eating, and sleeping, then every few days venturing up to school to take a test - it's very calm somehow. I'm now down to one more test, on Monday morning, so my life revolves entirely around chemistry at the moment. It's an interesting way to spend a weekend....

my stats final is over, and -

I NEVER HAVE TO TAKE MATH
EVER
EVER

AGAIN!

it is a glorious day.

Last day of classes, and lots of evaluations

Yesterday was the last day of class, and my very last class of the semester was my CHC (Honors seminar, soon to be more appropriately named MHC classes). CHC was a lot of fun because the main focus of the class was looking at the posters all the teams in our class had made, and eating bagels. And filling out evaluations, which turned out to be much more interesting than expected. First we did our regular Hunter College evaluations, which went perfectly smoothly - a few people wrote novels on the open answer portion at the back but that's nothing new. Then it was time for Macaulay evaluations since this is a Macaulay class. Which was when we discovered that we had the surveys for Seminar 1, and all the questions asked about Arts in NYC - not good for a Science and Technology seminar. I scuttled down to the Honors lounge where our trusty administrator had to convince people over at the Macaulay building to fax us the correct survey. Of course once I was back up in the classroom with 25 copies of the survey we discovered that they had accidentally sent us the faculty evaluation rather than the student evaluation. And so around we went again.

*sigh*

The term has ended.
Yes, there are still some folk with Friday classes, and I still have a CHC project to do and two finals to study for - but classes themselves, are over.

Today I handed in my massive 20-something page history paper and did my final scene for acting class. It was so satisfying to hand in the paper; I really put alot of effort and time into it and was very happy with the finished project. It's pretty much affirmed my desire to be a history major.

I will however, miss history class. For any future Macaulay students out there, if you get a chance to take Salzman, do it! There's alot of reading and a couple of papers (for the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties class) and he really challenges you - but in my book those are good things. I honestly came out of the class knowing alot more than when I came in, and having new perspectives on things I did know.

Off to celebrate having made it through my first term in college!

video!

As Promised...

Enjoy!

Love Katharine

Silence

It's quiet. And I find solace in that. I don't know whether it's because its 1am or I'm tired, maybe humans are geared to want pacifism and tranquility in the early hours of the morning... but I do cherish this quiet. Almost as if I'm listening to a song. I'd like to think that there is something to this, emptiness rather is quiet unsettling, and nothingness is unfathomable... so questioning silence becomes necessary, now that I pay more attention to my quiet room, my sanctuary, my bastion of myself, as the sounds of garbage trucks and cars racing by, fill my ears. Is this true silence? What is true silence... wherefore art thou silence?

My eyes have grown heavy, in the matter of moments that I've typed this. They were already but when I hopped out of bed to go brush my teeth, that sensation of waking up occurred and I had some energy to sit down, and feel the urge to create, to ponder, to peruse the inner workings of that thing we call brain. By typing am I browsing the pages of my brain, or am I tapping into something new? Is everything just a chemical response to outside factors? If so, are we really alive? These questions, well the last few bring into question free will, and what not, and that can be debated for eons. So I'll just state my opinion: yes, we have free will. Yes, there's cause and effect as well. Causality. However, we do have the free will to act or not to act, to decide within a given circumstances and look outside the options given to us. But I'm not calling on my better evidence or references for this little walk inside my head right now, just because it's late, I have class tomorrow, and I've grown more and more tired. It's amazing how lackadaisical I've become over the years. Is it age? or is it just a general societal malaise? Am I one of the sheep that are herded by our societal elite? our economic and political elite? I follow what I believe in, and what morals and ethical conduct I follow, and therefore, I am a wolf. I don't allow others ideas to breach into mine and change my mind immediately. Listen to others and then make your own decision. This is the core of understanding and then acting. Don't be too foolhardy to not listen externally, and don't be too malleable to not listen within.

All i know is that it is time for finals and I can't wait to knock em out. I've had really good classes this semester =]

This is the end...

A note to fellow overachievers: 18 credits is not fun during finals week. I have so much to do before I can breathe on December 19th, but at least my CHC professor extended the final paper deadline to the 18th, as opposed to it being due on the 10th. So perfect.

To do, still:

• Finish CHC video for Macaulay presentation tomorrow. This is pretty fun, actually. For this seminar, we had a choice between doing a poster project and creating a pseudo-documentary on the topic of our choice. My group is creating a video about the steam system in New York City and options for making it more sustainable, namely the utilization of cogeneration technologies. I'll post a link to the video when it inevitably makes it's debut on youtube.
• Statistics analytical project - decidedly less fun - due Thursday (yikes).
• Jane Austen take home final for Friday. FYI, fellow literature enthusiasts, Professor Davis is a great teacher and is totally adorable.
  
• Jane Austen final paper due December 18 (double yikes).
• Fiction portfolio due Friday (almost finished, though - maybe a quarter-yike)
• CHC Final report due December 18.
• German Final on December 17 (Ich habe keine Angst.)
• Stats Final on December 14 (Ich habe nur ein bisschen Angst.)

I had my Literature and Film final yesterday. I think I did pretty well - it definitely payed to put a lot of work in during the semester, since I didn't have to cram or read any sparknotes before the final. The test was exhausting, though - 3 essays in 2 and a half hours. It was like taking an AP test, except less stringent. One of the things I love about college classes is that, if you have to go to the bathroom for any reason during a class, you just get up, go, and come back. No passes, no asking "can you hold it?" no being treated like children. Just take care of your business like an adult. Freaking awesome. Even during my final, I just quietly got up and came back 5 minutes later, and everything was perfectly fine.

If Macaulay offers Lit and Film again, I totally recommend it. Professor Lattin is brilliant and really fun to work with, and the works we studied were really great: Henry V (Shakespeare), Frankenstein (Shelley), Turn of the Screw (James), The Hour of the Star (Lispector), Heart of Darkness (Conrad), and Beloved (Morrison). I just thought it was very enriching - a great, stimulating class.

I should probably get back to my pile of work. Egh.

-Katharine

Laryngitis isn't fun

So I kinda lost my voice over the weekend. Had a cold on Friday, over Saturday my voice started really going, by Sunday it was gone. We are not amused. The weekend, of course, was the lovely Southern Africa Simulation Game. I was on the Zimbabwe team, playing Robert Mugabe. Naturally the scenario we were given had me getting a bit more dictatorial than usual. Our strategy ended up at odds with what the professors wanted to do--we were trying to placate internal discontent and make friends, they wanted to see what it would take to get South Africa to invade us. It was intense, though, and overall a good experience. My cold has gotten a little worse, and I considered staying at the dorms today just to speed up my recovery so I'd be all fine and dandy in time for finals, but I decided to come because I have yet to hand in my final paper for my Milton class, or receive my mid-term paper for my American Lit class, and so long as I was going to two classes I figured I might as well go to my other two, since they're writing workshops and pretty easygoing. Might as well keep up the old attendance grade, right? I'll just let my internship know I have to skip tomorrow, and use that to recuperate.

Fun Macaulay events... and work

Today I met with my team mates on my CHC poster team at the lovely Macaulay building to work on our project (since it has to be printed tomorrow). We're looking at green housing in the Bronx, specifically how to turn this:

into nice sustainable affordable homes. Anyhow, we met at the Mac center unaware that today was Snapshot day for the class of 2013 - the building was teeming with Freshmen! Our group was relegated to an albeit very comfy corner behind the screening room, where we commandeered the floor. It's always nice to get to use the Mac center because - even when crowded, which is almost never is - it's a very nice space. And being there today made me think about other fun and sometimes rather tedious things Macaulay has done for us/made us do.

Snapshot day involved us taking pictures, the going to see them and our classmates' at the Mac center and making videos from the pictures (a bit odd but whatever). Then this spring our CHC class all took a field trip to Ellis Island:

with tiny Professor Friendlander in the middle. She was a very adventurous professor.

Art Night last winter - a general art exhibition of Macaulay students' work, put together by our fellow students, was also lots of fun. This year, all the Hunter CHC sections went on a field trip to Black Rock Forest, a nature preserve which Hunter actually owns a share of. It was cold but the view off the mountain was great, and it was overall really enjoyable.

And then there's the poster presentations we have to do... my team presents next Sunday. That's one of those not-so-fun Macaulay things. Wish us luck!

The end is nigh...

So this is that weird zone between Thanksgiving break and finals, when things are kinda winding down but kinda not because there's still stuff to do. Like, you know, finals. I spent most of my break doing homework, so that I'd be able to be more relaxed once school started again. Finished my feedback for my fiction and nonfiction workshops, and read Moby-Dick (yes, all of it. It's actually not bad, sort of presciently postmodern-esque). So I felt very accomplished with myself, until my professors went and assigned a whole new batch of homework. I did manage to take care of a big chunk of it over break, but part of me was hoping I wouldn't have to do anything else after that, ever... And then I went and got a cold, which was bound to happen sooner or later. This weekend is going to be tiring but fun: one of my classes, in lieu of a final exam, is doing a roleplaying game where everybody gets to be someone in some southern African political group. I'm on the Zimbabwe team, playing Robert Mugabe. It shall be most enjoyable.

On another note, I thought I'd share my personal note-taking strategies for class. As everyone says, to succeed in school, one must take good notes. I've become a compulsive note-taker--I'm always the guy typing madly away even when the professor says "You don't have to bother writing this down..." Which results in endless, confusing notes--in some lecture classes, I'll amass 4 pages, single-spaced, 12-pt font, for a single class session. In some classes, though, I really don't need to take notes most of the time (like writing workshops--noting down every single thing every single person says about every single story/essay leads to a lot of redundancy); in these classes, I tend to take notes longhand, and I need to keep my hands busy while listening. Which results in cryptic sheets of notepad paper covered mostly in doodles:


I am confident that, within a year, if I review my notes, this won't make any more sense to me than it does to you. But it looks pretty!

Registration Day

So today I woke up at 10 so I can get to the Hunter Library at 11. Registration day... registration for classes at 12... was this reason for this preparation. You will come to know that there is no more chaotic day, or desperate day, if you will, than registration day... people running to get their classes, running to get their pre-reqs down, running to their advisors, running just cause... it's pretty intense.

So at the library, I got a desktop computer in one of the comp sci lounges, and had my laptop with me as well. I typed my CHC (mandatory class for those of you who don't know) on my desktop I was using, and submitted that at 12. The page was not loading. I panicked for a quick moment and then realized I had my laptop. I opened it, logged onto esims and registered for my other 4 classes.

Luckily, after a brief moment of terror, I had all my 5 classes registered.

Today was a good day.

Unfortunately, some people didn't get some of their classes they wanted at the times they wanted, that's why you have to be prepared!!! =D

I'll catch you all around,

Julian

Mute at Hunter

Yesterday I had to miss a whole day of school from being sick for the first time ever... and spent it in bed reading for chem and bio, when I was awake. Today I'm having another new experience - spending a day in school without being able to talk at all. Laryngitis is the most annoying thing ever! And very awkward.

Today was also registration day, which meant a lot of extremely anxious students packed into anywhere on campus that has good wifi, cursing at eSIMS and Hunter internet. After experiencing the chaos of the honors lounge one time too many, this time around I went to the library which was, at least, much quieter. In the lounge it feels like a cross between New Years and a crazy race, with lots of "No! Why?" and "but I DO have that prereq" and "YES! I'm in" flying around - that is, after the initial shout of "Yes we're on guys, go go go!" passes around... And I'm glad to report that despite some problems, I actually got all the classes I wanted. Yay!