Spring Semester's Snowy Start

My break is over. This is snow way to live....or is it?

As I did last semester, I kept my Fridays open. So while my friends went to Hunter Friday, during the day I prepared for school and tidied up my room, buying books and an cabinet to put my mini fridge on. I think the best way to start what CUNY calls "Spring 2011" with without school. It makes the cold (including Thursday's snow) much more tolerable.

I returned to the dorm Tuesday night and when not interviewing applicants to the class of 2015, I've been seeing new-old friends and reacquainting myself with the city that I abandoned for all of break. I wish I had spent more free time in Manhattan. I like being here best without the constant pressure of schoolwork.

So classes for me started today. Mondays are going to be my busiest days. Peopling of New York City, Introduction to Media Production and Ancient Near Eastern Religion run back to back. The sitting in class won't be bore me in the least, but overlapping syllabi could spell disaster when assignments start.


A quick dinner was sandwiched by my last shift of interviews and attending the semester's first floor meeting. One of the things I love most about the Macaulay Honors College and Hunter is even reading the same sheet can produce something unique.

welcome to spring sem, 2011!

wow it's weird to dust off the blogspot and keep blogging. okay, so, welcome to the spring semester! this semester I'm taking english 120, peopling of nyc (mhc150), intro to art history, psychology of human sexuality and intro to nutrition. hello, beautiful semester.

also, did I mention that I usually have about 2 hours of class a day and, on mondays, wednesdays and thursday, I have only one class a day? oh and I have nutrition IN MY DORM on wednesdays so that's going to prove to be incredibly unproductive (hopefully not though).

the goals for this semester are:
1. be more patient.
2. be friendlier (apparently being friendly is not my forte, according to, ironically, my friends)
3. make the best of classes I'm unhappy in.

so I've been taking yoga recently (at yoga to the people, really everyone should try it at least once and you will probably fall in love with it) and one thing that yoga teaches is to accept the moment because it won't last forever but accept it, accept the tenderness that comes with it, and let it go. I hope this mentality is going to aid me in my semester because it's very true that all too often I end up checking the time on my phone to see how many minutes are left of class or checking to see where the next section of the textbook begins so I can take a break. no. from now on I am going to try to internalize the moment and accept it and breathe into it.

I'm also excited for my classes this semester, surprisingly more excited than I was last semester. I'm really excited for psychology of human sexuality (it just looks like such an interesting class), art history (which is probably going to turn out to be very difficult because it's a ton of memorization but I love art so it'll at least be interesting memorization) and nutrition (because, of course, I love food so much and learning about nutrition makes me really happy, it's pretty weird).

anyway, the other two classes are requirements and they are DEFINITELY the ones I'm going to have to have breathe into because I can already tell that english 120 is going to drive me up a freaking wall (because I know how to write an essay and argue a point, I did debate for 4 years of high school and summer programs at both stanford and princeton) but I'm not sure about peopling of new york city. I've studied hispanic immigration before (in high school spanish we spent a semester learning about it...in spanish though so I'm sure I'll be able to express myself more adequately in english) and my grandparents are jewish immigrants (survivors) from poland and I went to jewish day school for 19 years so I know about jewish immigration to america (AND to israel, but that doesn't really apply here). but, I'll make the best of it. or, I'll do my best at least.

First Day of Spring (Semester)

It's been a while since I last posted here on the MacBlog. Not much has happened since my last post after finals week (though I've had more than a few editions of The Macaulay Vlog - if you haven't subscribed to it yet...well, you're just not nice.). It's kind of weird that spring term starts on a Friday, for obvious reasons, but further, a day where snow was on the ground for the umpteenth straight day.

Aside from stepping in a slush puddle when getting a quasi-celebratory (for my blog hitting 10,000 views) lunch at Schnitzel and Things, I felt like I got the semester off to the right start. I was early for both of my classes (Intro to Literature and Readings in Popular Culture, both Honors-level), and picked up all the textbooks I know I'll need for the term. Five of those I found at the New York Public Library (leading to a whirlwind trip where I had to visit two libraries within my 3-hour break between classes), and another three I found at the Hunter library; the other two I had to purchase - a packet of readings for my Intro to Literature course, and the ActivStats packet for my Statistics course.

(A brief rant about the ActivStats packet - it costs $63 for a goddamn CD and a code to access it? Which I can't get anywhere else for cheaper, because I have to get it from Hunter? And which I have to buy so I can actually access the course materials? And which I probably won't be able to sell back to the bookstore, 'cause I assume the code's unique? That's some damn racket Hunter's running right there, some goddamn racket.)

The classes themselves went pretty well. My literature course has a theme of "hauntings," meaning we'll be reading a bunch of stories involving ghosts in some capacity (including Macbeth, probably my favorite of the Shakespearean dramas I've read so far), which seems somewhat compelling. Further, the diagnostic essay (a comparison of one of Petrarch's sonnets and one of Shakespeare's) was a relatively easy task, and one that caused me to somewhat fondly reminisce about my Humanities seminar in senior year of high school. Readings in Popular Culture involved comparing a cover of Vogue to King Kong and bringing it back to minstrelsy, the antecedents to Madonna and Lady Gaga (reminding me of this Nostalgia Chick video comparing blond pop stars of the '90s to blond pop stars of today), and sanitized idealism in High School Musical, meaning this is going to be one crazy course. (That's semiotics for ya.) I've heard really great things about Prof. Goldstein, and today, I saw much of it in action - this class seems to be incredibly thought-provoking; I'm excited.

Spring 2011 - we have lift off!

School jumped back into gear today with the first day of the spring semester; starting on a Friday way pretty sneaky and the fact that school in session really hasn't sunk in yet, at least not for me. This first day was good though, and exciting. For one thing, this is the first semester that I don't have early morning classes - today my first class was at noon, giving me plenty of time to laze about, go by the fellowship advisor's office to hand in my Goldwater scholarship application essay (it feels great to be done with the whole application ordeal), and get a delicious brunch from one of my favorite cafes in the Hunter area before going to class.

But more importantly, I'm really excited about the classes I have this semester. First this afternoon was my Physiology of the Nervous System lecture; being a neuroscience major I am pretty much on course to find this the coolest class ever, and our professor seems both friendly and good at teaching. It was a bit odd today, first off because it's in the Thomas Hunter building of the campus, which is generally regarded as a deeply mysterious maze/trap to anyone except perhaps English majors, who have class in there all the time. The classroom was pretty weird as it was full of extra desks, and the window is temporarily covered by scaffolding. And my professor arrived 20 minutes late because he had just flown in from CA, as his flight yesterday was cancelled due to the monumental amounts of snow in New York. But those were both fairly trivial things, and overall I'm really excited about the class and everything I'm going to learn in that class.

After my two hour neuro lecture I had 10 minutes to get over to the social sciences learning lab off in another building, where I'm lab TA for the same section of Statistical Methods in Psychology that I was a student in last fall. I was a bit nervous about being a TA - my professor from the fall is the one in charge of the whole student TA program, which is coupled with a once-a-week advanced psych statistics class, and she essentially recruited me because I did well in her class, but I also tended to zone out in her class a bit and since this lab met on the first day, I hadn't had a chance to get my bearings at all before we jumped in. It all went really well though, and I think I'm going to love it. It was pretty neat, and very gratifying, getting to transition from student to TA; it's like taking one step further along the path toward grad school and eventually being a real grown-up faculty member. And I think it will be a great learning experience, as well as a chance to learn more stats which I found really interesting in the fall.

Now it's time to post an introduction in my online honors class - another totally new experience, taking an online class that is - and maybe read some of my neuro textbook. Ahh school... time to get back into work mode.

- Celine

Macaulay Interviews!

It has been so much fun interviewing Macaulay applicants. Every single person that walks in is qualified in terms of academics, but there's the social aspect that really sets them apart from others. There were a few nervous nellys that seemed to be overwhelmed with the college process and were unable to make coherent responses. For the most part, they were intelligent and thoughtful. This one guy in particular came with a two page resume that blew me away. He's involved in so many extracurriculars that I wondered how he managed to have time to sleep! I'm so happy I volunteered to interview applicants because it has been truly enriching.

When we turn the tables on them and ask them if there are any questions they have about Macaulay, they always wonder what college is like. Even though it has only been one semester, I can honestly say that I would not trade the Macaulay experience for anything else. Taking pre-med courses and dorming helped me learn more about the world around me and myself. I feel like college is more than pure academics. It's also about expanding outside your comfort zone, taking advantage of the numerous opportunities offerred by Macaulay and the city itself, exploring your interests and finding new ones. I can't wait for another day of interviews!

I'm still in Australia!

And I'm still blogging! Check it out here: http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/kohagan/category/australia-today/

Ah frustration; as seems to happen leading up to any semester, I'm struck by the urge to start changing my classes around. And at least once during every break I strongly consider changing my major, adding further temptation to drop, add, and otherwise mess with my planned classes. That has always gone badly in the past though, so this spring I was determined to stick with my plan, and then I got closed out of one that I need to take for my major! This of course means I'll be taking it over the summer, my first summer (or winter) class ever, and means that I have to deviate from my plan and figure out what to fill that spot in my schedule with. Luckily, my stats professor from last fall runs a stats TA/tutoring practicum and had invited me to take it, and though I turned the offer down at first I'm hoping that it still stands. Oh well, as long as I manage to squeeze in all the necessary things in time to actually graduate with a degree it should all be fine.

- Celine

Winter break is speeding along, and I can't say I'm sorry. It's one of the perils of being an obsessive student that I never know what to do with myself when I'm not on school or overworked in some other way, and even if I do know what to do with myself I tend to feel unproductive. This of course is coupled with a strong desire to "have time to breath already!" throughout the semester. Alas.

I've been keeping my mind pretty busy and feeding my academia addiction though. My boyfriend and I have taken to settling on the couch with TED talks or The Great Courses DVDs, which is a great way to learn about topics we don't really get study in school; recently we've been on an education reform binge. And today we drove up to Yale to visit the boyfriend's cousin, a freshman there, and attend a lecture on viral coat proteins there which was pretty interesting.

All my grades are in...finally...

The above picture is me in late October with some lovely pumpkins (both real and painted)! If you have not visited the orchards in upstate NY, I recommend you do so if you get the chance. They are wonderful! Just a side note...

So I have finally found out all my grades for the semester although I was supposed to know by December 27th. It's okay I suppose. I had an inkling what my grades would be. I was really excited to get an A+ in 20th Century Art II! That was a really hard class and finishing off a century of art with a bang was nice. In Classical Sociological Theory I got an A (I really wanted an A+...) which was good and an A in my Thomas Hunter course, Integrating the Irrational. I got an A- in Chinese and Japanese Art, which made me a little sad. But the course was difficult, the professor horrible, and the curriculum left open to anything by Hunter. It was to be expected. I have gotten a total of 4 A-s in college now but I have also gotten 8 A+s and 15 As. What am I complaining about?! I guess obsessing over an A- is to be expected of a Macaulay student. Aiming high is a very good thing but not beating oneself up over mistakes is an important thing to remember. Honors students are human beings like anyone else and have faults. I think recalling one's common humanity with all people is an important action that can help an overachiever and, well, everyone for that matter...I seem to be rambling because it is 2:00 AM. I better go to sleep or risk not getting up early enough to finish and mail in my MoMA volunteer application. Goodnight and Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

I have a feeling 2011 is going to be a great year. I woke up at 7AM (which was surprising because I slept at 5AM due to a New Years Eve party), sipped tea and sat in the warm glow of the sun. Being in that environment made me reflect on what the new year means for me. As a freshman, 2010 was a pretty big year for me. I transitioned from being a senior in high school to being a freshman in college, from top of the food chain to the bottom. Now I'm living away from home, cooking my own meals, and setting my own schedule. It has been really difficult and stressful at times but I'm glad the semester's over and anxious for Monday to arrive so I can find out my grades!

I suppose I could have New Year's Resolutions but they always seem to be the same each year: do better in school, be more social, sleep and exercise more, read something other than a textbook, and travel to some place new. In the beginning, I'm motivated to follow through but as the days pass by and the year progresses, I become swamped with work and lose the drive to complete them. Hopefully 2011 will be different! Judging from the odd time I woke up, this may be the year where the resolutions lists dwindles down for the coming year.