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