The MacBlog

This semester seem to be shaping up into a rather quirky one for me. On the one hand, I've got a few classes that I'm quite excited about. My Physiology of the Nervous System class is charging ahead at a good clip, and I'm really enjoying it. It's the only biology class I've taken that involves homework - I hand in my first problem set tomorrow, mostly involving circuit analysis and calculating resting membrane potential - and it's very engaging. My organic chemistry lecture is getting started very slowly; we spent a week and a half on the first, introductory chapter. Then today we had a substitute professor because our normal one, and older man, apparently is unwell. Needless to say this set off a flurry of rumors, the gist of which being that it's fairly serious and our sub might become our permanent professor. The upside is that the new professor is much more animated, but apparently his tests are very challenging. Again though, that's just rumor, which I've found is a highly unreliable source of information about teachers.

I also tried yesterday to register for a new class, but the professor wouldn't take me this late. That's perfectly reasonable of course, we are a couple weeks into the semester already, but it was frustrating as it's a class I'll have to take over the summer and I would really rather take a different class or do an internship over the summer. Oh well. I'm also considering dropping one of my classes, an online class offered through Macaulay. I think it's a good class, it's just not quite what I was hoping for.

I'm still really enjoying my statistics tutoring/lab TA position. There are 20 of us TAs, and we all meet once a week with the coordinator of the program, who's also the professor whose lab I TA and was my teacher for stats last semester. It's nice to be part of a smaller group, and everyone seems to be very friendly, and it's really nice to be involved with the students in my lab section. Each TA has to do some kind of presentation during the semester too, so I'm thinking about doing a presentation on statistics in the media and other places in day-to-day life, how they are misunderstood, and more generally on the use of numbers to describe the world around us (something I've been getting steadily more interested in myself; I'm thinking of staying an extra semester, or just packing my semesters as full as possible, to take some more math and physics classes).

For the time being, I've got a lull in my work thanks to Lincoln's birthday, observed, making this a 3-day weekend, so I think I'll actually cook some real food for a change and then take advantage of the extra time to really study the foundations for my bio and chem classes.

- Celine