Studying vs. Surviving

            If anyone ever wondered what state of matter to-do lists were, I have the answer: they’re gaseous. Why? Because they take the shape and volume of whatever container you put them in. The more space you make for them, the more space they will take up; you might think that if you work harder, you’ll be able to carve out some free time, but it’s no more use than trying to let air out of a balloon so that half of it is a vacuum; it doesn’t work. On the other hand, while these lists expand very easily, they don’t compress so well; if you’re trying to get more and more done in less and less time, good luck.

            And with that optimistic thought, on with my week. It’s been pretty good, actually; as you can guess from my opening, there’s been a lot to get done, but it’s mostly enjoyable, and I’m working along steadily. I’m behind where I want to be because on Saturday, I went with a group of people from my unit to tour the USS Cassin Young, a WWII/Cold War era destroyer that’s docked here in Boston.

            A Harvard Graduate who worked on the same class of ship gave us a behind-the-scenes tour that covered everything from the quarterdeck to the kitchen. We enjoyed listening to his stories, and he enjoyed telling them. We left at 0900 Saturday morning and got back around 1200. It was a good way to spend a morning, but I didn’t get much done.

            From noon Saturday until noon Sunday, I take my Sabbath, if possible. On Saturday evening I have my free time for the week (occasionally supplemented with breaks throughout the week, if I feel like I can manage that. Not that my feelings are always accurate, but it’ll be alright). This past week, a lot of that involved the season of Bones that just came out on Netflix, but I also had time to get some creative writing in. Also, I recently bought a book on European History that I’m working my way through over the weekends. Growing up in Texas, I had a year of State History and two years of US History, balanced by one year of World History. So World History is still kind of unexplored territory as far as I’m concerned, and fortunately for me, people love writing books about it.

            Speaking of History and books, anyone who was in my World History class will remember the infamous Ibn Battuta, whose travel account I very much doubt any of us read in its entirety. A word of warning: if you ever study Arabic or the Middle East, you will almost certainly run into him again, and this time you’ll be trying to read all of that in Arabic. Arabic is going alright, though; I need to work on my spelling, but that’s one of those things that comes from practice, and I don’t have that much time to practice outside of what’s required for my homework. That’s a problem in all my classes, though, and one I need to look into a remedy for.

            This past week I’ve been spending most of my extra time on philosophy, firstly because it’s interesting, and secondly because I have an essay due this Thursday, and while I know for a fact that my writing is better than it was when I wrote my first philosophy paper a year ago, I’m not sure my logic will hold up. For the first paper, though, the professor and TF provide comments and give you a chance to revise your paper, and then average the two grades.

            I’m not sure how I got better at Philosophy writing – just practice, I guess. I often find that I learn more than I thought I did when going through classes. Hopefully that will hold up, since I never feel like I’m learning as much as I would like to; the homework distracts me from thinking about the concepts a lot of the time. There’s been a lot of controversy lately about the clash between grades and learning. In my opinion, it’s a broken system, but I think it’s about the best we can come up with in a broken world. But of course, that’s just the opinion of an “excellent sheep”*.

            Overall, life is busy as usual, but pretty good. In a cappella we’re learning new songs now, instead of just teaching the old ones to the freshmen, and some of the parts are hard, but we’re coalescing as a group, so things are going well. It’s actually warmed up again, enough so that I open my window to get a breeze in my room, but the leaves are starting to change, and fall is slowly approaching. It’s almost October, and in my mind, ingrained from childhood, is the idea that October leads into “holiday season”: Halloween waterfalls into Thanksgiving, which cascades into Christmas. Once you can get to the end of October, you’re almost there.

            Of course, that takes a while (though not as long as it seemed to take in elementary school), so I’ll still be blogging for a while. There is still a great deal of work to be done. But Fall is in the air, and before anyone knows it, I’ll be rereading this blog on the plane on my way home for Christmas!

*It really got started with this article, with the lovely picture accompanying it.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

And then there was this.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests

Fall Flavor

                It’s been a fairly uneventful week, partly because I made it that way. I have a habit of getting sick every week around finals time, but I thought it was just a general end-of-semester process, that my body realized I finally had time to rest and forced me to do so. Being the Harvard student I am, it took me a full year to realize that being sick is a direct result of overwork.

                How did I discover this? Well, the first two weeks of this semester were like the end of the semester usually is – an all-out sprint. I wasn’t really sleeping; I wasn’t really eating; I was just trying to get everything done. And I did. It wasn’t until this past week, when I finally had time to rest, that I really got sick.

                Fortunately, after the craziness of the beginning of school, my workload dropped significantly, and I was able to get sleep and food, so after a few not-so-wonderful days of recovery, I am nearly back to normal. Speaking of which, I went to the Physical Therapist yesterday to see if my ankle injury had healed sufficiently to allow me to work out normally again. It didn’t hurt, but it’s apparently still swollen. In addition to not signing off my waiver, the therapist informed me of three-five other things that were wrong with me, and only half the exercises she gave me have nothing to do with my ankle. Oh, well. I’ll probably start working out again anyway, if it doesn’t hurt.

                Despite not doing PT (I still get up at five in the morning to watch everyone else), I am enjoying ROTC. The lab last week was war games, which can be very fun, if you have an idea what you’re doing and the stakes aren’t particularly high. I also met with one of my mentors, a veteran studying at Harvard, this past weekend, and she was great. I also have an upperclassman mentor in the battalion, and I myself am mentoring a freshman, who I took for ice cream last night. We had a good talk.

                Also last night, I managed to make it to LIFE group* for the first time. We are just starting Galatians, and there were homemade cookies, and we had a good time. I hadn’t planned on coming to the group until about an hour before, and I didn’t know who was in it, but as it turns out, I know everyone there, and it’s a small group, so it was a very comfortable space and a good way to end the day.

                Classes are plodding along as usual; papers are beginning to come due, and people have started worrying about midterms. (You don’t have just one midterm; some classes have three or four. I think the theory is that students take tests more seriously if they’re called midterms.) We had our first Arabic quiz/test on Friday, and I’m working on a Physics take-home exam this week. So we’ll see how that goes.

                Philosophy is very interesting. I end up doing my reading for it way too far in advance, since I consider it the most enjoyable of my readings, and then I don’t remember what’s it’s about, but the class notes are usually specific enough to remind me. The discussion is interesting – the class is undergrad and grad students – and section will hopefully shrink and become more conducive to discussion. However, even with our 50-60 person class, I’m able to comment and ask questions, and the professor knows my name.

                One of the nicest parts of my current schedule is my ability to take a Sabbath. I did manage to get all my work done the past weekend and spend noon Saturday to noon Sunday relaxing and then studying and praying. It was marvelous, but it’s still difficult to maintain focus all throughout the rest of the week. I get everything done, but I tend to get distracted – I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday reading 1984 for the first time. The writing was superb, I hadn’t read a novel in forever, and I devoured it, but it drained a lot of my time. I have to remember not to start any more books on the side, unless I’m willing to wait until the weekend to pick them back up.

                Overall, it’s been a fairly good week. My schedule and workload are almost stabilized, and hopefully soon I’ll have worked out how to integrate them. The weather got pretty chilly, and then warmed up a while, and now it’s settled into a mix of nippy and almost-warm, depending on how much shade there is around. Pretty soon I should be posting pictures of a New England autumn, so stay posted! Until then, I hope everyone has a lovely first day of fall and a fabulous week!

*The small-group Bible studies held by Christian Impact (formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ)

Calm After the Storm

            Thank goodness – things have begun to calm down. It wasn’t exactly a natural process – it involved saying ‘no’ to quite a few things – but ‘insane’ no longer describes my life accurately. Last week I was running myself into the ground: I wasn’t getting enough sleep, I wasn’t getting enough to eat, and I wasn’t getting my work done well. I felt like I was falling apart, and Murphy’s Law* was in effect – everything else was falling apart, too.

            One of the more obvious ways I measure my growth as a person is to look at my stress threshold. I don’t think I could have survived the last couple weeks had I been short a few years or a few experiences. As it was, by the grace of God, I felt tired, I couldn’t think, and I was starting to get sick, but I never once felt overwhelmed or suffocated or defeated – I just kept plodding on, thankfully having an enjoyable, restful summer that energized me before I restarted school.

            However, I’m very glad that’s over; I couldn’t have gone on that way, at least not without my grades suffering significantly. At the moment I’m thinking of instituting a new schedule and seeing how it works. I took a Sabbath this past weekend, and it was wonderful; I understand why God mandated a day of rest. On the other hand, before the Sabbath, we have to take the other six days to “labor and do all [our] work.”** So I’m going to do my best to work diligently and without procrastination for the rest of the week, and hopefully everything will get done.

            Why has the storm calmed so suddenly? Mainly because a cappella auditions are over; we had our final call-backs last Friday, along with deliberation that lasted into the wee hours of the morning. Some people didn’t even go home Friday night; after all, we all met up again at 7:15 Saturday morning to “dorm-storm” our new members, along with all the other a cappella groups. What is dorm-storming? It involves a lot of pounding, a lot of screaming, and occasionally singing, meant to wake up the person being added to the group***. We burst in on all our new members and then brought them all along with us to breakfast, after which the rest of the group went on retreat to Cape Cod, and I went home and went straight back to bed. It was a good decision.

            ROTC, surprisingly, hasn’t been as much of a time drain as I’d expected, although it definitely involves time commitment. I hadn’t realized how much of a community ROTC was until this year. As freshmen we went to the scheduled events and then made our way home as quickly as possible; now that we have more to do and spend more time with the unit, I’m getting to know the upperclassmen better, and as they check up on me and I check up on my freshmen, I realize how much we really do look out for each other. It was a pleasant realization.

            And of course, there’s class to worry about as well. I’m enjoying pretty much all of my classes, although I need more time to appreciate the physics, but one of my favorites, since I don’t have time to mention them all here, is Hebrew. One day a week we watch a movie (in Hebrew, with Hebrew subtitles), and the second day we look at a PowerPoint on a topic of interest and discuss a reading assignment we have looked over and written a short paper on in the past week. It’s a class where I learn, but that doesn’t cause me stress.

            There are a few other things, outside of class, ROTC, and a cappella, that have occupied my time. For one, I went to Harvard’s four-story bookstore yesterday and ended up taking pictures of about 10-20 books that I want to go back and buy – lots of things I really want to study but don’t have time to take classes on. I wanted so many different things, and they all cost so much, that I decided to not buy anything immediately and instead go home and make a schedule/budget to fit them all it. Hopefully I’ll be going back soon to implement my plan.

            Also, my ankle still hasn’t finished healing, so I can’t participate in physical activity for ROTC until I have a doctor signed off on it. The first available appointment was next Monday, so I’ll let you know how it goes. Travel still takes a lot of time, although it provides a sort of ‘free time’ where I can’t really do anything besides muse and listen to the radio on my phone, neither of which I usually have time for outside of short snippets I snatch here and there. It is getting colder, however; I started wearing a jacket outside again yesterday, and today I started doing my studying inside instead of outside because it was cold enough to hurt my concentration. It was 48 degrees Monday morning for ROTC PT.****

PS – Since I wrote this, I have been handed free Frappuccino, apples, cookies, doughnuts, and apple cider. It’s been a good day.

*If anything can go wrong, it will.

**Exodus 20:9

***This hasn’t happened to me; when they came to my door last year, I was already at MIT doing ROTC, so I didn’t find out until that night, when I could look at my phone. So they came to my door and pounded… and shouted… and I wasn’t there. Oh, well.

****Okay, I need to start switching symbols. This is ridiculous. Anyway, PT stands for Physical Training

Academics and Auditions

            Hi everyone! I’m sitting here writing this while listening to preliminary auditions for Under Construction. We’ve been doing this for 2-3 hours a day for the past three days, but this is the last night. I probably shouldn’t be writing this during the auditions, but life has been so crazy lately that I don’t have time to devote to each thing individually.

            A cappella, especially, has taken a lot of time, as has transportation back and forth from the Quad to the Yard and from Harvard to MIT. However, things seem to be settling into a tentative routine, and after everyone finishes deciding on their classes and we set section and lab times, life should stabilize.

            Now that classes have started I can talk about academics. Hebrew is definitely fun; we watch a movie on Tuesdays and do a reading on Thursdays. And then we discuss the Israeli family, as presented in the movies and readings. Two of the people in the class were in my class last year, and the other two seem nice as well. And having five people in a class is very nice.

            Arabic isn’t as interesting, but is still nice. After doing twenty chapters in the textbook in two months, I am about to do the next four chapters in three months, so the pace is going to slow down, but hopefully we’ll go more in depth. It’s a larger class, but the people I’ve met are all nice.

            Philosophy is shaping up to be very interesting: the passages are selections I look forward to reading, the professor is good, and despite being about a 70-person class, we have some interesting discussion. Hopefully there will be time enough to discuss people’s ideas in the three hours of class we have a week, or during section.

            ROTC (the class part) is interesting; we had a discussion on Leadership and Management, which was interesting. For this week’s class, we have reading on leadership, and we have to take the Myers-Briggs personality test*. I’m an INTJ, in case you’re wondering. The descriptions are fairly accurate. There’s also a student from Germany in class who just decided to take the course (it’s a normal registered course at MIT).

            Physics is, well, physics, but it’s going fine so far. We already had one lab, and that went pretty well. And it’s a continuation of my course last year, so I’m already fairly familiar with the style. Outside of classes, most of my time has been taken up by a cappella and ROTC. It’s nice to be a sophomore – seeing all the freshman nervous for auditions or overly proper in ROTC makes me appreciate how far we’ve come. However, the time commitment, at least at the beginning, is larger than I anticipated. I’ve been told it will get better; I hope so.

            The weather has been gorgeous; my room doesn’t have AC, but opening the window works just as well. It’s slightly cool, but still mildly summery, and every time I walk outside I have to just stop and breathe in and enjoy how beautiful it is. Last summer all us freshmen didn’t know any better – now we’ve seen what Cambridge looks like for the other half of the year, and we’re taking advantage of these fleeting days of good weather while they last, when the ground  is still green and brown instead of white and gray.

            The majority of my week was just running around between all the things I mentioned, along with turning paperwork in for this and picking up that at the store, so there isn’t that much more to tell. We did several freshman recruiting events in Under Construction and learned a couple of new songs, but other than that, nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Oh, one more thing – I have discovered my favorite place at Harvard. Every day between classes, since I can’t go back to my room, I go up to the very top of the stacks** of Widener Library and ensconce myself where hardly anyone ever goes, deep in absolutely silent, still, solitary bliss,*** surrounded by hundreds of bookshelves and thousands upon thousands of books. So if you think of me in the morning or afternoon, that’s probably where I’ll be.

            Anyway, until next time! Best wishes!

*One of the more accurate versions of personality tests, though of course to be taken with a grain of salt – if you’re interested, you should be able to find a place to take it for free online

**The stacks are the centerpiece of Widener – floors and floors entirely filled with bookshelves. More information can be found on Wikipedia, if you’re interested.

***Don’t worry – I have friends! As I mentioned in my last post, I was pleasantly surprised at how many people I got to reconnect with from last year. But I am, at heart, an introvert. :)

Pfirst Days in Pfoho

            Hello again! I’m settled in at Harvard and ready to expound on my first-week experiences and how it feels to be back. First things first, though – I need to wrap up the rest of the summer.

            After I arrived back home from Jordan, it was my pleasure to participate in the wedding of a very good friend. After that, I traveled with my parents to North Carolina (my dad had a conference to attend, and since I was only home for another week, he took me along.) Finally, I had a day to say goodbye to Texas until Thanksgiving, and then I flew back here to Boston to start the new year.

            I must say, the weather here is exactly like the weather I left in Texas – hot and humid. Except that here, my room doesn’t have AC – only heating. I’m sure it will cool down in a couple of weeks, though. The biggest challenge in Pforzheimer (Pfoho), my new dorm, or “house”, as we call them at Harvard, is that it’s a twenty-minute walk from the main campus. There are shuttles, but they don’t run all the time, and either way, it adds in a lot of time for transportation. But I like my room; it’s bigger than last year, and I have more decorating stuff. Pictures are attached!

            Coming in, I was planning on getting to the airport at six pm and then taking the Subway to Harvard, where I would then half to walk or take a taxi to my dorm while hauling all my luggage around, all after dark. Thankfully, God provides, and I found, to my delight, that one of the graduated seniors from my a cappella group, who is now interning with CI*, was picking up one of my friends from last year’s Bible study at the airport at the same time.

            Thus, instead of attempting to lug all my stuff through Boston after dark, I walked out of the airport and into the (literally) open arms of the Christian community at Harvard. I was picked up by friends and driven to an actual home for a welcome-back event (with food they ordered for me without my asking!), dropped off at my dorm and assisted in getting my key and carrying my stuff in, and then invited to yet another event to meet the freshmen. It was a very long day, but it was great to have someone to come back to.

            That’s what it is, even though I’m twenty minutes away from where I was last year. It’s not exactly coming home, not quite yet, but it’s coming back. It’s still hard being away from my family sometimes, but not as hard as it used to be. I have friends who even before I said goodbye to my parents were texting to find out when I’d get back, and I have a suite-mate** who bought me a chocolate bar as a welcome gift, complete with a welcome note. And after I’d unpacked all nine of my boxes (and my suitcase) into my room, I felt I was indeed beginning to make myself at home.

            I’m also a lot more confident that I was last semester, I think partly because I’m older, partly because I know my way around better, and partly because being in Jordan gave me a lot more experience navigating unfamiliar situations. In America, even when strange things happen, you get to speak English to solve them! When I’m given things to organize or get done, I don’t feel as annoyed or overwhelmed as I used to; I have begun to take them in stride.

            In fact, instead of feeling tired and unready to start, the way I’ve felt the last couple of semesters, I find myself wanting to go to class and study. That may be partially because I’m taking more classes related to my major, classes I want to take. At the moment, I’m taking Leadership and Management for ROTC, Hebrew (a film and literature class), second-year Arabic, Physics, and a Philosophy course. I’ll post more details next week, when I’ve had more of a chance to feel them out, but I finished four-and-a-half hours of class today energized and ready to go.

            It’s a good thing, too, because ROTC took off running before I’d even hit the ground. It’s much better as a sophomore, knowing one’s way around and not being at the bottom of the totem pole, but that also means that I have more responsibility, especially as we try to help out all the freshmen who are just beginning their ROTC experience.

            Freshman are the main concern in a cappella, too. We are doing recruiting now, and soon we’ll be doing auditions. That, combined with trying to put together a budget and figure out recording costs for our next CD as treasurer, puts quite a bit on my plate at the moment, completely independent of my academic responsibilities. And of course, there are all the moving-in concerns that still have to be taken care of, and the usual paperwork to be filled out.

            Well, this post is quite long enough, and I’m going to make it quite a bit longer with a bunch of pictures I hope you’ll enjoy. I hope everyone else had a good start of school as well, and thank you for coming back to read my blog for a second year!

*Christian Impact, or Cru, formerly Campus Crusade for Christ

**She’s not exactly my suitemate; she’s my blockmate, which means we were placed in the same dorm and filled out our housing forms together. As it turns out, we have interconnected singles, which is very nice. But interconnected-single-mate, while fun to say, is a little clunky on the page. So I settled for suitemate as the closest approximation. In case anyone was really interested in that little explanation.

PS - Wow... that was a lot of pictures...