Deadlines and Dorm Rooms: Starting off Strong

Usually when I come back to school, it feels like I never left, but this time was different. Granted, this is the first time in a long time I’ve been in the same place two semesters in a row, but somehow, my room didn’t feel familiar. I remembered that I’d done things in it, but I felt disconnected from those experiences. And of course, upon coming back to school, I needed to have a space I could feel connected with and call my own. So I set about redecorating.

You can compare the results with the pictures of my room from earlier blogs. I discovered a way to attach all the summer scarves I won’t be needing to the wall, and decorated accordingly. I took everything out of each and every box, drawer and shelf, and then set about reordering it all. I was quite pleased with the result.

I’m also pretty happy with my schedule this year, although I have a few things that have yet to be scheduled. Because I’m taking two NS classes, I have ROTC pretty much every morning, but on all but one day, I’m done with my other classes by 1:00, and I have space in between ROTC and my Harvard classes to work out and get ready for the day, which adds a novel regularity to the week. ROTC hasn’t started yet, though, so we’ll see if the theory works in practice next week.

At the moment*, the only class I’ve actually started is Arabic, although I’m heading to my other two Harvard classes in about half-an-hour. Arabic class did feel like I’d never left – you had the same teacher giving the same format of lesson to the same students, with the same amount of homework as always. I won’t say I loved it, but it went fine. After this semester, I’ll be done with my formal study of Arabic, if all goes well.

I’m also continuing my German class from last semester, if I can fit it in. For NS, which starts next week, I have Naval Weapons and Navigation, so we’ll see how those go. As far as the Middle East goes, I’m taking History of the Modern Middle East, which is actually in the History department, but counts for concentration credit.** I’m taking one more class, but it’s still in flux, so I’ll let you know how that goes next week.

I’m still planning on doing a joint concentration in Philosophy and Middle Eastern Studies. My relationship with philosophy went through a rough patch last semester due to my Personal Identity tutorial. For one thing, all the course’s basic assumptions about the world ran almost directly contrary to all my basic assumptions about the world, which made it difficult to get anything done, because nearly everything that I was interested in was then outside the scope of the class.

For another thing, philosophy, at least of the Anglo-American variety, is – well, nit-picky. About everything. You must always be defining things, listing assumptions, explaining what you’re not arguing, heading off misunderstandings, and giving long adjectival phrases to clarify everything, and for a while I’d given up hope of actually getting anything done in the forest when you always have to be working leaf by leaf.

However, lately I’ve been reading quite a bit of Christian philosophy which does say something meaningful, and is as annoyed as I am with these problems, so things are looking better. I will probably never be a philosophy professor, but I’m still excited about being a philosophy undergrad. If one takes the broad definition of philosophy – thinking carefully about what the world is and who we are in it – then I can think of few better things on which to spend my time.

Philosophy is a powerful tool, and I’ve been using mine to re-shape the way I see the semester. I’m attempting to constantly remind myself to see both ROTC and my classes as, first and foremost, areas for personal growth and development, for the glory of God, and not as imposed duties (although there’s a good helping of that as well). And as long as I remember that, I’m excited about what the semester will bring.

*As of writing, not as of posting; I've had other classes now, but they'll keep until next week.

**concentration=a major at Harvard

Pictures:

My redecorated room:

The view from my window:

The mandatory back-to-school selfies:

My dorm:

The philosophy building at Harvard. As the story goes, they asked William James what to carve over the entrance, and he said it should be Protagorus' "Man is the measure of all things." When the building was finished, he showed up and found they'd instead carved "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?"