Deadlines and Dorm Rooms: Start-Ups and Sit-Ups

The weeks are going by both more quickly and more slowly than I expected. My schedule is much more fragmented than I would like – instead of a bunch of class and then a bunch of study time, I have a couple of hours here, an hour there, and appointments all over the place. This means that 1) the time in between appointments drags on, because I can’t get too involved in anything, and 2) deadlines come up really quickly, because I have so little concentrated time for academic study/work, be that papers, independent study, or my thesis.

One of the main scheduling hassles every semester is the discussion sections that are often added onto lecture classes. The sections are scheduled after everyone has enrolled in the classes, and they aren’t scheduled at the same time as the class or even always during business hours, which means they have a tendency to unravel whatever schedule you’ve come up with in the first few weeks. Still, it’s a chance to actually discuss the lecture material and ask questions of the TAs and TFs, and occasionally there’s food.

During my two sections today, the thing that struck me most was how relatively old I was. Because outside of my concentration classes, I’m taking general education requirements, I’m suddenly one of the only seniors in the room. From this side you can often differentiate students by class just by watching them: the nervous, anxious-to-please freshmen, the tired sophomores in the background, the confident juniors, and the seniors who never arrive more than 30 seconds before class starts.

Sections weren’t the only thing that started this week. I’m attempting to revamp the format of worship team for Christian Impact, so we’re bringing in new songs and I’m reorganizing the way practices are run. So far, it seems to be doing well. We don’t have a sound system, but the instrumentalists are great, and we have a good time. I accidentally got up and started singing the songs in the wrong order on Tuesday night, but we got through it.

We also started Christian Impact Life Group this week. A few people couldn’t come, so we ended up with a smaller subset of our Life Group from last year, which actually worked out well; instead of doing the normal icebreaker activities, we just sat and chatted about how we were doing (and may have briefly been derailed into an argument on whether Massachusetts should regulate shopping bag usage). There was ice cream, too, but I resisted the temptation; I’m trying my hardest to be extremely good for at least another couple of weeks.

To that end, I’ve also made sure to make time for working out almost every day. It’s become my stress-reliever, especially with nothing new to watch on Netflix, and I was pleasantly surprised to see my efforts bear fruit during our ROTC Physical Fitness Test (PFT). I was nervous about the test (I always am, even though I always pass with flying colors), but I blew it out of the water – without extreme effort on my part, my run time for the 1.5 mile had dropped by over a minute! Here’s hoping I can keep up the fitness for the rest – well, the rest of my life, really.

The one other thing that’s started this week was cooler weather; we’re having really beautiful days at the moment (thus all the nature pictures). However, the weather was kind enough to give us a hot, rainy day for the freshmen’s first day in uniform, as per usual.

So overall, I’ve been less productive than I’d like as per academics – my current exciting new project is fitness, when it would ideally be my thesis, but I can’t control what I’m excited about – but everything is slowly getting there, and hopefully this weekend I can take some time to knock out a bunch of this study. I have a lot of bumps and bruises from trying new exercises and generally being uncoordinated, but I feel great. And the longer I’m here, the more friends I have to run into wherever I go. It’s a good start, I think.

Pictures:

Being good is hard...