The Finite

First and most importantly, I must discuss the status of my binders.

Initially, I saw Weed‘s future as relegation to a back up binder. With the addition of several high-performance accordion binders to my arsenal, the former is becoming increasingly unlikely. Weed has been stripped of rings and contents in favor of a more compact, stripped down variant that I (surprise, surprise) garbage-picked.

The reign of Weed is over. The age of Fivestar has begun.

I was a little surprised to see the sophomore PrePharm curriculum only had three classes, one of which, Physics, I tested out of. So I went ahead and piled Econ and Bio 111 on top of that. I just hope that my classes won’t be like my dinner tray yesterday, wherein the Fritos on my mashed potato mountain began a steadily accelerating plummet towards my sliced peach halves and ruined everything for every one of the five food groups.

It didn’t occur to me until very recently, that college wasn’t just about meeting people and trying new things. There’s also classes involved. And so this week was spent dragging/scootering myself from building to building.

The first class (which I very nearly overslept through) was a 10:30 Organic Chemistry lecture in Lily 1105. My prof is the guy who wrote the book and he’s pretty funny at times. I’m surrounded by sophomores I don’t know who are all more worldly than me and all realized earlier than me that the lecture was a “review”. (I didn’t realize for several days. Huh, probably a bad sign.)

Then I have to hoof it across campus to the Physics building for, you guessed it, AGEC 217, National Economics. My teacher can best be described as “wacky old man”. He sounds like a higher pitched Mr. Lussow (the PE substitute) and possesses just as much energy. He’s also unexpectedly technologically adept. Our readings and assignments are only available online through Blackboard and his powerpoints are surprisingly elaborate. On Friday, he showed us a chart showing the statistical effect on our incomes by our race or height or age. It must have been an outdated chart because it only displayed “White”, “Hispanic” and “Black”. I raised my hand and asked, “Can we assume that the Asians are somewhere off the chart?” As the lecture hall laughed, the middle-aged guy next to me did a fist-pound with me.

On days I don’t have chem and econ, I have biology in Lily 1105 and anatomy in Lily 1105. Bio is a lot of redundancy with the Harper class I took in the summer. So I’m relieved to know some of the stuff I already know but alarmed about some of the stuff I’ll never learn. The class is pretty much the same as Harper though, except that the professor is a brunette.

I have three two-hour labs per week. Anatomy and Biology labs are at 7:30 on Thursdays and Fridays and the Organic Chem lab is Thursday afternoon. I’ve never liked labs in the first place because I’m not very good at them. Neal and JY can back me up here. But having two labs when I’m still half-asleep and one when I’m in my afternoon sugar-crash will change things for the worse. Do you have any idea how hard it is to look in a microscope when you’re sleepy and Asian?

Along with not seeing any freshman friends, I’m also surrounded by battle-hardened sophomores who have been through a year of college and are coming close to the School of Pharmacy application deadline. They are becoming fiercely competitive, feral at times. ravenously devoted to getting accepted and exceeding the performances of their “friends”. So, my position as an undeserving freshman in sophomore classes will probably be …interesting.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Day-to-Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.