International Symposium Day

So yesterday was International Symposium Day, which occurs every fall and spring semester. International Symposium Day basically consists of students giving half hour symposiums to the rest of the student body throughout the day about some aspect of either their venture grant, special project, or study abroad experience. Classes are canceled for the day and students get to go to however many and whichever symposiums they choose. I still had to work on Int. Symposium Day, so I didn't get to go to as many as I would have liked, but I did manage to pop in on two: 'The Oddity of My Presence in India' and 'Increasing Literacy Levels in Ghana, One Book at a Time!'. The first symposium was about one Beloit student's journalism internship in India over the summer and she discussed how both her identity as an American and her Asian facial features affected how those around her responded to her. The second symposium was given by my friend Nana Akosua, who spent some of her summer doing a venture grant in her home country of Ghana. She spent a month working with and teaching a group of 35 children (who had never before owned books of their own) living in a rural area outside of Accra how to read.

(Fun fact: the first time I ever stepped foot on campus as a prospective student was international symposium day, so I always get a good dose of nostalgia with my symposium days.)

Here It Goes Again

Phew. This last week was a crazy roller coaster of school work insanity (and I'm about to ride it again. oh boy.). Here's a quick summary:
Halloween!: Possibly my favorite holiday of the year. My friends and I went on the annual ghost walk put on by Beloit College students. (Of course my FYI professor's house was mentioned as being haunted. Hey! I have to work there, you know!) We also went to see a VooDoo Barbie performance (Beloit College's improv comedy student group), which was made even more awesome with everyone in costume. This Hallowen, I went as a girl scout, since I have an old, vintage uniform from the fifties hanging up in my closet. A trip to Jimmy John's was made and I got my usual: No. 6 Vegetarian Sub with BBQ Jimmy chips. Yum!

Presidential election: No matter what your politics, it's hard to argue that this wasn't a historic election. All of campus exploded when it was announced that Barack Obama had won. Later that night I grabbed all the Obama posters I could find and plastered them all over one of the bathroom stalls on my floor in a post-election frenzy. We now call it the Barack Obathroom Stall.
Study Abroad interview: I submitted my study abroad application this past week and also had my study abroad interview. (Beloit College encourages every student to study abroad, but they really want to make sure you're studying abroad for both academic and personal growth. Not just for the fun of it.) I was pretty nervous, but I think I did all right. I've done a lot of research on England and Lancaster University, so I was able to answer all the questions with a fair amount of confidence. I'll find out if I'm approved for study abroad sometime before the semester ends. Fingers crossed.
Last weekend: On Saturday evening some of my friends and I drove to the movie theater in Beloit to see The Secret Life of Bees. It was a little too melodramatic/lifetime channel for me, but I was in the minority. (Side note: Even if you don't have a car/don't have friends who have cars, it's still fairly easy to get out and about in Beloit. The College provides shuttle vans to take students to the movie theater, on shopping trips, etc.) After the movie, we came back to the college, had an impromptu dance party, and wound down the evening with a game of Boggle. On Sunday, I drove out to Kauffman's Country Store, which sells homemade deliciousness like fresh pies, bread, and cookies. During September and October, they sell baked goods at the farmer's market downtown every Saturday morning. The city of Beloit partitions off two streets downtown and local families and businesses set up stalls to create an open air market. It's always a great start to the weekend.

Working for the weekend

This past weekend I had my very first day of work at my third job (I also work here at Admissions and then at the Neese Theatre box office selling tickets for Beloit shows.) This new job of mine is of the hard, physical labor variety working for my FYI advisor, who recently purchased a beautiful, old Victorian mansion and needs help renovating it. She was generous enough to offer me a job doing odds and ends around the place to help whip it into shape, so Saturday I walked on over and proceeded to rake, scrub and paint. It was actually kind of nice to take a break from mental labor and do physical labor instead. I'd forgotten how rewarding it is to put a lot of physical work into something and then sit back to bask in the results.
(Though I still haven't been able to completely get all the paint splotches off my hands...)
I'm financing my study abroad completely on my own, so every little drop in the bucket counts and I'm currently drudging up jobs wherever I can. (I have two more possibly in the pipeline.) My schedule is already full as it is, but when I make a goal to do something (like study abroad), I don't give up until I reach it. (I'm a little stubborn that way.)
A good number of students who enroll at Beloit do work-study and work-study jobs can range from stocking shelves in the library to washing dishes in commons to being a writing tutor at the writing center to working in Admissions and keeping a blog.


After work, my friend Ellen and I drove to Hollywood video to rent a couple movies. (We got Matchstick Men and Maria Full of Grace.) Unfortunately, we somehow got turned around and wound up driving in the exact opposite direction of the college for roughly twenty minutes. We'd known from the start that we were on the wrong road, but in our infinite wisdom, we thought we would be able to sort ourselves out eventually. In the end, we had to stop at a gas station and shamefacedly ask which way the college was.
We did finally get back safe and sound (and watched Matchstick Men), but I've decided it's time to reactivate my Netflix account in order to avoid further incident.
I spent most of today working on my study abroad application for Lancaster. It's so close to being done, yet so far from it. The due date for the application is Nov. 3, so it's getting down to the wire. Luckily, there's been a slight lull in my schoolwork load, so I'll be able to finish it in time.

There you are, Blog. Right where I left you.

Fall break ended a mere three days ago, but it feels like I never even left. The only signs of my having been gone are the balding treetops, the thick blanket of leaves on the ground, and Chamberlin looking more and more destroyed. (It's pretty neat to watch, actually. It sort of looks like Godzilla stormed Beloit and Chamberlin was a casualty.)
My fall break was wonderful, but uneventful (which was probably what made it so wonderful in the first place). I knew that pretty much all my friends from home would still be at college, so I dragged home a friend from Beloit for the first half of break and I was able to show her around Racine. We sat by Lake Michigan and pondered our place in the universe, baked lots of cookies, watched The Rescuers Down Under, and strolled through River Bend Nature Center while brainstorming for NaNoWriMo. After she left, my brother and I clocked in some serious Rock Band 2 play, my dog and I napped more than is healthy for human or canine, and I spent ridiculous amounts of time strolling around our nearby Barnes and Noble. I also managed to be slightly productive by beginning work on my study abroad application. It's nowhere near polished, but I know I'll get it where it needs to be in time for the Nov. 3 deadline.
Study abroad seems to be on almost every second-year's mind right now. Usually students study abroad their junior year, but studying abroad can't usually be a last minute decision. There are applications to write (yes, applications plural), recommendations to get, finances to work out, and just general research on wherever it is you want to go. This may seem like a lot of work, but the more and more I prepare for study abroad and work on my application, the more excited I get about going. (P.S. That would be Lancaster University in England.) Some of the places my friends are thinking about studying abroad are: Wales, France, Japan, Ireland, and New Zealand.

月見

I finally, finally was able to go to a Japan Club event (at least partially). My schedule is packed tight with class and work, and unfortunately there's always some other obligation I have that interferes with Japan Club events, but last night I had a window of time in which I could actually go off and participate in Japan Club's tsukimi (moon viewing) event. Although I didn't actually get to go up to the roof of the science center and check out the moon with everyone else (I had to rush off to work), I was able to help make tsukimi dango or rice cakes, which are basically dumplings made of rice. (And eat them too. Yum!) I like trying new foods out, so I was eager to give the tsukimi dango a whirl. I wasn't sure I would like them, but they tasted pretty good.
In case you're curious, other Japan Club events in the pipeline are an origami workshop, a tea ceremony demonstration, a visit to the Anderson Japanese Gardens, and hopefully a trip to Mistuwa later this semester.

Tuesday Marathon

Since nothing too blog-worthy has occurred between now and last Sunday, I thought I'd give you a rundown of my Tuesdays, which for me really are like running a marathon. (But don't worry. My Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are ridiculously laid back, so it all balances out in the end.) When I was in high school, I always wondered what a college student's schedule was like. It differs from person to person, of course, but here's mine:

(Disclaimer: This is out of the ordinary for a class schedule. Really. I promise.)

9am-10am: Second Year Japanese

Japanese is hands down the hardest class I've taken at Beloit thus far. And now that I think about it, it's probably the hardest subject I've taken... ever. When you do poorly, you feel miserable, but when you do well, you feel like you're on top of the world. Being successful in any other class doesn't feel nearly as good as being successful in Japanese. The class atmosphere is often light-hearted (which I like), but at the same time, you have to keep on your toes. We teach each other different tricks to help us remember all the kanji, have grammar and vocabulary drills, translate text, have daily quizzes, and we bow at the start and end of each class (my favorite part). There's definitely no staring off into space in this class! I took Spanish in middle school and high school and I often felt like I was being left behind. When I didn't understand something, I just had to deal. In Japanese class, our sensei honestly wants everyone to succeed, so drop-in tutoring sessions are provided twice a week, a conversation practice session is held once a week, and there's a Japanese language table at DK's (a smaller cafeteria in Pearson's) five days a week where we can practice our conversation skills further. But at the end of the day, it's up to the student to study and do all the homework. Japanese is one of those classes that you can succeed in, but you have to be willing to work hard.

10am-12pm: Japanese Ghosts and Monsters
This course focuses on the supernatural within Japanese culture and we look at a wide range of media featuring them. (Books, movies, anime, plays, short stories, oral history, woodblock prints, handscrolls, poems... You name it.) It also functions as a 'history of' in that the class is framed in a chronological fashion, so we can see for ourselves how this or that developed over time or where this or that idea came from. (For example, My Neighbor Totoro, which is a modern anime movie, has a lot of grounding in Shinto.) The class is fairly big for a Beloit College class - I would say there are 20 to 25 students enrolled in Ghosts and Monsters. The style in which the class is taught is very much discussion and there have been some really fascinating conversations so far. There is quite a bit of reading assigned for this class, and we almost always have a weekly movie to watch outside of class. (But it's hard to complain when you're reading fairy tales and watching My Neighbor Totoro!) There's also a number of writing assignments, but that goes without saying since pretty much every Beloit College class has a writing aspect to it. We'll also be asked to come up with our own ghost or monster of our own design (a project I'm really looking forward to).

12pm-1:30pm: British Literary Traditions
British Literary Traditions (or Brit Lit) is an English class that I'm fairly sure every English major is required to take (ie it's required whether you're majoring in Literary Studies or Creative Writing). The particular section I'm in is a lecture-style class, which is a little out-of-the-ordinary for an English class at Beloit, but my professor's lectures are fun and enlightening, so I find myself really enjoying the class. (When it's nice out, we almost always have class outside in the poetry garden.) There's a lot of reading in Brit Lit (some of our texts: Pride and Prejudice, Troilus and Criseyde, Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, etc.), but I can honestly say that each book we've been asked to read has been interesting (and if it's not interesting when you read it on your own, my professor makes it interesting).

1:30pm-2pm: Lunch!
It's off to the Java Joint I go to get re-energized. (Their hot chocolate is especially awesome. I especially like it with whip cream and cinnamon on top. Best combination ever or best combination ever?)

2pm-4pm: Intro to Journalism
Right now in Journalism we're looking at the theories, history, and the hows behind Journalism itself. The class is a lot of discussion with a little lecture thrown in here and there for good measure. Later in the semester we're going to have to write a variety of articles (a feature story, a sports story, an op ed piece, etc.), but right now we're just focusing on examining and critiquing various forms of media, which I think is a very important skill to have. Not just as a journalist, but as a news consumer. The class size in my journalism class is more typical Beloit: about 15 students or so.

7pm-9pm: Intro to Astronomy
I've really missed having a science class (the last science class I'd taken prior to astronomy was AP Bio... in my junior year of high school), so astronomy has been helpful in shaking the rust off my science mind-set. (And it truly is a mind-set.) One of the reasons I chose Beloit was because the students are required to take classes outside of their general focus area. Clearly, I'm not planning on majoring in science, but it's nice to be able to dip my toes into something different now and again when conjugating Japanese verbs and analyzing Chaucer get to be too much for me. Intro to Astronomy is a really nice course in that it does what it's supposed to do: introduce you to Astronomy (who's really not all that bad once you get to know him, though he does have a tendency to chew with his mouth open). Intro to Astronomy is mostly lecture, but we also get to do hands on things like lie on the roof of the swanky, new science center and find constellations (something I could never do before this class). The professor also asks us what it is we'd like to learn about each week. I've never before been in a class where the teacher asks the students what it is they'd like to learn.

10:30pm: SLEEP!
Ha ha. I know. I'm a total loser for going to bed at 10:30pm, but after a day like this, you'd want to crawl into bed a little earlier than normal too.

(And again, don't worry. Schedules aren't usually this completely insane and in fact, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I have only one hour of class, so it really does work out in the end. And if you've made it through this whole elephantine post, you deserve a cookie.)

Weekend Escapades

As mentioned in my last post, this past weekend was Family/Friends weekend. There were more parents and grandparents wandering around than there are squirrels skittering about campus. Not wanting all the parental units to get bored, Beloit College organized some entertainment venues such as a screening of The Real Dirt on Farmer John and booking Beau Soleil, a band that mixes Cajun music, New Orleans jazz, and blues (with a side helping of a bunch of other related music styles).
I wound up seeing Beau Soleil and holy dang, Eaton Chapel was packed to the gills. (I'm not kidding. Beau Soleil sold out.) I'd never really heard Cajun music before (let alone of Beau Soleil), but it was really enjoyable and it was a good, cross-generational kind of music that everyone can enjoy. And true to Beloit fashion, a handful of crowd members got up out of their seats and started an impromptu dance party off to the side of the stage.

On Sunday night, our old FYIs reunited for a nice dinner at commons (and no, that isn't an oxymoron. we were even given cloth napkins and everything!). For those of you who aren't familiar with the acronym, FYI stands for First Year Initiative, which is a program nearly every Beloit College student enters. Its purpose is to help ease you into life at Beloit College and it basically serves as your training wheels while you move from being a high school student to a college student. FYI carries over into your second year, but swaps out the 'F' for an 'S', becoming Second Year Initiative. SYI is basically your backbone and guide to mapping out the remaining two years you spend at Beloit. I didn't stay long at the dinner, having to run off to work, but it was good to reconnect with my FYI advisor (and interesting to see how everyone in my FYI has changed since we were unsure, newly-minted first-years).

Even though October isn't quite here yet (I wish!), I'm already getting in the Halloween mood. Instead of working on my Japanese homework (or at least pretending to), I wound up swapping ghost stories with a bunch of friends. It's amusing how much your own imagination can scare you. Forget scary movies. Just wander around a dark and silent dorm for a little while. I'm usually pretty difficult to frighten when it comes to that sort of stuff, but even I checked under my bed before settling in for the night.