Midterm Madness

I believe that most of my friend group is suffering from midterm madness, a terrifying yet unavoidable disease.

Symptoms include the inability to focus while studying, a desire to consume more food than usual, and an excessive amount of internet surfing. Insomnia or excessive sleeping can both occur.

It's definitely midterms time. It seems like everyone I know has a midterm or two creeping up on them. For me, the terrifying one is my Japanese history midterm - 1500+ years of history to remember, and all - which means that I've been putting in some serious study-party time. Yesterday and today, a group of us got together to review all of the primary-source readings, the handouts, and the textbook readings.

However, we were studying perhaps 55% of the time. The other portion of time was spent making cracks about Prince Shotoku's excessively complimentary historical portrayal ("So what did Prince Fabulous do NOW?"), or about changing power structures ("Shugo-daimyo already knows four moves. Shugo-daimyo did not learn LOYALTY TO EMPEROR."), or about Japanese vocabulary ("'These Buddhist nuns were called bikuni.' 'Wait, bikinis?' 'Well, you have to gain the illiterate townsfolk's attention somehow.'"). We also made a much-needed study trip into town, where we ate Chinese food and talked about potential essay questions (and chopstick etiquette)

All in all, we probably got less studying done than we could have if we had been going at it on our own, but we did get some necessary stress relief.

In other news, the applications to be a tour guide for Oberlin have come out; I'm finding it tough to fill out some sections... None of my teachers have posted grades yet, so I don't have any idea what my official GPA is, for example. I hope that won't be too much of a problem... I would dearly love to be a tour guide and spend my time babbling effusively at potential Obies. My fingers are crossed.

Settling into Routines

It's been a pretty quiet couple of days. I spent the last weekend doing homework - an abnormally repetitive, tedious econ problem set and a thirty-page reading that I had to prepare a discussion for - and avoiding the overtly friendly bees that came out to enjoy the sunshine we got Sunday. I'm pretty sure the bees here can sense who they will freak out most if they land on.

Several days after it first fell off, our doorknob is still broken. I managed to screw it back on, but it's still not turning properly... Our work order has been changed to "in progress," but honestly, I don't know what the policy is for work order fulfillment here. Do Roommate or I have to be in the room all the time? We're hoping that they call before they come to help us out.

The question that's been waiting on my mind lately is what I'll be doing over Oberlin's week-long fall break. Most people go home, or travel (the school sponsors service trips, and a local bus company runs shuttles to NYC, Boston, and Chicago). The dining halls shut down for Fall Break, the library closes at 5 PM, and so people tend to get the heck out of dodge: Oberlin is not an exciting town if there's no concerts/comedy shows/movie screenings. It's still a nice town, but it's also a town with a three-block-by-three-block downtown.

One of my friends here is an international student, and so has made puppy-dog eyes to get me to stay over the break with her so that we can cook and hang out together to alleviate that boredom. I've been invited to another friend's house a few hours away for Thanksgiving, so I'm thinking that I'll stay here over the fall break. Perhaps I can use this time to get some sewing done for Sakura-Con at home in Seattle, or Halloween. I don't know what Halloween is like out here, but I'll be disappointed if there's not a huge fanfare about it - this campus is full of artsy, creative people whose favorite holiday is likely Halloween. I'm personally hoping for inter-dorm trick-or-treating and the chance of costumed adventures. Halloween parties with college kids will likely lead to a whole bunch of drunk people, so I'm not planning on going to anything of that sort.

Other than this Fall Break question, my life has been reasonably quiet these last few days, just going to classes, doing homework, and occasionally meeting to tutor a local high school kid. Perhaps it's because I ran with the geeky IB kids in high school and am going to an intellectual, geeky college, but I find myself frustrated that this student isn't willing to put in the effort to catch up himself. I have to keep reminding myself that patience is a virtue, and that I am getting paid to be helpful - even when he doesn't know the difference between a consonant and a vowel at age seventeen. (What kind of elementary schools do they have around here if a kid doesn't know what vowels are? AIUEO, Y?)

On that note, the tutoring is the only job I've managed to find so far - it seems like a lot of the on-campus places like the library tend to hire at the end of the first semester and train during spring semester. I'm told that being a tour guide for the admissions office works the same way. I'm hoping that I can get into the ranks of the tour guides, because I love talking about Oberlin and how fantastic it is, but as of right now, I'm mooching money off my parents for groceries. The money I made from my first tutoring session got put towards my copy of the Avengers movie, but having some more "fun money" to go into the reopened town movie theater ($5 tickets, a shock for this girl who's used to $9 or $10) or go out to dinner would be appreciated.

Many of the jobs that are listed on the Oberlin classifieds website specify that they only hire or only pay federal work-study students, but my financial aid package didn't include that. It's a bit frustrating - I would dearly love to work, but the jobs that I've applied for haven't even had the courtesy to send me a "thanks but no thanks" email. I'm hoping that next semester I'll be able to find something.

First-Year Dorm Adventures

Today is Yom Kippur, so Oberlin gave us all the day off (hooray!). One of my friends and I have plans to go out for lunch and spend the day watching Avatar: The Last Airbender and do absolutely no homework whatsoever.

However... I got up and did dishes this morning, and when I pulled my dorm door shut behind me, the doorknob fell off.

Our door hasn't been shutting properly for a few days now, and I think I know why - the screws that hold the outside knob on the door have become so worn that they're starting to become loose. I've already tightened them three times since we've been living here (thanks for the screwdriver, Daddy), but at this point, they're not doing much good. Roomie and I will have to put in a work order for our poor overworked doorknob. Perhaps while we're at it, we'll get them to fix our light fixture, which is currently being held together by a copious amount of packing tape. I'm now understanding the logic behind these cinderblock walls: they're pretty much impervious to damage, unlike everything else in the room.

The joys of living in a first-year dorm.

Just a Normal Saturday Night at Oberlin

Last night, I came back from dinner a bit late and found my hall full of people. This in itself is a tad unusual, because (generally speaking) my hallmates and I do not spend our time hanging out in the hallways; they're narrow and sort of dimly lit.

Most of the people - other students from the world cultures wing - were in drag. I thought I had missed some obvious campus event, Drag Ball or a Rocky Horror screening.

Nope.

They were going drag bowling for the heck of it. Several of my hallmates left wearing my shoes (being a girl with size 11 feet does come in handy when your male-bodied friends need heels) or accessories.

Needless to say, with that whole shebang going on, coupled with yesterday's Culture Festival, I got very little work done last night. However, the cultural festival was fantastic, and I really enjoyed it. Most of the cultural groups on campus, plus some non-cultural groups (Oberlin Slow Food? I suppose it could be argued that local-food supporters are a subculture...) set up tables around the main green area on campus, Tappan Square.

Most of the tables had an activity (making crafts, doing calligraphy, et cetera) for the local children that came. It's when the college hosts activities like this that I truly appreciate how the town and the school function together; many of the area's families come to college-sponsored events.

There was also a ton of food. The German House table had four or five different varieties of cake, the French House table had crepes, there was a line thirty people long for Indian food, and one of the Spanish tables had samples of sprinkle-covered frosting balls. I don't know whose idea it was to take frosting and roll it in sprinkles and call it a Spanish dessert, but they were so tooth-achingly sweet I could feel cavities forming.

One of my friends, Emma-from-Asia-House, and I dressed up for the cultural festival; it was the first time I've gotten a  chance to wear kimono out here in Ohio and I took it, getting both of us dressed up and looking fabulous. We got a lot of attention from the various people attending the festival, had several photos taken of us, and impressed our Japanese teacher.

It stayed nice for the first hour and a half or two hours of the festival, while the Oberlin College Taiko group performed and then the Chinese Student Association did a lion dance demonstration. It started to sprinkle a bit as our little group was winding down, so Asia House Emma, Emma-from-my-hall, and I came back to my dorm room. Asia House Emma and I got undressed, a much faster undertaking than getting dressed in kimono is, and the three of us watched BBC's Sherlock until we had to go to dinner.

I should have been responsible - I do have a paper due tomorrow as well as a load of other homework - but instead I chose to spend my day gallivanting around campus and town. I don't regret it, because I know I can still get everything done, I'm just feeling a little crunched for time now!

Workload, Class Structures, and Why I love IB In Retrospect: An Examination of College Academic Life

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have a grand total of sixty minutes of class, plus my anally-retentive early arrivals. When I first got my schedule, I was elated, and then realized that this was probably kind of stupid - after all, college classes are supposed to be harder, require more reading, and have more outside work than high school.

I don't see it. I feel like my workload is actually fairly similar to what I had in high school (minus the late nights at school hunched over Adobe InDesign for yearbook work). It's just the kind of work that differs.

My workload by class breaks down something like this:

• Japanese (in class MTWTF, an hour a day): Roughly a half hour to forty minutes of kanji, grammar, vocab, and/or worksheets. If there's a project to do, I might spend up to an hour and a half on this subject. This doesn't include the once-weekly required conversation practice or time spent at the Japanese table during lunch.
• History (in class MWF, an hour a day): Roughly two hours of reading, broken up into "What's Due Monday" done over the weekend and "What's Due Wednesday or Friday" done on Tuesday or Thursday. This involves highlighting, annotating, and thinking up questions for our class discussion. Coming up with good discussion questions has been rather absurdly easy; I think of what a research question for a history IA would be. If I have a project due in class, I might spend an extra hour or two on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but so far, we haven't had a major hours-in-the-library research paper yet. 
• Economics (in class MW, an hour and fifteen minutes a day): Roughly an hour of reading, plus the "problem sets" (perhaps two hours each) that are due every week or so. Also, I spend fifteen minutes or so rereading my notes from the previous classes.
• "First-Year Seminar" (in class MW, an hour and fifteen minutes a day): Two hours of reading, give or take, with discussion questions/notes/annotations involved in that. The papers that I've had to write so far have taken me three to four hours to finish.
• SexCo (in class Wednesdays, two hours a week): Two to three hours of reading, plus the counseling-training sessions that usually last about an hour a week. 

I credit IB with making a good deal of this seem easier than I expected. I know how to skim readings, how to go back and find the important bits, how to recognize key names and take good notes. I'm not afraid to find people and ask for help. For a first-year college student, my writing is clear and decent. Because I spent my last two years of high school in a high-pressure environment, I already know how I study most effectively, when I'm at my best for writing papers, and during what times I'm most useless (1:30-2:30 PM and anytime after 2 AM, for reference. Knowing these times means that I can schedule my homework and such more efficiently.)

What I'm finding is that I'm not having trouble with the same things I did in high school - I'm not overscheduled (yet) and so I do all the readings for my classes on time and thoroughly. I spend time reviewing and discussing outside class for reasons other than frantic last-minute scrambles at the lunch table.

Instead, the class that I'm having trouble in is the one I expected to be easy. The Japanese curriculum is different here, with a greater emphasis placed on casual language. I'm not comfortable speaking casually, so I'm feeling a little stilted when I try to speak. The class also moves at a much more rapid pace, to the point where there is a quiz every day or so, and the kanji/vocabulary we're assigned comes in larger quantities. I feel bad about wasting so many index cards on my obsessive flash-card making (I cut them into fourths to minimize my impact).

It's a strange feeling, the classic "little fish in a big pond" scenario. Everyone here is quite intelligent, and the impact of the whole "beginning-a-language-in-college" thing is pretty obvious. I've decided that the biggest difference between high school and college so far is the pace at which this language class moves; the people who took their first year of Japanese here seem to have no trouble keeping up. To put this in perspective, I took four years of Japanese in high school and was placed into a 201 class here. My high school classes feel like they were being played in slow motion in comparison.

In high school, I led our Japanese club and was asked to be the student speaker at the Japanese National Honor Society induction. It's safe to say that I thought I was good at this! Now that I'm here, seeing little notes like "ii desu!" ("it's good!") on my tests is killing me, because all I see is the mistakes marked in red Xs.

Effectively, I'm learning firsthand what so many people say about college - you will be challenged, even at things that used to come easily to you. It's starting to get a little disheartening, because I admit it's difficult to be knocked down a peg or two regarding your favorite subject, but it's also kind of motivating. The structure of the language class is similar in effect, although not in pace, to high school; I'm not finding this to be the case with my other classes.

In many (perhaps even most) high schools/high school classes, grading is heavily weighted toward daily homework. In most of my classes senior year, daily homework "completeness points" or "stamp points" made up about forty to fifty percent of the grade you received. Larger projects accounted for another twenty percent, a midterm and final five to ten percent each, and, depending on the teacher, perhaps some other category would be thrown in.

A college grade schematic tends toward a breakdown of homework at 20%, one or two midterms at 20% each, and a final at perhaps 40%. Actual figures can waver according to the class itself, and occasionally there will be another category (my history class actually does consider "participation" as a grading point), but this is pretty average as far as I can tell.

The homework for my econ class, which has the exact figures listed above, is given as seven "problem sets" over the course of the semester; they're usually five or six problems long. What that means is that thirty-five to fifty problems will determine twenty percent of my grade. Thirty-five to fifty problems in high school is sometimes only two or three days' worth of homework. Each problem matters more.

What this means is that it's far easier to do poorly in college than in high school; I feel grade pressure here a bit more than I did in high school because my undergraduate GPA will determine my grad school prospects. However, at this point I'm just trying to keep in mind that no one will be perfect during their first semester of college, and that some adjustment is necessary as well as normal.

My advice? I see my roommate struggling with subjects she's not fond of because she wanted to get distribution requirements out of the way early. I agree to a certain extent with that philosophy (if you're writing your honors thesis in history in your fourth year and also taking a boring physics class, for example, I would assume that those two would conflict and one would suffer), but at the same time, I knew that coming to college would require an adjustment on my part and chose classes that I would enjoy. This meant a really social-science heavy first semester, but it's also things that I'm comfortable with.

It's like choosing what clothes to bring to college: a little reinvention of your personal style is totally fine, and even a good thing, but if you go from jeans to formalwear, you likely won't be comfortable in the new duds. Having the familiarity of favorite subjects is somewhat reassuring when so much else in your life is changing.

On Making Friends

I suppose the "making friends" aspect of college is less intimidating if you're going to a school with people you know from high school. I didn't have this benefit, and I'm quite shy, so the concept of "making friends" with random people honestly scared me. The last few days have shown me why this is slightly ridiculous, and reinforced some basic truths about How to Make Friends when you're tossed onto a new campus with new people.

1. Be yourself. This is so cheesy, but it's so effective... One of the people I've made friends with this week came up and talked to me after she saw my computer background (one of the Equalist posters from the Legend of Korra), and we proceeded to spend the afternoon in my dorm, trading fandoms and series that we thought the other should watch/read. Another person I've been growing closer to mentioned My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic within my earshot, I piped into the conversation, and we're now friends.

This tactic works best if you're a geek of some sort. Being fans of the same TV shows, manga, movies, webcomics, something like that - it provides a source of conversation so you don't endlessly cycle around to "so how were your classes today?" It also takes a little bit of pressure off, because your fellow first-years will usually be feeling the same sense of awkwardness regarding small talk.

2. Go to things that interest you. This afternoon, the college hosted a lecture by Peter Kornicki, who is head of East Asian Studies at Cambridge University (yeah, that Cambridge) about 17th and 18th century Japanese books. It was brilliant, and going to that gave me an opportunity to meet other students who are willing to give up their Tuesday afternoons to listen to someone talking about woodblock-cut printing. That sort of thing also provides conversation topics! If you're interested in something (politics, random academic topics, astronomy, LGBTQ rights...) your college will likely have a student group for it. If they don't, you can start one - advertise on notice boards, any online classifieds your school runs, the newspaper (if they have a section for things like this).

3. Leave your dorm door open. Our door is heavy and swings forward with the teensiest breeze ever, so the first thing we bought was a doorstop. Especially if you're living in a first-year dorm, people will just sort of wave at you as they pass, and some of the more adventurous ones will stop and talk.

4. Ask questions. Yesterday, before my economics class, I mentioned as an aside that I had done IB in high school. The girl in front of me whipped around, asked me for my EE topic, and we had a ten-minute conversation on the merits and drawbacks of IB in our respective home countries. If she hadn't asked me what my EE was, I doubt I would have talked to her.

Even if you're painfully shy, ask the person sitting near you where they're from, what dorm they're living in, why they're taking that class... No one will get irritated at you for talking to them.



What this sums up to is the simple fact that it's pretty difficult to NOT make friends during college. In the first few days, during orientation, there will be people who seem to just click into a large group that eats together, sits together during orientation events, and goes partying together. If you're not into that scene, wait until after your classes have started to worry about Not Having Friends. Theoretically, you're in at least one class that interests you - use that as a starting point for friendships. 

"Is The Homesickness Setting In Yet?"

When I first started this blog, I didn't intend to make it quite as Oberlin-centric as the past few posts have been; instead, I wanted to discuss the challenges and benefits of being far away from home during the "college experience." One of the things that I wished I had found in the college search was an account of what I could expect from the first year of college. There seems to be so much written about how to get into college, but the amount of material on the college adjustment is left to books like The Naked Roommate or individual forum posts.

I Skyped my best friend today. She's living at home and going to school at a state college, and we're both feeling the distance... I used to be three blocks away, now it's two thousand miles. I don't know what I would do without Skype, cell phones, and texting to keep up with my close friends and my parents at home.

Even so, when I was talking to my best friend and her mom popped by to ask whether I was missing home, I didn't know what to say. Perhaps this is because I've usually been okay with sleep-away camps/traveling without my parents, but I've never really gotten homesick. In the last few days, I've kept a little more to myself. I can't say that I'm homesick exactly, but my cat, my parents, my friends... I'm feeling the absence more than usual.

Today especially - my hall made dumplings in the tiny dorm kitchen, and I couldn't help but compare the action of cooking in Dascomb to cooking at home. I missed the counter space and the gas stove from my kitchen, as well as having access to little things like large-sized kitchen knives to shred cabbage with.

Yet even with my slightly-more-melancholy attitude these last few days, I'm not homesick. I miss home, but I'm not desperate to return. I think one of the reasons I've been feeling a little down lately is the amount of stuff I'm not doing: because I've had papers to write and homework to do, this weekend has consisted largely of me sitting in my dorm room or in the library, procrastinating. In those moments of not being busy, I focus more on how I used to do homework on the couch with my cat sleeping on my feet.

My solution for this is continuing to be busy. I'm watching more movies, re-reading books - anything so that I'm not just surfing the internet looking at Maru videos. If you're in the same situation I was a year ago - applying to colleges across the nation but worrying about the separation all the same - then all I can say is yes, you will miss home. However, missing home is manageable - talk to your parents for twenty minutes a day between classes or after dinner, text your friends when you wake up so that they have a message waiting for them when they get up (although this only works if you're further east than your friends), find a place in town to go when you need a kitten to cuddle.

It's normal to miss home. It's also normal to be off gallivanting around your fascinating new campus. Striking a balance is the hard part.