Second Semester
Sometimes I get kind
of overwhelmed with school. I keep waiting for the “easy” semester to happen,
and it hasn’t yet. Maybe this one is it. Anyway, I thought I’d talk about my
classes a little bit this semester.
I always take five.
You must take at least four, but six isn’t unheard of. I have Ecology on Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday. It’s a second year course, and there’s more than a
little hand-holding going on. Since beginning to take some upper year courses,
they really stop giving you reminders, or help, or anything like that. You’re
off on your own, and should know what you’re doing. In this one there are
constant reminders. They send emails out constantly. In good news, I will for
sure not forget when anything is ever due. At the same time, I have gotten
really accustomed to taking care of myself when it comes to my studies, so I’m
a little uneasy about it. The course material itself isn’t too bad. It’s a lot
of basic population statistics, which I’ve already had a couple classes on. I
haven’t learned anything new in the past three weeks of class, but maybe it
will kick up a notch soon. The professor is young for a prof, at about 28. He
doesn’t know how to time his lectures yet so he’s always running overtime. It’s
a little annoying. Hopefully he figures it out soon.
I’m taking one really
artsy course. I don’t do a lot of non-core sciences, because that’s just not
me. I find that if I want to read about history or art, I can seek it out
myself. But, for the sake of balance, I’m in a course on Islamic Civilisation.
I don’t know anything about Islam. It’s in the news constantly, but I couldn’t
string together a list of more than about ten facts about it. I think a lot of
that is cultural bias on the part of the schooling system in North America, but
that’s another story. I really like this class. It’s not too difficult, but I’m
learning a lot. When you start from nothing, there’s a lot of knowledge you can
pick up in short time. The professor is really great. He’s engaging, and really
knows his stuff.
Biology students tend
to split into two groups. There’s the ‘cure cancer biogenetic engineering’
type, and the ‘tree hugging hipster hippie forest people’ type. That’s a generalisation,
but not a big one. I’m in Nature Conservation two days a week, and this is
where the hippie type congregates. The whole class is spent listening to the
prof talk on and on and on about his opinions about the environment. Provided,
he does have some good points, but also a lot of bad ones. He’s big into “taking
down the man”. I find that I don’t agree with a lot of what goes on in that
class. At the same time though, the grading scheme is really simple, so I’ll be
getting an A in this class.
I have Human Sexuality
on Tuesday nights for three hours. The long story short with this one is that
whatever you’re into, it’s more normal than you think. There’s really not much
to talk about with this one. It’s really clinical, because if it wasn’t, it
would be a little too raunchy for a school campus.
Finally, there’s
Developmental Biology. This is the science of how organisms develop from just a
single cell into a whole animal. It’s really fascinating. We do a lot work in
the lab on this one. I posted a picture of a slide that I looked at last
week on my tumblr if you want to check that out. It’s really nifty, and gives you a bit of an idea of what I'm doing.
So that’s my semester.
It’s looking like I’ll be done with this year in early April, which will be
nice, and then I’m hopefully having a summer adventure abroad, but that’s still
in the works.
I hope you guys are
slipping in to your second semester really easily. I’m sure it will be over
before we know it.