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.