Guess who has a midterm and a precis (ie, glorified book and article report) due tomorrow and yet is writing a blog post? THIS GIRL.
Occasionally, I question my judgement, but usually it works out alright in the end.
I'm taking twenty units (5 courses) this quarter AND I'm trying to be part of the dragonboat team. That's another one of those "hm I'm not sure if this was a super good idea" kind of things, but I guess we'll see how that goes as well...
Mostly, I think it's a matter of efficient time management and not slacking off, ie, wasting time on the Internet. Which, coming from my background of like, ALWAYS being connected and using facebook for work, is really hard to do haha. But what else can you do but your best?
Grad school is pretty different than undergrad so far, despite me taking a lot of undergrad courses. The amount of free food and free alcohol (or Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages) is kind of staggering. I mean, just wow. And then there's the dining halls.
I went to Arrillaga Hall today for the first time. Oh my god. The undergrads here. I don't understand how they lose weight. It's probably a really good thing UCSD didn't actually do this endless lunch style (though it does force you to eat on specific schedules and not, say, at 9:30 pm) because I would have gained so much weight. The food in the dining halls are really really really good! I think my jaw dropped when I went in today haha. They had these dishes that were plated super nice and fancy (they even used a dish towel to wipe the edges of the dish so that it looked restaurant quality presentable) and a whole bunch of awesomely delicious foods. One of the other dining halls has Viet sandwiches and (okay) pho. It really... spoils you, I think. Cause wow. I don't know how kids here stay skinny. Probably by not eating actually that much, and by getting used to it. I need to not eat all the delicious looking things in site when I go...
Classes wise, it's really interesting, because they really expect a lot out of grad students. I mean, we already did the undergrad thing, yeah, but we're expected to have transcended to the next level and be able to use a whole new moveset. It's like we're pokemon, kind of. You work as an undergrad, accumulating experience points (aka units) and new skills (UNDERGRAD wants to learn ALL NIGHTER. Delete WRITE A REFLECTIVE PAPER to learn ALL NIGHTER?) Some of these pokemon go on after graduation and do awesome things, like learn new skills via TMs (or jobs) and don't ever want (or need) to evolve. Or maybe they're like Eevee where they can evolve into a plethora of different things with different skill sets or what have you.
However, there are more special evolutions! After reaching a certain level (graduation) if you have the right conditions (no job in the workforce, good GPA, good application, needs more specialized skill set) your UNDERGRAD can evolve into GRAD STUDENT. From here, there are two different routes GRAD STUDENT can take.
In the first path, GRAD STUDENT will go on to complete a masters program, and then, upon enough experience points, will eventually evolve into INDUSTRY PERSON. They'll have a job, hopefully. They're probably things like computer scientists, business people, law people, etc.
The second path requires accumulating a lot more experience points (units - often, for the humanities and social sciences types through READING A LOT) and also using a special stone called DISSERTATION. Somehow and somewhere down the line, these GRAD STUDENTS though special trading events between schools (usually) can evolve into their final form, PROFESSOR.
Clearly, I am overthinking this, especially when I should be writing about other academic-related things like how Chinese people thought rocks were the most loyal thing in the world. That's why there are so many rocks in Chinese gardens (like, those big huge rocks that are often really old). There was an old story about how this one rock actually came to have something of a spirit and personality, because it was able to choose who its master would be and did things like puff up small clouds to become beautiful for only its master. Then when its master died, rather than belong to someone else, it actually decided to commit suicide by shattering itself into a thousand shards. ...this is the abridged version that I gleaned from my readings, but I thought it was kind of interesting how these inanimate objects could really come to embody real feelings, emotions, and virtues to the point of fantastical stories.
I complain, but really, I've been having a lot of fun at grad school, as evident by my lack of posting and getting pictures up from the last bit of my stay in Japan. I swear eventually I get around to that... (probably right when all the papers are due hahaha). Classes are really small, but campus is really big. I think my smallest class has like... five of us total in it (and we're all from the same department!) while the biggest lecture has maybe 30 at most? AT MOST. WHAT IS THIS MADNESS. I'm used to lectures being like... at least 40 or something. It's kind of unsettling.
...I suppose though, UCSD has like, twice the number of students or something. 24,000 or something? Stanford has ~14,000, but undergrads (aka, people I'd probably have classes with) only make up 6,000. The other 8,000 are graduate students who are taking more specialized things, so the chances of taking classes with them... well, apart from humanities/social science folk (which I'm sure are in the minority) are fairly small.
Oh, I don't know why that reminded me, but! One of the awesome things Stanford did was throw a party at the Cantor Arts Center, which is the local museum/art gallery on campus. It was an interesting kind of concept. They had a bunch of student performances, artistic performances, and they opened the Arts Center up for a scavenger hunt where you had to get the name of nine pieces of art. A clever trick to get students to walk all around the arts center, exposing them to a wide range of art from around the world.
Actually though, the Cantor Arts Center is AMAZING. I would totally pay to get into there (students are free though, yay!). The amount of art that it has there is really astounding, as well as the types of works they have there. They had these really creepy masks from I think the polynesian or Alaskan areas... I swear they were watching us. So. Creepy.
