Somewhere new
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September 2017 through June 2018
My first year at UW was my hardest. I won't get into specifics, since the causes are obvious and probably universal: new city, new people, "strange faces, other minds." I got lost in Padelford occasionally, played Secret Hitler a bunch, ran, slept, explored. I realized how awful I would be at medicine and gave up even the pretense, instead electing to become an ecology, evolution, and conservation biology major (the second least popular biology track) with a focus on the Arctic. It was a year of discovery, I suppose. I discovered botany and fell in love with plants; I discovered oceanography and fell in love with the sea; I discovered Seattle, and fell in love with the city, its gray-grim, rainy moods, its cold sunny days in the early spring, its muted colors and flashes of sudden light, like sun sparking off a gem. And its people of course, fairly friendly and always odd. It was a year, too, of serendipity. Happy accidents and random classes gave me some of my closest friends and best mentors, people I still know and am grateful to know. I had no clear plan, and that was a blessing. If I had know exactly where I was going, I might not have wandered down the alleys and tangents, might never have stopped and seen the wondrous people and things around me in this sulky, vivid city.
Incidentally, I have no idea why all the font sizes are slightly different on this page, nor do I know how to fix them.
My first year at UW was my hardest. I won't get into specifics, since the causes are obvious and probably universal: new city, new people, "strange faces, other minds." I got lost in Padelford occasionally, played Secret Hitler a bunch, ran, slept, explored. I realized how awful I would be at medicine and gave up even the pretense, instead electing to become an ecology, evolution, and conservation biology major (the second least popular biology track) with a focus on the Arctic. It was a year of discovery, I suppose. I discovered botany and fell in love with plants; I discovered oceanography and fell in love with the sea; I discovered Seattle, and fell in love with the city, its gray-grim, rainy moods, its cold sunny days in the early spring, its muted colors and flashes of sudden light, like sun sparking off a gem. And its people of course, fairly friendly and always odd. It was a year, too, of serendipity. Happy accidents and random classes gave me some of my closest friends and best mentors, people I still know and am grateful to know. I had no clear plan, and that was a blessing. If I had know exactly where I was going, I might not have wandered down the alleys and tangents, might never have stopped and seen the wondrous people and things around me in this sulky, vivid city.
Incidentally, I have no idea why all the font sizes are slightly different on this page, nor do I know how to fix them.
Fall Reflection, November 2017
Honors 100 was my first introduction to what the Interdisciplinary Honors Program expects from students, which is, I learned, primarily deep introspection and diligent work. This reflection, required at the end of my first quarter, considers those topics which have most dogged my mind over the past weeks and which most affect my decision of how to get through college, what to do while in college, and what I want to accomplish here and in the future. This quarter was strange and hectic, certainly an "adjustment period," as my family keeps saying, but it has given me much of the working knowledge and practical determination to succeed, I hope, in quarters to come.
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Biology 180
My first class with Dr Jon Herron, who teaches some Honors biology classes. On the first day, I sat next to a girl in the front row, introduced myself, and got to talking. The next day, I did the same thing to the same girl. In truth, she was probably glad I introduced myself twice, since I have an unpronounceable name, but I was extremely embarrassed to have so obviously forgotten who she was. We ended up being good friends, so I suppose it worked out OK. (Update 2021: Anna and I play Stardew Valley together every Monday night and complain about our weeks.) The class, meanwhile, convinced me that the most interesting part of biology is the study of relationships, between organisms, populations, ecosystems, or society and nature, through time and across space. It's much more fun and far more relevant to everyday life than cell bio, I think.
The 1st Chemistry Lab, September 2017
I was not particularly excited about having a chemistry lab that ended at 9:20 at night walking in to Bagley on my first day, and I grew progressively less excited and more terrified as the evening went on. I have never been one to hand in a test or lab report incomplete, but the quizzes and labs in 142 sorely test my abilities. The pressure of time ticking down made me sloppy at moments, and my partner and I had to redo several of the flame tests to ensure we collected good data for our math, which I also had to redo several times. By the time 9:20 came around, with our TA standing in the doorway ready to abandon us, I turned in my lab report and notes, and hoped for the best. It was perhaps the best crash course in time management I've had yet, and since then, I've been careful to ensure my work is good the first time around, putting in more time to do it well rather than wasting time rewriting poor work with four minutes left to go.
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Global Challenges Discourse, November 2017
This event was too deeply fascinating for me to be concerned about taking pictures. Although I was most intrigued by Kate Starbird's perspective that engineers design many of the ways we facilitate conversation now, and so engineers must work to design structures that will bring us together and prompt discussion rather than create rifts, it was something Randy Engstrom said that I remember best. He argued that these rifts always existed, it's simply because they're visible now that they have become such an issue. But because they are visible now, we can begin bridging these divisions within our nation and our species.
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Biology 317, March - June 2018
Everything smelled good for a while, which was nice --- good like a candle shop, every time I opened my backpack and rooted around the drying coniferous branches. I had never had a class before that demanded my studying consist of staring intently at plants and speaking in Latin, and I am sure my friends now look back with a sigh of nostalgia on those halcyon days when I could merely --- unasked for --- identify plants in English. Quite frankly, no one should have given me the power to describe Thuja plicata in detail, with its decurrent needles, its gymnosperm origins, its preferred environment, its taxonomy. Unfortunately, this curse was unleashed upon the world, so the most we can hope for now is that my application to volunteer in Hitchcock's herbarium will be accepted, and they shall trap me in the basement with the vaults of plant specimens where no one need suffer me speaking of botany ever again. I did do quite well in the class, though.
Gender in Western Thought
An excellent class. I have learned that I have no idea what postmodernism is, and that it is probably beyond my powers of understanding. I made new friends, got in lovely debates, and finally read Sartre and Plato, which I think means that I am officially classy and intellectual.
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English 111H
Every student at UW is required to take a freshman year English composition class, focusing either on literature, rhetoric, or community service.
Warning: the top link is to a zip folder. I have no idea if that works, so I've also included a link to the introduction. The introduction is also significantly shorter, so it is perhaps a better place to start anyway. |
Header image: Sycamore leaves on the UW campus. Description: Yellow-gold leaves on black branches, with the sun shining through them and a bit of blue sky behind.