HFCS: effika’s blog

This first week of classes has been worse than any other first week of classes, with the exception of junior high. Luckily my classes are done on Thursday. I have the whole of Friday off for doing useful things to continue my thesis. Let’s have a run-down of my schedule this semester!

Monday and/or Wednesday

• Microbial Ecology/Pathology lab. 9:30am-12:30am.
• This sounds like it’s going to be a fun course (we already took a trip out to the duckpond to collect soil samples and we get to tour the sewage plant, too!). Unfortunately, my brain doesn’t work before 10am.
• Recitation for this class is on Mondays only. Yay?
• Independent study/ more thesis stuff in the afternoon.
• Physics Lab II, Electricity and Magnetism. 4:30pm-6:50pm. Wednesdays only.
• I took the first physics lab over a year ago, and I haven’t actually had a physics course in 2 years. I hated the first lab, and vowed to leave the other one until the last semester that I could. These labs are completely useless to anybody, even physics majors. The amount of busywork in the lab made (and makes) me cringe. I have more important stuff to spend my time on, and when I was a freshman who had the time for it I couldn’t enroll in physics.
• The section I originally enrolled in was cancelled this Tuesday, leaving me to scramble to fit in a lab that at least didn’t start at 7pm.
• One plus: Taught by my old physics 2 TA, who was pretty cool.

Tuesday/Thursday

• Quantitative Analysis aka Analytical Chemistry. 9:30am-10:30am and 1:30pm-4:20pm.
• My ability to pass any chemistry lab has relied solely on the fact that even if the experiment doesn’t run correctly I’ll still get credit if I write it up well enough. This course is probably going to kill my gpa, for if I do not hand in the proper number on the little card I will not receive much credit at all.

I’m also having a nice little fit over whether I want to graduate this semester, if I can graduate this semester, and what terrifying realities lie beyond for a microbiology major. You’d think that people would need a microbiologist around but nobody seems really gung-ho about it. Maybe I should just start showing up at places and telling them how much better life would be if they had a microbiologist. There’s always grad school, but I’m so sick of school that I’d like to take a few years off before going back.

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