Here's to the girls who stay smart

Okay, so here's something that you may or may not know about college. Somewhere in the midst of going to crazy parties, joining clubs, complaining about dorm showers and discovering who they truly are, college students actually do have to attend classes and do work. (I know, crazy, right?) So I figured I'd do a nice little post about my academic experiences at Oberlin thus far. Just to get it out of the way. (Because who really wants to read about school stuff, right?)

So, first off, I'm going to tell you a little story about a class I'm taking that I totally did NOT expect to enjoy, but ended up being pleasantly surprised by: Principles of Economics. To be perfectly honest, there are three main reasons I registered for this course. 1) I wanted to balance out my schedule a bit and not have my entire first semester be filled with humanities-esque courses. 2) It fulfills half of the Quantitative Proficiency requirement for graduation (look it up on the Obie website if you wanna know more about that, because it's far to dull for me to spend blogging space on). And 3) It would be nice if I could actually understand a bit more about the economy and subsequently get more of Jon Stewart's jokes.

Shockingly enough, I discovered pretty quickly that this class is actually....interesting. And it makes sense to me. It's not one of those subjects that I would love to study but goes completely over my head (i.e. most sciences). And apart from being interesting and making sense, I also have a professor who can hold my attention isn't completely unintelligible and impossible to follow! That's basically a three-fold-win for a college course right there! Generally the classes are typical lecture/note taking style sessions, but we actually discuss some pretty interesting content. And we occasionally do some highly entertaining experiments in class, which involve using an online simulation of a market for a certain product and having each student take on the role of a buyer or seller. Doing that showed a demonstration of how the market responds to changes in asks, bids, etc. So much fun. (Wow, I feel like such a nerd right now...)

Okay, now I wanna discuss another class that I'm totally loving right now (this is probably the class I will reference most often in this blog): My first-year seminar class, "Beyond Disbelief: Can Literature Tell the Truth?" Being a HUGE literature nerd, I'm totally not surprised by how much I'm loving this class. It's my only small class really (16 people) and it's entirely discussion-based, a nice change from my other classes which are mostly lecture-based. From the looks of it, most of our discussions will be about poems that we read (thanks to the most amazing book ever). However, we started the course by reading David Shields' Reality Hunger, which I HIGHLY recommend to anyone who knows how to read and has been doing so for a while. It's truly fascinating. As is the class itself. Today, for instance, one group did a presentation of a poem they had read and analyzed (E. E. Cummings' "Buffalo Bill's" for those of you so nerdy that you wanna go look it up) and we spent the entire class discussing it. Fifty minutes dedicated to discussing an eleven-line poem. For a person like me, that's just about the most wonderful way a class could possibly be spent (again, me = huge nerd).

But, yeah, that's probably about as interesting as I could possibly make an academics-based blog post, so next time I'll get back to writing about the entertaining aspects of college. You know, auditioning for a million theatre things at once, hating yourself a little after going to fourth meal, spending your nights watching Quidditch matches and/or Disney movies, waiting for an hour in line outside the auditorium for tickets to hear Ira Glass speak.... God I love college.