A Day in the Life...

Hey everyone,

It seems that no matter how much we talk about what students do at Dartmouth, it's still hard to convey a sense of what life us actually like here. So I've decided that for this post, I'm just going to walk you through my day today.

The alarm went off this morning at about 7:05, but it took me until about 7:20 to get out of bed. Seriously every morning this term I ask myself why on Earth I decided to start taking Arabic (and its corresponding 7:45am drill) my senior year. I mean, seriously.

But to drill I went, about 5 minutes late. You can read about what drill is in this post I wrote a couple of weeks ago. That ended at 8:35 and with my actual Arabic class starting at 9, I used that bit of time to finish my homework.

We finished learning the Arabic alphabet last week and have moved onto learning some basic grammar and sentence structure. Because I didn't put enough work into learning some of our early vocab in the past couple weeks, I'm struggling a bit now. But don't worry (la'a batz!), I'm catching up. It really is amazing how quickly you can fall behind when learning a new language! Still, breaking into small groups to make some basic sentences like "I'm a student at Dartmouth and I study Arabic" and "Do you like the United Nations?" (is it me, or is the vocab you learn when you're just starting to learn a new language really random?) was really fun. Like I mentioned in my last post about Arabic, it's cool to be able to be so cognizant of your own learning.

Arabic ends at 9:50, giving me almost an hour and a half until Astronomy starts at 11:15. I stopped by Novack - the café in Baker-Berry Library - on the way back to my room to get a coffee, bagel, and today's copy of the D (the Dartmouth - our daily paper). I still find it difficult to make efficient use of hour-long chunks of time, but I did manage to get a start on tomorrow's Arabic homework before heading over to Wilder for Astro.

I'm taking Astro 3 - Exploring the Universe - because I need a science lab credit (look for a post in the near-future about Dartmouth's distributive requirements). Though my major and minor are in the social sciences, I used to be a huge space nerd in middle/high school and I'm having a lot of fun in this class. And I mean, what's more college than taking about Newton, Einstein, and special/general relativity? We had a quiz today (short weekly quizzes on Wednesday make up a good chunk of our grade for this class) and I'm pretty sure I aced it, so that was good.

Lunch at Collis Café - one of my favorite places to eat - came next. I didn't have plans to meet anyone but ended up running into some friends. I really think Dartmouth, with 4100 undergraduates, is the perfect size. You can usually bet on running into people you know at places like Collis and the library, but there's no way you'll ever end up meeting everyone in your class, let alone the whole school. Anyway, it was good to run into them because I'm really busy this term and have had a lot of trouble making time to actually see people, unless we work together or are in the same organization. So it goes, senior year.

And now here I am at the admissions office, working on this post. I'm going to leave at 3 today (I'm usually here until 4) because I'm actually working for an admissions event tonight. We're hosting a bunch of high school guidance counselors from all over New England and the full-time interns from the summer are going to do a D-Plan presentation for them, followed by dinner. Never one to turn down a free dinner from the Hanover Inn, I'm definitely looking forward to the event. Still, with everything that's going on this term it's tough to give up extra time, so I figured I'd compensate a bit and leave work early. Plus, I've got my senior portrait at 4:24 (yeah, really), and could use some extra time to get ready for that and hopefully even make some progress on that Arabic homework. ARABIC, WHY MUST YOU REQUIRE SO MUCH TIME!?!?

Ahem, excuse me. The dinner ends at 6:30, giving me an hour before my UGA staff meeting starts at 7:30. Hopefully that won't go more than an hour, because I've got a government midterm tomorrow morning that I'd really like to study for. And in the meantime, I'm trying to put the finishing touches on the new Cords CD album art and info so that we can get that to DiscMakers tomorrow. I will be so glad when that whole project is finished (and it almost is!) but that's an entirely different story.

If this sounds like a really crazy day, well, it is. My freshman fall didn't really look anything like this term, and today is busy by even the current standards. Tomorrow's not much better with a midterm in the morning and a presentation (which I've barely started) for Rocky Leadership Fellows tomorrow night, but Friday and Saturday are really looking good right now. And I'm sure you can all relate to that.

Cheers,
John