It is pretty strange for me to finally be in university! After taking two years off to pursue ballet with the Goh Ballet I am back on the academic path (to the relief of my parents, teachers, blah, blah). I have started by just taking one summer course… a little bit of a bummer seen as I was invited to go to China on tour with the Goh shortly after I registered and paid my fees for ASTU 150. I wish I was taking more courses this summer now that I am tied down to going to class.
Actually I do not mind the course one bit and I am quite glad that I am taking it before my full course load next year. It is only once a week for 3 hours and it is a class of 8 students (I am not kidding you, eight!). The building is really nice and the professor is really helpful. I do feel quite stupid and uneducated whenever the other students are talking about movies/comics/books/political things that I have never heard of… didn’t grow up in North America and spent the last couple years of my life dedicated to dance :P. Also manage to feel quite naive whenever I speak in class… I have no idea what most university classes should be like and am therefore in my opinion slightly at a disadvantage!
So far I am a little bit perplexed as to why they like to make academic writing so complicated… I like to see the world as being accessible, adding words like epistemological, politico-aesthetic e.t.c. not only confuses people but it means that: a. the articles take much longer to read! b. not as many people will read what you are trying to say. c. some words are used so often that you have to wonder whether they can truly have meaning at all and whether the author is using them to prove a point… or whether they are just trying to sound intelligent. Also when you are writing in-class assignments and you keep having to rewrite extra long “nominal” phrases your hand does get a little tired …and it wastes ink… and it wastes trees!
That said I am a little nervous about course choices e.t.c for the fall semester. I have decided that I am perhaps not the best arts student… even if I have been a dancer and fully immersed in the arts for un vrai, vrai long time, part of me cannot take arts studies all that seriously. I walked past a classroom the other day where they were being lectured about fairies and felt extremely disappointed! How useful is that? By going to university I want to be learning about…well not about fairies. So my plan going into university is to do the dual degree program in Arts (hopefully Cognitive Systems) and Engineering… something that is applicable and could possibly get me a real world job. That said we will have to see if I can deal with university level science courses. I have been working as a high school math tutor, and I have just done Bio and Physics 12 (99% in both! BC mark inflation to the extreme) in the last two months, but I have probably completely forgotten most of Chem 12… and Calc is just hanging in by a couple of threads. Also I am planning on taking CPSC 110 next year. Having absolutely no programming background I am frantically trying to make a little bit of sense out of the midterms e.t.c. posted online so that I have an idea of what I am getting myself into!
Anyways I am planning on taking a laissez faire attitude this year. If I am a complete failure in a certain area and do not care for it at all, I am not going to worry about it too much… right we’ll see how that goes. I’ll keep you updated! <3