Hey! I’m Reika, and I’m a third-year psych major. Don’t want to give myself too much existential dread by trying to lay out what exactly I want to do in the future, but let’s just say exploring the unconscious. I’m from Japan, but my father is half Japanese and half American, making me a quarter American and three-quarters Japanese. Despite this, because I’ve gone to international schools all my life, English is my dominant language. If anyone else in this course is also Japanese, or anyone who’s open, I would love to connect! Contact me on Instagram @reika.js anytime. I love playing volleyball, and most of all, I love singing. Though I’m a bit shy around people, you can find me singing nonstop when I’m alone at home and especially in the shower.
I wanted to take this course, honestly, to fulfill my literature requirement, but also because I’d love to vicariously experience all kinds of romance, regardless if a romance world does not exist, through our course literature. Overall, my hopes for this course are to find some good novels I can look back on and think, “damn, that was a good read.” I used to love reading, but it became a passion buried under the advance of more new shiny things, namely social media, which I do feel a bit ashamed of. I feel like sometimes I just need someone to force me into a book for me to finally realize it was worth reading. Some books I really enjoyed that were part of my IB literature course were Wide Sargasso Sea, Slaughterhouse 5, and The Vegetarian. None of these are inherently romance novels, I’d say, but nonetheless, I look forward to the contents of this course.
Something that makes me a little nervous for this class is the contracts. Of course, I want to get the highest grade I can get, but I’m still weighing out the consequences. Because I don’t indulge myself in books or novels on the regular, I find it hard to imagine that I’d be able to stick to a new routine and schedule. Anyone else feeling the same way? I think it’s also a battle with whether or not the contents of the materials will pique my interests, because one thing I know for sure about myself is that I cannot slog through a boring book. I’ll think about it a little more this next week. If anyone does read this, what are you guys thinking for yourselves? I’d love to know.
4 replies on “Will I find romance through this course?”
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Hi Reika, and welcome to RMST 202! “Exploring the unconscious” is quite a life goal… I’m not sure this course will help you get there, but we will be discussing issues of psychology quite a bit. On the other hand, I can’t promise you that you’ll find “romance,” at least in the conventional meaning of the term.
On the contracts: don’t be too worried, and remember that you get a chance (once, around Spring Break) to change your mind and adjust your contract if things are not going as you expect them to.
Hi Reika!
I’m in the same boat as I took this as a requirement but also I want to read a book that I can reread because of how good it was.
With the contracts I am planning on aiming for the middle (like a B or something) to begin with and depending on how well I am doing in the course, I might end up changing it in February. For me it really depends on if I can keep up with the reading as my other courses also have a lot of weekly reading. I would recommend that you put something that you think is manageable and then change it in the future if you can do more.
I hope to meet you in class!
The existential dread of trying to figure out the future is so incredibly relateable. That’s coming from another psych major too, you’d think we’d be better at avoiding that whole thing.
I’m also a bit concerned about being really unengaged with some of the texts and just having to just slog through it like one would a textbook, but at the end of the day the time will pass anyway. I’m hoping it just comes down to finding the right lens to look at it through.