Choosing New Classes and an Advisor Already?!

                Hello! I hope you had a really fantastic Halloween. The day itself wasn’t very eventful for me seeing as it was Sunday night, but on Friday previous, I went to a drag ball which was a lot of fun. From what I’ve heard, the drag ball is held annually. Yes, I was dressed up as a man.  Guy clothing is really comfortable, actually. Here’s a picture with my friends that we took after the drag ball. I know I look kind of ridiculous, but isn’t that the point?

Me in man clothes courtesy of my friend Dana

                Anyway, course selection is coming up. The dates for class registration start with seniors and end with freshman. This makes sense because upperclassmen need to fill requirements and underclassmen have more opportunities to take courses at a different time. I am actually looking at courses that are rather different than those I am currently taking. It’s not uncommon for students to completely change their track of study, but I didn’t think mine would be so dramatic.

                As you know, I am taking biology, environmental science, calculus, and management. I came to Clark University thinking I wanted to pursue a career involving the improvement of the environment. However, the courses I’m looking at right now are courses in philosophy, psychology, management, sociology, and English. I never knew until I took so many science courses how much I would miss analyzing literature. Recently, I’ve been steering much more towards psychology and management and away from science. It’s interesting how quickly everything changes.  In high school, I wanted to study everything from pre-veterinary medicine to English education. Now I’m thinking about what kind of career I could really love in the management field. I’m not going to go into too much depth here about which courses I’m looking at, but that’s just because I’d be sitting here writing all day. My course registration starts on November 18^th, so you can expect more about that in my blog either on that day or the following week. I am also meeting with my advisor this evening, so I may have a better idea of what classes are realistic for me to take afterwards.

                Another thing that has been occupying my time recently is trying to figure out who my advisor should be. Right now, my advisor is in the biology department because my first-year intensive class is Biology 101, but because I am focusing on psychology and management, it makes sense for me to make a change. I have been working on writing a letter to one of my professors requesting her to be my advisor. It was a challenge to figure out exactly how I wanted to approach the letter, but I think it came out pretty well and I’m working on revisions before I send it.

                This entire entry has focused on future classes, so I’ll write a brief summary of what’s going on in my classes now. In my biology lab, we’ve been working on a formal write-up of a lab we did on the Threespine Stickleback. In this lab, we are testing to see if predation levels in different lakes affect the length of the external spines as a defense mechanism on these fish. In environmental science, we are analyzing growth of resource exploitation such as oil and more recently, are looking at human population models. In today’s class, we discussed the political, economical, and environmental effects of such a dramatic increase of human population. In management class, we’ve just recently started up new online projects which simulate how a computer company chooses, makes, and markets its product. The group which is most successful actually gets out of writing a paper at the end of the project, which is definitely a nice incentive. Finally, calculus class has been working with implicit differentiation. The words themselves sound a bit intimidating, but the concepts are rather straight-forward.

                I realize that in my last entry, I promised to elaborate a bit more about the management computer simulation. My group is having our first official meeting tonight, so I will be more informed for next week’s blog and I will definitely discuss more of what the project entails. Have a great rest of the week!