Thursday, June 3, 2010

End of sophomore year!

So I was getting ready to study for my finals today and I realized that I never wrote about my spring term classes! And in order to avoid studying for my finals, I decided to write all about them now.

This term has been my favorite term since last year, in which all three terms were tied for my favorite. I'm not sure whether to rank this term as better than last year or not, but I think I'm leaning towards the latter. My whole of last year's classes were amazing and unmarred by the tragedy of physics and other things.

I took organic chemistry lab, cell and molecular biology, intro to poetry and evolution of people, technology and society. Only 15 credits. Yes! And they were all after eleven o'clock! It was quite nice, especially because I loved all my classes, with the exception of intro to poetry. Poetry is one of my only three hates in life (Physics, poetry and ants. In that order) and I only took this class because I knew it would be extremely easy. And it was. There was only a midterm and a final and both were short essays (one page per poem double spaced). This was quite amazing, as it allowed me to devote time to my more important and far more interesting classes. My teacher was from Israel too and he had a really cute Hebrew accent. I thought he was pretty good looking as well, which was an added bonus to this class that I did not foresee...

Basically my favorite class this term was organic chemistry lab. Yay! There were 2 hour and a half lectures a week and 1 four hour lab. It sounds like a lot, but it really wasn't. I usually enjoy labs more than the actual classes they're for and this class was no exception. My lab was at eight in the morning, but I always looked forward to it, even though it was so early. And a lot of work. In order to participate in the lab, we had to come to class with a completed prelab. Now these prelabs usually took me about two hours to complete. We had to copy down the whole laboratory procedure into our lab notebooks in addition to making a bunch of extra charts and tables and adding background information. This part kind of sucked, but it was worth it. And our professor actually came to labs and demonstrated every step and talked to us and helped us, which I thought was super cool. Another plus was that I took it with one of my sciency friends. I might not have liked this class as much if he wasn't in it. But all in all, favorite class ever! I'm going to try really hard for this final. I'm aiming for 100%, but I'd be happy with a 95% I guess in the worst case scenario.

Cell Bio. Also a fun class and the textbook for it was the prettiest one I've ever seen. It had all these pretty bright colors and abstract cartoonish pictures of cells and cell parts. It also had cool swirls and dots and stuff. It was so cool! And it came with this cd that I only recently started using that had these chapter quizzes and movies on it which were also really cool. When you clicked on an answer for the quizzes it made this really satisfying clicking sound. I don't even know how to describe this properly, but I actually took all the quizzes in order to hear it. Yeah, I'm kind of nerdy, but I really liked that sound. I watched all the movies too... Haha. But the class was also really cool. I realy liked my teacher and I learned a lot of things about cells. I'm probably never going to use any of the information that I learned in my actual real job that I'll get one day, but I guess it's cool to know stuff like this. I can pull cell communication pathways and cancer mechanisms out at cocktail parties and stuff.

Lastly, my evolution of people, technology and society class... I took a class from this same professor last term as well and knew coming into this class that he was prone to telling personal stories and going off on tangents, but still, I learned a lot from this class. I might even want to go into some kind of evolutionary human paleontology one day or something. And yeah, I thought this class was that cool. We learned about all our human ancestors and went into human evolution and some of its causes and stuff like that. We didn't really get into the evolution of technology and society, but that's okay. I don't think that stuff is that importat anyways... Bones are way cooler. Not going to lie. I think it would be really fun to go out in the desert or somewhere in Siberia and go looking for fossils every day. One of the coolest things I learned in this class is that I could go out into nature and kill a deer or something without any weapon whatsoever. All you have to do is keep running after one animal and it will eventually get so tired that it will stop and you can bash it in the head with a rock and kill it. That's one of thee earliest ways our ancestors hunted. I thought this was super cool. And my techer said that he actually tried it one day with a friend with a deer in some national park in Washington. He did it and it actually worked, but he got a ticket from a game warden for harrassing the wildlife. Haha, I thought that was pretty funny.

So those were my classes this term. All in all they were pretty much amazing.

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