Dispatches from Collegeland, 2014-2016
Back to school, which for ever more of you now means higher education. How goes it?
Date: August 26, 2014
Categories: Life
Tuesday, 23 April 2024
Life, the universe, pies, hot-pink bunnies, world domination, and everything
Back to school, which for ever more of you now means higher education. How goes it?
Date: August 26, 2014
Categories: Life
*waves arms weakly in an attempt to revive the thread*
[No need to revive the 2013 thread. We’ve moved you to the new one. –Admin.]
So this is my attempt at an Official College Post, such as it is. I started classes yesterday and it’s been actually pretty rad so far? I’m writing this from a table outside the theater because I am predictable and it’s a nice place to sit.
I have three three-hour studio classes and none of them is at a convenient time. One starts at 8 AM, one at 8:30, and one at 4:30 PM. Ugh. But my professors are awesome and it’s been pretty chill because classes can’t properly start until everyone has committed to their schedule.
The actual proper activities/clubs fair is on Friday, but I’ve been roped into a writing/slam poetry club and I can’t say I’m complaining. Also I wanna fence because I miss having a sword, and I’m going to try to get involved in theater, either as an actor or as a technical person (preferably costuming).
Independence is weird. But also really nice. I think I’m gonna like it here.
What classes are you taking?
My studio classes are 3D design and drawing (both required) and illustration. I’m also taking an art history class and something I haven’t had yet called “Practices in Art, Architecture, and Design” and from what I’ve seen of the syllabus it may be really boring. Sigh. But I’m also taking an intro to women’s studies class and it’s really rad.
Upside of having a really boring lecture class full of art students? Everyone’s preferred diversion is drawing the backs of people’s heads.
“That romantic music, like that of Empfindsamkeit and the Sturm und Drang, presupposes a mode of perception once described by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder as “utter submersion of the spirit in the surging torrent of feelings” is a fundamental fact for the reception history of the era, one which an aesthetic rationale based on the logic of musical forms is almost powerless to oppose.”
“If, then, the separation between a sublime and a demotic concept of romanticism was part of the aesthetic program of romanticism itself, our understanding has nevertheless been clouded by countless terminological confusions arising from the contorted relation in literary history between French and German romanticism, a relation which was in turn mirrored in music history.”
gevalt
I arrived back at school on the 17th for sponsor training. At my school, every freshman hall of 12-20 people has 2-3 sophomore sponsors who live in their hall the entire year. We get to be mentors, friends, supporters, creators of community, and so on for the first-year class. Sometimes I describe it like the social side of an RA (we have traditional RAs as well).
We had/are having more than a week of training on all kinds of topics:
-diversity (broadly defined)
-communication and conflict styles
-alcohol and other drugs
-the college’s sexual misconduct/assault policies
-how to be an ally to the LGBTQ community
-supporting survivors of sexual assault
-time management for first-years
-eating disorders and positive body image
-programs at the campus center
-CPR/First-Aid training
-mental health first aid
I list all of these off because I feel fortunate to get such a rich and thorough training in a lot of areas that really matter to me. I feel well-prepared for handling a lot of things that could come up over the course of the year.
The first-years moved in on Sunday, which is extremely exciting! So far, my group is absolutely wonderful. They have been very mature and respectful during the orientation discussions about diversity and sexual assault. There is also one guy in my group who is passionate about ultimate frisbee and really good at teaching it, and he has been leading groups in pick-up games at every spare moment. Last night, they played ultimate frisbee (encouraging anybody from other dorms who walked by to join), then sat down in a circle on the grass talking about light and deep topics, then moved into a dorm lounge to continue talking. It was such an iconic “college moment”, and I think their bright-eyed dreaminess about living the college life like they’d imagined is precious.
Several have expressed to me how safe and belonging they already feel in our sponsor group, and that is such an incredible thing to hear on Day 2. I feel very blessed to get to work with the first-year class and know that I am already making a difference in their transition to college/lives!
Oh wow I can actually post on this thread now!! Community college is cool and I am making friends which is nice. I’m taking Psychology 101, Introduction to Literature, Music Appreciation, and Public Speaking here and then Music History, Music Theory, Chamber Ensemble, private lessons, and Orchestra at music school. And I work on the weekends. So life is interesting and chaotic.
Hi folks.
Things here in Collegeland are not going especially well for me. I got a cold upon moving in, and right after getting over the cold I came down with gastroenteritis, which means that instead of all the exciting experiments in cooking I was planning, I’ve basically been living on bananas and boiled rice.
Some of you may remember my existential panic around registration time — well, that resolved, but only temporarily. I registered for a geology course on a whim and then dropped it, for a number of reasons (it can’t possibly contribute to my GEs or prerequisites unless I switch to a major which, on more careful examination, does not interest me). This brought me down to almost the minimum units required to be a full-time student. Last time I had a courseload this light was freshman year. Additionally, it’s all English and History courses — solidly in my comfort zone, really. Still, half of me feels guilty for taking so few courses and the other half is consumed with anxiety over Useless Humanities Degrees.
Some of you probably also remember the Housing Problems, still earlier. I have a room now. The neighborhood is nice, it’s close to campus, my roommate is quiet and unobtrusive — there are upsides. The largest downside is that this house seems so poorly maintained. At least one refrigerator leaks. Doors and windows don’t shut properly. Burners don’t light. Things are getting fixed, but slowly. While my housemates are mostly friendly and interesting people, they’ve all got the sort of knife-edge humor that comes with living in an academic pressure-cooker like UC Berkeley. Everyone’s halfway on the defensive all the time. It’s not a great environment to decompress.
It’s terribly frustrating to be sick right now, because I’d decided to take advantage of the reduced courseload to get involved in campus organizations, look for internships, and basically Have the College Experience that I’ve avoided by hiding in a dorm room for the past year and a half. But it looks like I’ll have to wait a week or two to get that started, at least the portions of it that involve getting out of bed.
With luck, I’ll be back here with more interesting details soon, as opposed to generalized complaining.
Hello everyone, as you may or may not know, Stanford is on the quarter system, meaning that classes only begin on the 22nd. I am actually still in the Bay Area doing lab work, and I fly out Friday midnight on the red-eye — so this is my second-to-last day of summer work at this lab. After this I go home and (I guess) do nothing for two weeks. Very different from the Ghana trip I expected at the beginning of summer, but I suppose better than the possibility of Ebola.
Regardless, after I fly out I will likely stop coming here for a while in order to spend time with family and friends, neither of whom I’ve seen in a while, and to run errands and such — so this will be my first Dispatch from Collegeland and last for the foreseeable future. My classes have somewhat changed; I am taking C programming, databases, and immunology as I mentioned in the Higher Education thread, but I have swapped out my science writing class (offered all three quarters) to a psych class about perception (only offered fall quarter). I have been meaning to take more psych classes — in fact, I was (and continue to be) considering a minor in psych. I was considering double-majoring, but with the notation in science communication I’m doing (effectively a minor) it seemed like too much. Somehow, though, despite my 19 units I have no class after 11 AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays…
About my residence, without giving too much away, I am living on the Row (where almost all the Greek houses are) but in a house called a self-op, wherein students hire a chef (so no dining halls) and Stanford staff come in to clean. There are about 60 people living in the house and I’m rooming with one of my best friends, so I’m extremely excited.
There is currently Intense Drama going on in my friend group (the concept of which confuses and infuriates me!*), but I’d rather not get into the details (nor am I really involved, just friends with all parties involved) so I’ll just say that it’s been a little tough as Friend A has cut out Friends B and C completely, and now whenever Friends B and C are mentioned she gets extremely angry and starts swearing. Which is a little awkward, considering Friend C is one of my best friends and I am better friends with B than A.
* — Points if you get the reference. I am not actually infuriated; an accurate phrase would be that I am currently being extremely careful about what I say to whom.
*wonders whether the Stanford houses he remembers are still in business*
Probably! I just looked it up, and the years non-theme houses were built were 1963, 1915, 1976, 1911, 1907, 1965, 1896 (wow, Mars is old), 1963, 1896, 1909, 1976, and 1967. I’ll be living in one of the newest ones.
Literally everyone on my floor (and by extension most of the freshman class) has managed to get sick this week. I may or may not have escaped that fate, although I’ve gotten some nasty allergies as payback I suppose :P.
Turns out evening studios are way worse than early morning studios. I’ve lost most of my energy by then, have to eat dinner late, and miss a lot of extracurricular activities. Sigh. But I can register myself for classes next semester and there will be no evening classes for me, hopefully!
Meanwhile my art history professor is amazing and funny and plays themed music before class (Take Me To Church before a lecture on Gothic cathedrals, haha) and apart from the evening drawing class I love all my other classes/professors too.
Take Me To Church, as in the song by Hozier? ive listened to that song about 10 times this week. It’s so haunting.
Yeah, that one. It’s a beautiful song.
At Stanford now! Partially moved in; will finish later today (my stuff is scattered throughout the Bay Area and campus at people’s houses and rooms and such). I’ve been awake for 13 hours now and got 4 hours of sleep the night before, with some fitful napping on the plane. I also haven’t really eaten in 12 hours… wheeeeeeee
Small update to this: I woke up 5:30 AM CDT (3:30 AM PDT) after about four hours of sleep, had a meal at 6 AM CDT (4 AM PDT), napped on the plane, and ate at about 10 PM CDT (8 PM PDT). (That’s a 16-hour gap with only water and a packet of crisps tiding me over.) I am going to bed very very soon. I have been awake for about 17.5 hours but that is okay because now almost all of my possessions are in my (really nice) room and soon… soon… sleep.
All right, I have to tell you folks about this.
Here in my new communal residence at UC Berkeley, I’ve made a few good friends. There’s the misanthropic Mechanical Engineering major with a talent for improv (let’s call him R), the Computer Science major who’s a great vegetarian cook (A), and the Genetics and Plant Biology major who plays guitar (L). L and I get on well. Recently, we ate a home-cooked meal on the roof of a housing co-op and talked about life, the universe, and everything.
This is for context. The story begins tonight, when I cooked tacos at 10 PM, because I’m an adult and “dinner” can be whenever I want. I took a picture of the tacos, because I have started making a habit of taunting Jadestone with my passable cooking skills and access to edible food (HI JADE) and I wanted to send them to her as a counter-move to her recent Cake Maneuver.* L was also at the table, though she was not eating.
I have talked about this situation with her, so L was familiar with my “friend in England” when I explained what I was doing. Tonight, she asked how I got to know her (Jade). I mentioned that she was not always in England, but that we actually met on the Internet. L pressed for more details about the circumstances.
I demurred, knowing that opinions differ, but MB has always followed a principle of discretion. We were only even visible to Google briefly. So I said it was a “fan page for a children’s science magazine,” which was not a lie.
L said — casually, but with a strange tone of voice that I now realized was masked intensity — “what children’s science magazine???”
It turns out that L has an enormous Muse collection acquired from ages 8-13, plus numerous back issues she ordered specially. She even lurked on MuseBlog for quite a while, though she never really posted. She remembered Red-tailed Hawk and the GAPAs, and apparently POSOC was a familiar title to her, too! She balked a little at the suggestion that it was never too late to join (perhaps thinking she missed out on the days the community was built, which I can understand), but we still had a delightful nostalgia-laden conversation until I had to go clean up the detritus from taco-cooking.
I told her, accurately, that she had made my entire week.
(*Not a euphemism. She posted half an entire cake. I am still reeling.)
Ah, the circle closes.
That reminds me of an ancient Stupid Senseless Smiley Story about a close encounter between shy Musers. Fortunately, your experience had a happier ending.
Update: I accidentally a date
This made my week better.
It was pretty fantastic.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuggh
right at the time of the semester when everything is happening:
(first phase of registration for courses is in less than two weeks and I don’t know what career I’m aiming for and so can’t decide what I’d want to pick up as a second major if anything, this was supposed to be the semester I figured that out but I’m still painfully indecisive and running out of time, whatever I commit to next semester I’ll basically have to either do that or fall back on English)
(I am trying to figure out housing for next semester because where I’m currently living is OK but too expensive for what it is)
(I remain not gainfully employed and the unpaid internship I’m working at is turning out to be less interesting/useful and more work than I expected, at least so far)
(mental health is deteriorating because I’ve basically used academic work to give meaning to my life and now that that is seeming less and less meaningful, where does that leave me?)
…my laptop is broken.
(but there are plans for a second date. not everything is bad.)
Re second majors: Pick whatever field is fun. There are ways to turn everything into a career and sometimes what you do in college leads to career-skills, sometimes you get them other ways. Which classes did you enjoy this past semester? Which classes are you excited about? Use those questions to pick a second major.
Trying. In a way, that’s part of the problem. So many things are interesting!
At this point, leaning most toward History. Though the classes in Integrative Biology and the various Environmental Science options also look really neat (I’ve taken a couple courses in life sciences before, here — unfortunately not key prerequisites), those majors would require summer courses and at least an extra semester to finish out the requirements at this point. I’m still considering taking a couple of lower-division science courses next semester to explore the possibility — if my inclination does not bear fruit I don’t have to pursue it. With the remaining semesters I could easily do a History minor, with more difficulty but still possibly a History major.
On the other hand, if I aim for History from the outset, I’ll have more room for other interesting classes that don’t contribute to any particular major — brushing up on my Spanish, for instance, which is extremely useful in many different places and life paths. History involves more of the skills I’m already good at (writing and analyzing text). And I’ll almost definitely graduate on time, which will save my (and my parents’) money.
I have done a decent job of narrowing the field, I think, over the last semester. It’s just that so many things are happening at once, and the laptop death was the proverbial last straw. (The poor thing has served me well.)
The world needs more people with a sense of history.
That’s very true. If there is one thing that I’ve learned in the history courses I’ve taken so far, it is that many things I once assumed to be inherent parts of the human condition were very different once, and often emerged from unexpected causes.
History is /fascinating/. Though honestly a lot of the history I know I learned from Muse.
POSOC, just in case you’re still worrying that an English/History combination will wreck your future — it won’t. Being able to think and write clearly are important skills, and once you’re out in what undergrads used to (and probably still) call the Real World, you’ll find out how rare they are. Those abilities will stand you in good stead. I can’t tell you how many jobs boil down to thinking and writing for people who can’t think and write for themselves.
I don’t always hold with “following your bliss” (or with any other simple one-size-fits-all rule for deciding what to do). In this case, though, I’d say you have a clear bent and ought to follow it unreservedly and with gusto.
(“MuseBlog: Occasionally Emerging from Utter Inscrutability to Lay It on the Line Since 2005.”)
Tangentially related: I am trying to break the habit of calling non-internet interactions “real life,” since if I’m spending (to be brutally honest) 12+ hours a day on the computer, it’s not really true that my real life is the one lived away from the screen. I suppose a similar rule applies to college life vs. adult life, but I doubt I’ll stop calling it “the real world” before I graduate. (two months!!! assuming my profs ever get their paperwork in)
I appreciate this a lot, Robert. Most of my insecurity comes out of the recent realization that it’s now much harder to make money writing what I want for a living (and it was no picnic even before I was born, of course). So I’ve revised my dream job from “writing what I want” to “something that will allow me enough leisure time to write and is also intellectually stimulating and makes me feel like I’m contributing something to the world.” Which is extremely broad or extremely narrow, depending on how you look at it, and has caused me to re-evaluate a whole lot of neglected secondary interests all at once.
Does your school have job fairs? I’ve found that real world jobs have more variety than what I was expecting. It can be sort of hard to find the niches where you’re happy (as they might not be niches you’d heard of/thought of before) but maybe talking to people from various companies would give you some idea of what is out there.
Yes, it does. Though I haven’t really taken advantage of those yet. Generally they just seem like a smorgasbord of things I’m not qualified for, but that’s mostly my anxiety talking.
Most job requirements don’t actually need you to 100% match up to what they’re looking for. Often it is a “in an ideal world we’d like an applicant who can do this and that and this too!” but they don’t necessarily expect all those skills in one person. If you can swing it, I’d try to go to one. Remember, they’re not the be-all-end-all of your job search. They aren’t the only thing that is out there, but they can give you ideas.
I don’t feel I have as clear a bent as you think, essentially. But I’m always going to find a lot of different things interesting — perhaps I shouldn’t let that get in my way.
I didn’t mean a vocation, just enough of an inclination to see you through the rest of college. Anyway, for whatever it’s worth, your reasoning about your options seems sound to me.
That’s a good point. It feels like I’m deciding what I want to do with the rest of my life, I suppose, even though people tell me it isn’t.
Even when you’ve got a degree and are out in non-Collegeland, you do so many things! Since graduating, I’ve worked for a bakery as a retail worker (not what I want to do for the rest of my life, heh), a design company (not what I expected but really fun) and now a software company! So many different jobs, so much variety and I’m only getting started. I empathize, though. I’m about to start the next stage of my life and I waver occasionally on whether a museum studies Master’s is worth it. But I haven’t heard of as much burn out in those programs and you really do need a master’s to get the sort of jobs I want. I want to design programs for museums to show them that math is cool! I may go on and take some extra math courses too (I was an anthro major with a museum studies minor). But anyway, the point is that I’ve varied a lot already and I will continue to change things up for a while yet.
oh my god if my laptop were broken I would probably fail all of my classes in the amount of time it took to replace my laptop. Godspeed!
Your second-last parentheses. With a STEM degree it’ll be easier to swap the treadmill of grades for the treadmill of money and status symbols, but THIS.
Yup. We spend all our effort on getting into the mythical Good College for 7+ years, then when we get there we have to start planning our actual lives and stop relying on grades to tell us we’re doing fine. Some of us don’t adjust well.
Remind to self: Never, ever, ever again, if it can be at all avoided, leave a paper for your hardest class until the last minute. I had a paper due yesterday for my Victorian Lit class on Great Expectations. I the majority of the paper on Sunday. Finished the paper at 11, got comments from my friend at 1 am, stayed up until 3 revising, didn’t fall asleep until 4. Was totally shot on Monday, plus the paper was really not my best work (I was having problems with the thesis disintegrating toward the end of the paper. NOT GOOD). Procrastination: Really Really not worth it.
On the plus side: Book of Esther class cancelled tomorrow! *Squee* And work today was awesome (I intern for a non-profit in the children’s publishing industry). So many new, shiny picture books and a few very intriguing YA books. I really need to raid the take shelf again.
Hey. For all of you in collegeland, for all of you post collegeland, for all of you precollegeland, I recommend the MIT admission blogs. They’re true and honest. They put the stress in there, they put the joys in there. People are real and raw and true and it shows you what college is like (and what MIT is like). There are posts about overwhelming stress and posts about people who juggle at 3 AM and posts about everything imaginable. I think there is a lot of worthwhile stuff there, and I recommend them highly.
Noted!
Newest Dispatch:
– I dropped my C programming class — too late though, unfortunately, so now it’ll show up on my transcript as a W (withdraw). It was just too stressful on top of the capstone biocomputation class, and my friends and family were noticing that I was not myself. I put my mental health above my pride, and I’m so glad for it. My life has gotten significantly better. (Now, I’ll have to take it later, but I’m planning to take it in a much easier quarter.)
– I got a job filming classes! It’s cool to watch lectures I wouldn’t have otherwise. Also, it lets me channel my inner perfectionist toward selecting camera angles, focusing, and managing the audio, while letting me take a nice mental break from work.
– Sending resumes to tons of companies, asking them if a) they have summer internships (if it’s not indicated on the website), and b) may I please join it. (No responses yet. Giving it time. It’s a little early.)
I’m in such a good mood right now, and in general. Dropping the class lifted a weight from my shoulders. I can get more sleep now, go to social gatherings, hang out with my friends.
Also, I discovered that Lorde had an album before Pure Heroine, and now I’m thoroughly enjoying The Love Club.
Congratulations. Like you, I have trouble putting my mental health above my pride, and it is an achievement when you can do it. Enjoy sleep and friends!
Ugh.
So it turns out the last counselor I talked to gave me incorrect information (about community college courses not counting toward the unit ceiling — they do, up to a point) which means I basically have to commit to a second major next semester — if I do a second major. No real room for exploration, unless I just minor in History.
And I got a job offer from an application I thought was long buried, but I got an internship in the meantime, and if I take this job I’ll get money but I’ll also get more hours of work and I’m not sure I can afford that right now?? I don’t want to drop the internship because it’s starting to get more interesting, but… it’s unpaid. And it’s already a lot of hours. And my mental health right now is not that stable. 18 hours a week is a lot when you’re a full time student (job would be 8 hours minimum, internship is 10). On the upside, the job is the one everyone says everyone does their homework during (basically sitting behind a desk at night making sure nobody gets into the residence halls).
Why must everything happen at once. [ADDITIONAL WHINING CUT, MOVED TO RANTS & PLAINTS]
Remember that essay I posted about, that I was up until 3 am finishing and I felt it really wasn’t my best work?
I got it back on Monday and I got a 94.
I’m not sure how. I mean, it wasn’t a terrible essay, but I felt the topic could have been narrowed more. I guess the professor liked it. More evidence (if I needed more) that you can get A’s in English classes as long as you are not in English Comp.
Now I need to figure out a topic for my next essay which is due in a week and a half. It’s going to be an argumentative analysis essay on Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir “The Woman Warrior”, but I need to decide what to analyze.
In other news, I finished off a big project that I’ve been working on for two months at my internship. I am so glad to be done with the giant spreadsheet, but I am eager to see what new assignment I will get next (aside from regular library tasks).
I just registered for my last semester of college classes.
Wow.
Well. It’s winter vacation. I suppose I owe you all an update on POSOC’s Existential Crisis, part 4 of an ongoing series:
I think I’ve managed to stop kicking myself for not reaching this point of uncertainty until now. Without the experiences of the last two years, I wouldn’t be here. It’s frustrating but it’s not the result of me being Stupid and Bad.
That’s kind of liberating. I’ve spent the last six months in such a horrible spiral of regret, and it’s… not gone, it comes back occasionally, but I can get rid of it if I need to.
This still leaves me with the problem of how best to proceed, of course. I think — if I’m brutally honest with myself — the fact that I’ve been bouncing between all these different options (history! environmental science! psychology!) demonstrates that I have little idea what I even want to pursue, except for the knowledge that literature is no longer sufficient for me (if it ever was).
So these are the two plans:
A) remain in school, wrap up the English degree, maybe pick up History minor on the way, use the ample time/space that this plan opens up to take electives in other things that interest me. Go teach abroad for a year or two after graduating to re-assess my options.
B) Take a semester to a year off. Live at home. Take up part-time tutoring to earn some extra cash. Do some serious research into what would suit me best. Take prerequisite courses at local community college. Go back and finish the degree (either a different major or a double major — at this point, due to some technicalities about unit ceilings, a double major would probably be more efficient).
When I lay out the options, and I think about what other people who have been through this have told me, it seems like Plan B isn’t going to get me any significant improvement in outcome over Plan A. It’ll just be hassle and isolation and maybe a different bachelor’s degree a year later (which in the long run doesn’t matter too much).
I just hate not having a plan. I always had a Plan — it may have been vague and unrealistic in some parts (Get an English degree, Get a Job, ???, Become Famous Writer, Profit!) but it was there. Now it’s gone.
At this point, one of the major factors in favor of Plan B is how horrible university has been for my mental health — I pretty much sleepwalked through the last month in a depressive haze. Still not sure how to fix that, though I think I have a decent therapist now.
Taking time off from school is not terrible at all. I’ve seen plenty of friends do it and sometimes it is the best choice and helps them quite a bit. I don’t know if option A or option B is better for you. I’m really glad you’ve realized that you’ve not been stupid or bad at all. You haven’t been! Sometimes things are confusing but not knowing what you want happens sometimes and it can be hard.
Thanks, Oxlin. I get the impression that a lot of people go through similar things and just rarely talk about it, which makes everyone feel alone.
What exactly is the problem, POSOC? Is it that you’re not enjoying your studies, that you don’t think you are learning useful skills, that you don’t think you’re acquiring useful credentials, or something else?
It’s a mixture of the three, I think. (Very astute distinction you make, there, between “skills” and “credentials” — I think the gap between them is part of the problem with our attitude to education…) It’s damnably hard to articulate, but let me give it a shot.
The way we do literary criticism bothers me. To me, the focus on the text to the exclusion of author and audience removes everything that is important about literature! If you haven’t got a human creating it and humans reacting to it, then I can’t fathom its significance. Analysis seems to take place in a weird chilly otherworld where you describe how the text acts upon itself — as if texts can possibly act! Without the human eye they stop even being words, they’re just marks on a page. And you’re supposed to pose as an objective observer when you’re going to find meaning in the text based on purely subjective things about how you read it. I — can’t tell if my problem is that it’s too empirical or it’s not empirical enough. And the fact that other people seem to grasp these things intuitively and I can’t articulate my problems makes me think they’re not wrong, I’m just ignorant. An entire department at one of the best schools in the country can’t be wrong, can it? (Meanwhile, in my head, the fact that I’m doing reasonably well academically despite my ignorance is not evidence that I am not actually stupid, but evidence that the entire discipline is stupid. Impostor syndrome gets you coming and going…) It’s not so much that I don’t enjoy my studies as that I can’t justify them to myself. Which sucks the enjoyment out of it pretty quickly.
And that feeds into the second and third problems — if I was getting a degree in something more practical, I feel like I could just push through my classes and find meaning in volunteer work, extracurriculars, and the like. But if you’re doing an arts degree it ought to be something you’re passionate about. And if I’m not…
(I recognize that the skills taught in the humanities are often important and undervalued. I guess this is more of a “credentials” problem. However, I often feel I’m only improving my skill in writing in a very specialized field without applications outside academia.)
So all of the above feeds into the depression, which in turn makes it more difficult to assess my emotional responses accurately.
I think it is possible that an entire department can be “wrong” in some sense – as I’m sure you’re aware, there’s different schools of literary criticism (like there are of philosophy or musicology or any other of the humanities, it seems like), they take contextual evidence into account at varying levels (which is also largely dictated by the fashion of the moment), and generally departments tend to organize themselves within one or another school of thought. It’s possible you ended up in one that clashes with your own academic beliefs and you’d be happier somewhere else. Not sure how this relates to your overall problem, but it does seem possible to me that it’s not you, it’s them.
You know what’s best for you.
In my current state, I would warn against taking time off – when I did so, my parents were not happy about it and insisted I apply to service jobs at minimum wage (despite my repeated statements that my mental health was suffering and I was taking the time off to recuperate, also despite the fact that I was applying to colleges for readmission in less than a semester)
HOWEVER: Right now, I’m in a good place. When I took time off I was absolutely certain that I could not stay any longer. It was the right choice for me. It might be the right choice for you, but I can’t judge that from outside your head.
I should also note that when I took mental health leave from U of R, their official procedure for readmission was as follows:
-Not allowed to be readmitted until at least six months to a year have passed
-A psychiatrist from their department (i.e. not the one you’ve been working with for the last six months, someone who does NOT know you well) would make the call on whether you were allowed back
(That was especially a problem for me, since I had a history of the psychiatrists employed by the school misjudging my mental state, with disastrous results)
Before you go on leave, make sure that your college doesn’t have restrictive policies like mine did. (I’d go as far as to say that the policies are to cover the college in case something happens to you, and not to ensure your health – perhaps I am just being bitter, though)
These are important things to consider. UC Berkeley sounds like it’s a LOT more lenient than U of R. I’ve spoken to officials about their time off/readmission policies and if you leave in good academic standing, you’re all but guaranteed to be let back in if you apply in time for a given semester.
There are other obstacles. My parents sound more supportive than yours, so far, but they occasionally been vocally supportive and then abruptly changed their minds. I can see my mother pushing me to get a job — she’s done that in the past over summer break, even.
Also, there’s health insurance to consider. I won’t be able to remain covered by my parents’ policy if I am no longer a full time student. Not sure what to do about that.
(I don’t think you’re being bitter. I don’t know from personal experience, but from things that people close to me have gone through, I know that universities can be extremely callous toward students who don’t “measure up.”)
Are you sure about health insurance? I thought the Affordable Care Act enabled you to stay covered until age 26, regardless of student status.
Confirmed — health insurance won’t be a problem.
As far as taking time off is concerned, it helps to be honest with yourself. Some people can take time off successfully, some can’t. My parents were wiser than I was in that regard — if I had taken a break, I might never have returned. At the very least it would have taken me years. By the time I was ready to return to school, I was able to go for my MFA instead of finishing my bachelor’s. (To this day I still have dreams that I never finished my undergrad degree and find myself back at school.)
Grad school turned out to be a much better fit for me than undergrad overall. Unexpectedly however, my senior year of college turned out to be wonderful, better by far than the first three years combined. That made me very grateful I stuck it out.
I’m concerned about that prospect. I think I’d go back out of sheer stubborn pride if nothing else — but I’ve learned this semester that stubborn pride does not sustain me like it used to.
Part of the thing that makes this decision so difficult is that last semester was measurably better in terms of having friends and doing interesting things on campus — but my belief in my work was entering the final stages of collapse. I could take time off wholeheartedly if EVERYTHING was miserable.
On the other hand, the fact that I’m so torn up about this seems like evidence that I’d return to school as soon as I could.
if it’s any help, I’ve pretty much gone though life without a plan, and it’s turned out pretty well. It sounds to me as if your’e going through two processes. The first is dealing with depression, which is horrid, but it sounds as if you’ve got it to a manageable point. The second is that your’e experimenting with options, which isn’t a bad thing. Until you’ve delved into something in detail, you don’t really know if it fires up your passions. There’s room in a lifetime for plenty of changes of direction, whether planned, random or enforced.
Two processes, yes, with the caveat that they’re so intimately linked that it’s hard to tell them apart sometimes. (The problem with pinning your self-worth to Being Smart for most of your life is that it’s very difficult to unlearn, as I told Robert on the Warm Fuzzies thread a while back…)
I am continually impressed by people for whom not having a plan works. I must admit that I can’t imagine how one becomes a specialist in Tudor-era instruments by accident. (Then again, the most lucrative and interesting jobs I’ve ever had are the ones I fell backwards into… I suppose I’m just disinclined to trust to luck.)
I played the recorder at school, like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, I didn’t give it up. Started meeting other recorder freaks. That was OK, but then I got in with a bad crowd who were into crumhorns. That’s how it starts.
But seriously, life decisions are rarely irrevocable. Some doors close, of course. If you’re thinking of taking up competitive gymnastics, it’s already too late. But most doors remain open. It’s just that people assume they’re closed.
(Take this with several grains of salt, as I have way less life experience than anyone else who’s commented; I just want you to be happy.)
I’m not suggesting you trust purely in luck, but I think that if you know that the university will readmit you, it makes sense to take time off. Especially if the alternative is finishing a degree that you know isn’t right for you. There might not be One True Degree that you ought to go for – I think your mind is far too wide-ranging and curious for that – but if you know that literature isn’t what you want to keep doing, it doesn’t seem worth it to keep being miserable in school and finish it. I also feel like switching majors now will be hard, but it sounds like you know how to do it; I imagine it’d be a lot harder once you’ve graduated college. I realize this is a weird thing to say, but you have a unique advantage right now, in that it seems like you basically have a place at UCB until you finish your degree; if college is supposed to be a time for exploration/discovery, maybe you should take advantage of that.
Whatever you end up doing, you’re a really strong person; I admire you for hanging on and I don’t think this will be the deciding factor in your life. Like Paul said, you’ve got a lot of time to experiment. In the meantime, I’m so glad you’re taking care of yourself.
(Incidentally, my mom did her PhD in English literature, and she hates literary criticism more than anyone I’ve ever met; it’s not just you.)
Lizzie — Yes, this is probably true given what I’ve heard from people in departments like History (and to some extent Comp Lit, though I know very little about them). Berkeley English is very postmodern-critical-theory right now, and it sometimes makes my head hurt.
CO — That’s my thinking in favor of Plan B, too. There are obstacles involved, of course, like the rising tuition over the next five years, and the health insurance problem I mentioned to Dodecahedron, but they’re not insurmountable. It’s just a frightening prospect to go “off the rails,” so to speak, even if the rails might be leading me the wrong way. (School is structure. Lack of structure is scary.)
Reference for those who have not been following this train since the beginning: Changing my major or picking up a second one without taking time off is still technically possible, but I’m not confident enough in what I want to do to pick one at this point — and I do not really have enough leeway to change twice.
It is possible I am overthinking this. It’s not like any undergrad field of study can crystallize new insights about the universe and the human condition every week. Every field involves a certain level of [BS]. I may have gone into university with unrealistic expectations.
Robert — I think that’s true. I just won’t be able to remain on my parents’ policy — I’ll have to sign up for separate coverage under the ACA. So it’s a matter of paperwork, not life and death.
Paul — Ye gods, crumhorn players? You never stood a chance. I’ve always thought the schools should have some kind of unit on the dangers of that sort of thing.
I’ve said this before but it bears repeating — thank you all for sharing your experiences and your support. When I feel like I’m trapped in a hamster wheel inside my own skull, what I most desperately need is perspective, and this community provides a wealth of that.
I keep meaning to throw words all over the place! I’ve finished my first semester, and it went really well. I’m at community college, which is gr9 because I don’t know quite what I want yet, and it’s cheaper and I can stay home while sorting things out and dealing with health stuff. Yay, community college! I’m aiming to do two years here, transfer, and get some sort of science degree–I’ve figured out this semester that I really really do want to get involved with something bio-connected, and that I’m better at it than I thought. High school, I knew I was good, but my no-nonsense professor assures me that I’m actually very good indeed–he asked me to think about science without knowing that I’d been wanting to. So I’m excited about that. He’s suggested that I not do just general biology, because he thinks my analytical tendencies would be better served in a specialization. I think that’d be more interesting, too. I’m thinking about genetics, because wow, and I feel like we’re looking at some genes from assumptions about bodies, and social constructs about bodies, and that’s actually pretty sketch. And I’m super interested in pharmacology, and toxicology, and the science of addiction. So we’ll see where I go.
Academically I’m happy. I enjoyed my classes in biology, sociology, and English–topics I like–and was satisfied with the applied calc class that I had to wrestle with (because of my unreliable retention of math concepts). I liked all four professors. Two of them I will have again in the spring.
Otherwise I’m not enjoying being where I am. I live in a very conservative area. I mean, I’m in the Bible Belt! It’s my only home, but that’s really bad for me, because it means I am hearing homophobic comments on a regular basis on campus (nobody knows I’m queer, but I’m hearing them). I knew before the semester started that, when I get the chance, I need to not live here. I’ll be happier and healthier. I haven’t made any friends, partly because I feel temporary, and I beyond that don’t trust people–I’ve heard too many of the things people I’m friendly with say to me in their heterobliviousness. A couple people who hadn’t said anything of the kind turned out to be awful on some other front. And the other people, I just haven’t gotten to chat with. Or I have, and we just didn’t click. There’s a really gorgeous probably queer student I’ve seen around who I so want to say hi to, but haven’t found the moment. As you might have gathered, I’m 99% sure we don’t have a LGBTQAI organization, which I think might help me. Heavy sigh. Anyway.
Some good, some bad. Nothing I can’t handle. Overall I’m optimistic, cause I’m doing what I need to do, want to do, and can do right now. And I’m having some fun along the way. So, thumbs up + smile. College!
I’m soexcited about my classes this semester. Ecology & Evolution, Genomics & Bioinformatics, Chinese, Medieval Mediterranean, and Spanglish in Context. I’ve had them once each so far, except for Chinese which I’ve had twice. All as cool as they sound.
I’m also the leader of my colleges’ Splash, which is an event where college students teach high school students short classes on basically anything they want. I resented my position a little last semester, but over winter break I became inspired to really work on my group leadership skills, so now I’m working a lot for Splash as we head into our last month before the event.
My friends are great, my sponsees are great, my classmates are great. I got to go to my school’s field station (we have a field station) for Ecology & Evolution lab today, and it was a beautiful day. Life is good. I’ve been bouncing off the walls a lot.
Oh man I’m envious of Spanglish in Context. Please tell me more about that!
Ooh, I’ve heard of Splash. It sounds awesome!
It’s very cool. We started out by talking about “Spanglish” – what it is, how different people define it, whether it’s real, and its intersections with race/ethnicity/class/immigration. We moved from there into bilingualism more broadly (though still focused on Spanish-English in the U.S., since it’s a Spanish class), such as different forms of bilingualism and social theories of bilingualism. The next parts of the class will be about the cognitive effects of bilingualism, then bilingual education. I like it a lot!
My dispatches from semi-collegeland: By the time that Spring term ends and I get my GED, I will have accumulated 33 college credits. I’ve been getting credit from the symphonic band for some time now, took WR 121 last Spring, Math 095 and music theory Fall term, currently taking Math 111 and WR 122, taking Math 112 and WR 220(!!!) next term.
As for how I got into WR 220 (Methods Of Tutoring!), I had the same professor for WR 121 as I do now in 122. He was impressed with how I did in WR 121 (I got a perfect grade on my final paper whaaattt) and after receiving my first progress report that I wrote for 122, told me that he would like to use it as an example for future classes and that I should enroll in 220 for spring term. And this is a professor who is known for being fairly difficult! I still don’t know how I did it.
Lucky me, I have to take the SAT the Saturday before finals. I am delighted. Then after that I need to get ready for the GED test (which I will do sometime this Spring). It’s kinda scary to think that I’ll be an Actual College Student this fall.
As for my major, I’m starting to lean towards the idea of a double major- Biology and English/writing/??? I’m still pretty uncertain.
SFTDP
Also I might take a beginning archery class???? When I was registering for my other classes it was full but now they’ve added another section!
SFTTP
Aaannnddd I might not be able to take WR 220. This is also my first time responding to a somewhat condescending e-mail from a professor. Yayyy. Hopefully it’ll get sorted out….
The last few things I said on this thread were mostly scared heartsick flailing, so I feel compelled to report on some of the good or at least not-bad things about the university experience, too.
One of those, often experienced while planning out course registration, is the bittersweet feeling of far too many fascinating things to learn. My creative writing class with a former poet laureate takes place during the same hour as the History seminar on “Science, Religion, and Magic in Early Modern Europe.” Had I but world enough and time…
Unfortunately, all the time turners in existence were destroyed in the Ministry of Magic (Department of Mysteries) in The Order Of The Phoenix…
And they wouldn’t grant one to a Muggle anyway. Is it a coincidence that this restriction prevents me from taking a course on magic?
For a Muggle, poetry may be the next best thing to magic.
Dispatch from precollegeland: I got my AP scores and I met my offer and I’m going to Cambridge!!!!! Sorry to those of you who have already heard me shouting this from every conceivable rooftop. I swear I will quit talking about it soon, but thank you to all of you for supporting me and believing in me when I didn’t ♥ .
(I am moving to England in two months, is this life even real, I am all happy and glowy inside)
Congratulations, CO! Be careful, though. They’ve got some strange pies over there. (By the way, I was one of the believers.)
CONGRATS, I KNEW YOU COULD DO IT, YOU ARE AMAZING ♥ ♥ ♥
Still upset we missed each other by like a WEEK when I was working in Cambridge though! And now that I am mostly west coast for now you’re heading away again. Nonsense.
CONGRATS!! I echo everyone else, I absolutely knew you could do it! Oh, you’re going to have such a fantastic time! (And now we’ll even be on the same continent again!)
Shout from all the rooftops you like, you deserve to celebrate after all your hard work !
congrats, that’s awesome!
ps does this mean you can no longer use Oxford commas?
♫ Who gives a [cake] about an Oxford commaaaaaaaa ♪
Congratulations!!
Which college, by the way?
Aaaaah, my darlings, thank you so much
Jade- GET OVER HERE STAT, I have two months in which to search for you in the desert.
Sel- We’re going to have to have Wild Escapades in Europe, I’m afraid. Unfortunate, but there you are.
Robert- (You are the original believer and I am so grateful.) Clare college! Apparently David Attenborough is an alumnus, so I’m hoping he’ll turn up to talk about the giant squids.
Week 8. I have made it this far. I can make it to winter break. I can do this. (the way I’ve been describing how the term has been going is by designating my fists “my mental health” and “my academic responsibilities” and making them beat each other up and it tends to get the point across pretty well)
It’s been a while!
Right now I’m taking a course in Dystopian Literature (with an extraordinary professor, I’m really enjoying it so far), another in the history of the Soviet Union, and an immersive Spanish course. Hoping to find a job in either one of the libraries or as a writing tutor, since I’m at almost the minimum course load for a full-time student again.
I’m going to add a History minor to my English degree and fill the rest of my senior year with courses in… other stuff. Hopefully a mixture of practical job skills and various things that interest me (I’m a hopeless dilettante, so I may as well embrace that). After that… who knows? I’m still scared that I’ve missed the boat on whatever I really “should” be doing, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that life is a lot more complicated and doesn’t end when you graduate from undergrad.
I am also on the hunt for housing for next year — the rent at my current place is going to rise, and I’ve kind of got my heart set on a single room. (I haven’t had very good luck with roommates. :/ The best I can say of any of them is that we didn’t talk much.)
Trying to improve my mental and physical health. Exercise, eating more, sleep, sunlight and fresh air, talking to people instead of hiding in my room, medication, and therapy. None of the above are magic bullets. Hopefully something sticks, though.
I want to try more extracurricular things and student groups because I want to meet more people. Unfortunately this is difficult because the Internet is a lot easier and more rewarding in the short term, and after a long day I have the willpower of a nematode. But I want to make some friends outside of the house I live in.
SO I need to do a course in pre-1800 brit lit for my major. I was wanting to do medieval lit, but they weren’t offering it in the fall so I registered for Restoration, EXCEPT. I just found out they’re offering medieval lit in spring 2017 (with a really good prof who’s retiring next year), so I can drop Restoration and take Anth 101 or something else gen-ed in its place, and then plan to fill the requirement in the spring.
Except. I was planning to do Literatures of the Digital Age in the spring, and that’s ALSO when I was hoping to do British Modernism with a prof I really love.
…so. How stupid is it to do three lit courses in the spring, provided I ALSO have a really gen-ed heavy fall? (Hoping for “not that stupid.”)
Depends. If those are the only courses you’re taking, you should be fine. You might have to budget your time more carefully if all your essays come due at the same time (which they have a nasty habit of doing at the least convenient possible moment, I’ve found )
That’s fair, but I’ve found that everything comes due at the same time whatever it is you’re taking, and I enjoy doing literary analysis more than I enjoy most things (incl. sleep, food, the acceptance of my peers).
Go for it, then!
Hullo, Museblog!
I’m here to make one of my irregular updating posts, but seeing as I’ll be walking for graduation tomorrow, I thought it only fitting to post for what will be my last opportunity on the college thread (at least, that is, until some hypothetical graduate school off in the murky future).
Aside from the aforementioned imminent degree, my important life developments include an acceptance into a summer music festival for which I am currently writing a piece – due in five days. I had actually completed completed my coursework a quarter ago, which has completely shifted my focus to this project for the past two months and strangely focused my workstress into its zenith right after those of all my peers. The program itself comes in July, and happens to be in Greece, so I’m also going to be taking advantage of an otherwise required plane ticket to extend my trip into a visit through Athens, Rome, Florence, and Venice!
Everything about the situation, honestly, has been a source of some anxiety. Somewhere along the way, my musical idols became those who write nonsensically difficult music (for reference, looking into the notational worlds of Evan Johnson, Joan Arnau Pamies, Aaron Cassidy or Brian Ferneyhough might give some insight). It’s generally music written in a way that forces a completely new form of dedicated rehearsal (and one that precludes any sight reading as we know it). Naturally, common complaints leveled at it are that it’s music meant to be seen on the page but not heard. While I think that’s actually obviously not true, it is fair to say that part of my appreciation for this and what I’m now doing is that composing in this “style” elevates a notated score to a level of importance much closer to the actual performance – in my view, a kind of window into the detail and process of a piece’s construction as well as a reference to outside sources, etc. Anyway, this all comes down to any performer (myself included, I’m sure) is going to prefer a score that’s written for practicality’s sake. With these sorts of methods of construction, that almost always means simplification in some way. After all, asking a performer to perform the legitimately impossible is never a comfortable thing. I already know that the person with whom I’ll be studying in Greece is strongly on the side of making the score as immediately readable as possible, so that any ideas of a composer are transmitted directly into sound (i.e., the conventional way of Brahms, Beethoven). Since I’m writing music that sort of intentionally introduces notation as an obstruction to that, I’m not really sure how my studies there will go. To what degree should I compromise something that’s really not a very popular choice to begin with? Is it reasonable to assume that my intentions and instincts are a better choice than the seasoned advice of the professor there? Furthermore, if I stubbornly hold on to this part of my piece, am I just making myself a difficult student who isn’t interested in learning from the coaching and experience? I think no matter what, I’ll be doing a little bit of head butting, just as there has been throughout my development in college (I think the advice of my professors has almost always been stellar on the topic). What’s scary is that it feels dreadfully close to some kind of superiority fantasy I’m developing in which I’m on the front of the avant-garde and my critics just ‘don’t get it yet’. All of that is just about as anxiety-inducing as the actual impending deadline.
As for life plans after all that hubbub, I don’t really have anything, making the future feel pretty bleak. Stasis is probably one of my older fears, even though it’s not really a legitimate one (we all do move through life at our own paces and with our own destinations). It still feels terrifying to think about living at home with no plans and no end date in mind (sure, there are a lot of things that could pull me in another direction, but my irrational brain is not wont to focus on those). Plus, as with any big move, it’s scary to lose the proximity I had to my few good friends in Davis. I seem to be the sort of person who needs good friends to be around always, so it’s just part of something I’m always dealing with. To sum, I think I’m supposed to be a lot more excited about the future and my trip than I am, but the stress just overshadows it all. If I weren’t so prone to mercurial emotions in the first place, I’d call it some variant of post facto depression.
So, that’s where I am: perched on the precipice of a life change at the end of college, and totally stressed out about it. (That may not seem that bright, but really, typing it out here is a big help for it.)
dude. No. If you want your pieces to be performed in a way that at all reflects what you have in mind, make them easy to read. They don’t have to be easy to play – although that helps – but the musicians need to be able to figure out quickly which parts are going to be problematic. A basic rule of life is that no one cares as much about your stuff as you do – the musicians don’t care about the detail or process of construction, the audience certainly doesn’t care. It’s not going to “[force] a completely new form of dedicated rehearsal” – it’s just going to force performances that don’t live up to the piece’s potential, because the musicians don’t want to spend 10x more effort on one piece than if it were written conventionally, especially in a summer festival setting where they have to put together and perform a lot of pieces in a short time. If your writing process is more important to you than the final product, and you really don’t care if the players get beyond just figuring out the basics of what they’re supposed to play when, then go ahead and write the way you want to write – but you might as well just play it on a digital synthesizer instead of getting live performers, because the live performance isn’t going to be anything beyond what a synth can do and the synthesizer isn’t going to go out for beers after and spend the night making fun of the piece. If you already have a career and a big name, people might be willing to put in some effort to get past a barrier to entry; when you’re a student, they won’t. Write the study score in elfin runes, for all I care – but don’t make the parts difficult to read for the sake of difficulty.
Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.
I probably didn’t express myself super clearly, though – I don’t think the construction is more important than the performance and I didn’t mean to imply that I’m making it difficult to read for difficulty’s sake (I’m constantly in a process of editing for clarity). It’s just a matter of what I can justify leaving in, I guess.
A lot of this comes back to the precedent that’s been set by other composers. It sometimes feels I’m missing something if the exceptions to the rule are walking around out there. At the beginning of those composers’ careers, somebody was willing to spend all that time on the music of an unknown. Probably in a lot of cases, that was the singular Irvine Arditti, and it would be silly to suggest that any of it could come to be without an equally dedicated performer (something that’s obviously nonsense to ask of a festival stranger). Whether all that history amounts to a bad example, I don’t know. Some would be quick to say it does.
It’s a difficult thing to accept that people probably won’t be interested in your work the way you’re interested in the works of others. That said, I’m sure I can’t care about their work as much as they do.
you hear about the exceptions to the rule that succeed. You don’t hear about the others who are now the music theory teachers of the world.
((First up, sorry for the delay – editing is probably one of the unwritten layers of hell))
Though the jab is understood, I kind of do want to quietly say a word of defense for theory teachers: Not only have plenty of accomplished and impactful composers also taught theory, I’ve had an enormous amount of respect for the music of my teachers, whether or not they’re well known. I don’t think musical success is always as clear cut as we’d like.
As for the music itself, I have a couple of things to say (and sorry if ever I came off as combative). First, I’m a performer as well as a composer and I do try to use my best instinct from that angle. It’s not like I’m slapping riddles on the page and handing them off – even complicated notation is arranged to try to create a smooth reading (relatively, anyway) of the material. Second, and this is where it gets messier, what I can say is that I know there’s a market for the music – in composing, performing, and listening. I end up sort of stuck in a position of either writing for the market I want to end up in, or writing for the situation I’m currently in. The choice probably seems obviously the latter, but I’m not always sure how else to appeal to people that could get me involved in the circles I’m interested in. It’s tough to paint a picture of yourself when you only have one opportunity every year or two to write a piece that will be seen.
At the moment, I’m not really sure how better to express myself. The performers might make fun of me, yes, but I’m at least confident in the precedents that I’ve seen, and I’m trusting my instincts for what’s reasonable (and I have compromised a lot of it). We’ll see where it goes.
I know nothing about this style of music so please don’t take any of this as criticism, I am genuinely curious: what is the musical purpose of using a notation that obstructs.. the music? Is this a conception radically different to the idea of the score serving only as visual aid for the production of a sound which an audience does not see, but hear? (An audience generally goes to a concert to listen, not to read.)
If notation becomes more important than the audible result, would it not make more sense to “perform” a work in such a style by displaying a visual copy of the score for people to look upon and/or analyse?
My opinion is that if the desired sound the composer has created in his mind during the compositional process is still paramount, then any difficulties in the score that prevent real musicians from interpreting it at least “correctly”, let alone well, will detract from what the composer has imagined.
Apologies for an overdue response! I’ve been so tied up in a deadline.
I would say it is something of a different approach in that the obstruction is actually a part of the music, score and all. This is also not to say that reading a score is above the actual music, just a little closer to it (think more George Crumb than Brian Cherney), and in fact, I don’t think this music ever could be separated from the performers. With this style, unlike what I’ll call most conventional music, the score is more than just a tool to give direct access to a sound conceived of by the composer. Instead, it’s a roadmap to a performance that necessarily involves choices on the part of the performer on how to render the music as ‘best’ as possible (seeing as a notationally perfect performance, in most cases of the style, is impossible). There are exceptions even within the style, and this is not all to suggest that what’s on the page isn’t there to get a sound (often one that would yield something quite different if simplified on the page). In my opinion, the best performances are the ones that bring to life as much of the notational world as possible in actual performance – there is a kind of way to show/make heard the struggle, choice, and virtuosity involved.
It’s controversial for good reason, though, and even with performers dedicated to it, it can feel a bit rude to write. I definitely still have mixed feelings about it; for the piece that I mentioned earlier, I’ve taken out almost everything that would even cause a second look on a run-through (at least, I think so).
Probably the best way to better understand it is to see and hear it – Ferneyhough may be the poster child, but he can really turn people off. I’d recommend Finnissy’s English Country Tunes for an example of a piece that could never be perfectly performed and Evan Johnson’s L’art de toucher le clavecin, 3 for a piece that gives an overload of performance instruction. Both are easily found with recording and score online.
Quick life update:
– I graduate college in 2 days (what)
– I will be starting full-time work in the Bay Area in August (what)
– Before then, I will be backpacking through Japan for three weeks (what)
– I am currently procrastinating packing up all of my possessions and am tempted to just get rid of everything (well, ok, what else is new)
Awesome, Kokonilly!
Just got back from orientation. I don’t really have a few words that can describe my experience comprehensively. The school I’ve chosen to go to isn’t as big as I’d imagined myself going to, which makes the whole thing a little underwhelming. I had very good reasons for choosing the school- the program I’ll be in is very excellent, I love the campus, and I’m in the honors college. I think I’ll have the opportunity to be happy there. I got my class schedule, too: lots of music classes, no 8ams, honors seminars. I hung out with some people, mainly people from my high school. There weren’t a lot of people from my high school there, but there were a few I was acquainted with, and it felt better than I expected to see some familiar faces. I got a lot of free stickers and stuff, and signed up for like 1038284820 club/organization emailing lists. Anyway I’m back now. I’m really excited to start college, but also very very nervous. I guess that’s normal.
Good luck at college! Clubs and organizations are a great way to make friends in other majors and just generally meet people who share your interests.
*looks from side to side*
Do they have a SEDS chapters?
Hey all! In a fit of being-awake, I’m making an incredibly infrequent check-in.
I just finished my freshman year of college! I think that I can say that, in some definitions, I attend the northernmost university in America – very much a change from Orange County! It’s a very nice campus and has a great teacher education program, which I’m hoping to eventually be accepted to after I finish my history degree. Fingers crossed in three or four years!
This year was… interesting. At once I gained a great deal of confidence, both in speaking and in my appearance – my relatives looked pleasantly surprised at how I chattered on at Christmas, and I’ve really grown more confident with being seen in public! I also took a mentoring class where I got to go to a local middle school twice a week and help out there, and three weeks ago I got to teach an activity about Greek mythology! It was super cool and the kids were so sweet; it really planted my feet in the teaching future.
But also this year was very difficult, in that I spent a great chunk of it depersonalizing/dissociating – I lost my grasp on my identity entirely. In October my executive dysfunction reared its head after a month of productivity and said to me, “Wait a minute – you don’t NEED to really do MUCH OF WHAT YOU’RE DOING.” And I went, “Hmm, lying in bed sure is low effort.” So a lot of my more voluntary activities like pep band and my lecture classes.
And it got worse winter quarter – I dropped out of basically all my classes by the third week, only going to mentoring – and as a result my grades tanked and I was put on academic probation. Also, I spent most of winter quarter in deep depression, beating myself up about why I couldn’t make any friends and why I was wasting money and etc etc, and in February I was very close to certain things.
Spring break, I cried a lot because my best friend/ex/the most significant emotional relationship I’ve ever had in my life seemed to be avoiding hanging out with me, and thus harshly accepted that we were inevitability drifting apart. Ah well. But I spent a lot of time with my other best friend (not an ex) of mine back home. We went to the LA natural history museum and hung out a lot, and she helped me realize that it’s okay to be who I am – antisocial, yeah, but still a good person who can make meaningful connections.
For spring quarter, I made sure to register for classes I would enjoy: Ancient Western Civ, Theatre 101, Intro to Linguistics, and mentoring again. And that really made a difference in getting back to productivity! I attended classes, I got nearly everything turned in, I even joined a D&D group, which has been so much fun and finally got me some friends!! I was looking in the wrong places, it seems.
Then, dead week I lost my hold on a lot of stuff and missed many deadlines, plunging me into absolute despair and terror. Luckily my Linguistics prof opened the final for me again, and after a week or two of contemplating the worst case scenario of being kicked out, it… seems to have turned out okay. I’m still on probation, but I’m still enrolled. My god.
I’m still on campus as I’m taking summer classes – Geology 101 and Anthropology 201! We’ll see how that turns out – hopefully well!
So yeah! That’s college. A very mixed bag, but hopefully with social relationships to hold me accountable I’ll do better. I’m still around, even after six years of chronic depression, and hopefully in four years I’ll look back and be pleased it all worked out. :~)
I’m glad you’re pushing through, Zinc! I’m really proud of you for every time you got out of bed to attend class and keep moving forward, that makes all the difference in the world. And yay for friends in unexpected places! That teaching mentoring class sounds really neat. My boyfriend wants to be a teacher, and I keep encouraging him to do something like that and see how he likes working in a classroom. Keep us posted on how the summer courses go!
My current plan for senior year is split almost evenly between the last courses in my major & minor, a handful of practical skills, and random electives in areas that interest me. I guess if I’m doomed to be a weird dilettante I can at least lean into it. (Also they’re offering that “Science, Religion, and Magic in Early Modern Europe” course again and I’m taking it this time.)
Finally having a single room is bliss, even if it’s farther from campus than anywhere I’ve lived before.
I just found out that a different professor will be teaching the advanced differential equations class after all. It does bug me, but I’m still going to give the class a shot.
The challenge for next semester is going to be whittling my course load down to something manageable without a time turner. I should aim for 30 credits. Twelve credits go to various “Intro to Computational Concepts in X” (X € {Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Biology}), so I have eighteen left to divvy up. I could easily cover them with Math credits alone (Advanced PDE, Applied Analysis, Game Theory, Applied PDE) but I want to take other subjects as well and I don’t own a time turner. Not to mention that I also might get the really cool job I’m interviewing for next Tue.
I’m also in an ideological sticky spot, as evidenced by the following (conflicting) book girl axioms:
:hearts; Take all the interesting classes
:hearts; Take all the interesting jobs that you really, really want (give you $$, build cv, etc)
:hearts; Finish your masters degree in two years (=^= minimum time)
:hearts; Get excellent grades
:hearts; Do an exchange semester/year in Paris
:hearts; Sleep Coffee A life?
Something will have to give. Right now, I’m thinking of booting “finishing degree on time”. If I take three years instead of two, I still won’t have to pay tuition and it takes the pressure off of other other escapades (Paris, classes, jobs) by giving me more time.
But I’ll have to do a bit of research to make sure I still get the right amount of credits towards my degree per semester, otherwise I lose my *government support money* and my health insurance. I’d have to get at least 16 and at most 20 credits attributed to my degree per semester, unless I can somehow retroactively invalidate some of them by changing my degree’s focus.
Besides, I’d feel like a terrible underachiever if I don’t finish on time. There’s this little, evil Slytherin voice that says “but you don’t know you’ll have a breakdown if you try to do everything at once”. I know that 24 isn’t *old* to finish a MSc, but what if I want to get a PhD? It’s only two years away from the age cutoff where most of my funding gets cut off too (subsidised subway tickets, parental health insurance, etc). And of course, if I did decide to get a PhD, I would be at university for more years anyway and the *time crunch* wouldn’t be an issue.
I don’t have to decide now- I can put it off until the end of my first semester, and if the shift-degree-focus trick works, then the closest deadline is the foreign exchange application submission (March 2017). But it can’t hurt to start the brainstorming, especially since the “take a third option” approach has worked for me in the past.
Hello from college! I am here, I placed out of a piano class, I’m taking 17 credit hours, I’m moved into the dorm, I put all my posters up, my arms hurt from carrying boxes, and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I’m here to stay. Dispatches to follow!
Wow, that sounds amazing! Can”t wait to hear more about it!
I’m so excited for you. Keep us posted!
College dispatch #2:
Classes are going pretty well. I have an online course in music tech and i have to do it on the lab computers as opposed to my own laptop, because I don’t have Finale. (Eventually the module’s going to let me switch over to only using Sibelius, but for now I have to actually go to the lab to get work done.) So that’s kind of annoying.
There are lots of concerts and events happening at the music school here (actually, it’s now called the college of visual and performing arts) so I’m anticipating being very busy going to everything.
The school just built a brand new gym so I’ve been working out pretty regularly, and hope to keep it up. They have a rock wall, free to use, and all the climbing routes have Pokemon-themed names.
I haven’t been too successful in the friends department yet- I’ve met and hung out with a fair amount of people, but no one really consistently- but I’m not too worried. Friendships take time and whatnot, and I’m sure I’ll make some good friends eventually. My roommate is from somewhere very close to the city, so lots of her friends came to this school. It’s not too pressing of a concern- I have my hands full with school- but when did you all meet your good friends in college? Was it in your first year?
I made friends fast freshman year mostly out of nerves and desperation—I stayed friends with all of those friends and close-ish with a couple, but by mid junior year and definitely by senior year I was pretty done with them as a group. We didn’t actually have that much in common except, at that point, common experience.
I joined the band freshman year and started getting closer with band folks sophomore spring. My junior year, I spent the majority of my time with those friends, and then a bunch of them graduated. My senior year, I got closer with the band people in my year and some underclassmen.
By the time I graduated, my best friends were a girl the year below me in the band that I didn’t become good friends with until the end of junior year and a girl in the band in my year that I was friends with from day 1, but got closer to every successive year of college. I spent a ton of time with the band, most of whom were underclassmen who hadn’t even been there my freshman year. The people I was closest to freshman year were still in my life, but in a much smaller way.
So in a nutshell—it evolved every year for me! I think not worrying about making good friends right away is a really solid approach. You have plenty of time and you’ll meet many, many more people and have many natural-feeling opportunities to get close to them.
I’m a sophomore, so my advice is probably not that useful, but I definitely made friends slowly to begin with and that definitely wasn’t/isn’t cause for alarm! Personally I met my best friend during orientation, because we lived near one another, but it took us a really long time after that for us to get close, and I think we only got as close as we are now because we had classes together and that not only made us see more of each other but also gave us natural excuses to hang out outside class. (I.e., let’s go to the library and work on that paper, let’s get lunch together after lecture—and then in the spring when our schedules changed our standing lunch date didn’t.) Most of the other people I hang out with I know from classes and especially from classes within my major.
Do any of you have experience with double majoring/having a dual degree? Because I just realised that I could credit a lot of my classes towards a Bachelor’s degree in Physics. And by a lot, I mean 91 out of the 180 required. Now I’m really starting to want this but I think it might be a terrible idea.
I know Jade did one in Biology & Geology, and ebeth in English & History, but I haven’t known anyone to do a master’s and a bachelor’s at the same time. (Maybe Robert? I confess I’ve lost track of how and when he acquired his various credentials, never mind how many there are.)
I was seriously considering doing a dual degree in Mathematics and Computer Science for a few months. Ultimately I realized that it wouldn’t open any doors for me in my chosen field that weren’t either already open, or doors I didn’t care about going into. But I also had a fairly negative college experience, on average, so the appeal of getting out early with only one degree was much higher than it might be for you. (Also, cost of extra semesters was more of a factor for me in America than I suspect it might be in literally-anywhere-else.)
(SFTDP) I would also advise that in the system where I went to school, having a bachelor’s in one field and a master’s in another related field (which was easier to get into and completed faster because of the related coursework already taken) seemed to be worth much more than two bachelor’s degrees. In my experience you typically don’t need an exactly matching degree to go into a field, just one that’s close enough and a little bit of proof you can do the work you’re signing up for.
What degree are you currently getting? If looks like you’d have half the physics classes to go how many classes is that?
Thanks for all your advice!
Dodecahedron: I thought that having a physics degree would help open doors, but I’m going to try and do more research to find out. A big motivator was/is the assumption that I would enjoy the degree: I can drop it at any time, but I wouldn’t get credit for all the classes I took. Thankfully, I get two “tolerance semesters” (no tuition), so finances aren’t a factor.
There’s no way I’m not doing the master’s degree- I’ve also heard that bachelor + master is worth more than two bachelors. I do know several people who did (or are doing) two bachelors degrees (usually Math and Physics) simultaneously in four or so years.
oxlin- I’m currently going for a Computational Science degree. I have a few Intro to Comp Sci classes, and after that I basically get to choose among certain courses that are about Computational Science in various disciplines (such as physics). So I would have physics classes, but on a much more superficial level. However, I can credit some of them both for a Physics bachelor’s (with emphasis on CompSci) and a CompSci masters (with emphasis on Physics) degree.
From a practical viewpoint, I’d have to take 2-3 extra classes next semester, depending on when I’m aiming to finish. I already know the content of one of them, but I’d still have to show up for the test because it’s an admissions class.
I was considering testing out of a gen-ed requirement, and I just realized that if I test out that frees me up in the spring to finally take a creative writing class (which a professor recently advised me to do soon); I might be looking at the best spring schedule ever. I was powering through a bunch of gen-eds this term anyway so as to justify my goal of spending spring doing British Modernism, Medieval Literature and Literature of the Digital Age all at once, with Acting I in there too for a half-semester class to finish out my arts cluster. Adding Creative Writing to that would be ideal.
(Yes, it’s a lot of reading/writing. That’s what I’m here to do.)
What’s the British Modernism syllabus look like? I went into my analogous class expecting far more Eliot and Yeats than I got. I’m glad we read plenty of Woolf, but about a solid third of the class was spent on Ulysses.
I’ve had enough Ulysses for a lifetime. The most worthwhile thing about Ulysses was that studying it gave me the conceptual grounding to understand Dhalgren two years later.
I haven’t looked at the syllabus; I’m enthusiastic about the class less because of any individual thing on the syllabus than because the professor is a really good teacher and I’d at least consider anything he was offering. He spends a lot of time on Ulysses, but I figure I’ve got to read some Joyce sometime and I may as well do it under the aegis of a really good lecturer. I can & do read Eliot and Yeats on my own.
I did not mean to discourage! Not only will we have different professors, we likely have different preferences re: literature. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
No, I knew you weren’t trying to be discouraging. I’m sorry I was so defensive!
Is Dhalgren any good? I’ve been meaning to make a start on Delaney but I don’t have any idea where.
Dhalgren might not be a great starting point — even having read very little Delany other than that, myself. It is a fantastic piece of literature, with some of the best passages about art I’ve ever seen in any medium, but I also found it a frequently upsetting and difficult read. I’m not sure how to describe it, really.
I had a composition read yesterday and got a 93 on it and tomorrow I’m playing a Bozza piece for repertoire class, so that’s happening, and also I stayed up till 3am with some people from the composition studio watching Hunter x Hunter, which seemed a very College thing to do, and then I fell asleep on their common room sofa across from another guy who was also asleep, which also seemed very College. Their dorm- it’s a music concentrated dorm- is a lot more social than mine, which is honors. I’m kind of sad I don’t live there, since my hall gets a little lonely, but also kind of glad because the honors dorm allows me to concentrate on work.
Other things I’ve done:
-cried over spilled milk (i dropped a half gallon of it into the street in the rain)
-made a terrarium with succulents
-gotten belay certified at the rock wall
-finished Twin Peaks (alone, in my room, at night, which was a mistake, because the ending- whatever your opinion on it may be- is the scariest thing i’ve ever seen)
Anyway , college is good. It’s interesting.
I officially changed my major from Music Performance to English with a concentration in writing today! Ever since I definitively decided a couple of weeks ago that I would be changing my major, it’s felt like such a huge weight was suddenly lifted off my shoulders. I’m so relieved. This past semester has definitely shown me that while music will always be a passion of mine, I’m not cut out for a career in it nor would I enjoy a career in it, and my health problems would make it even harder to make it in music successfully.
Thoughts so far after my advising appointment:
-Non music majors have such light schedules compared to music students
–I’m taking far less classes next semester than I’ve taken all of the past three semesters, but I’m getting more credit hours out of it than I got for previous semesters?? This system where music classes are only worth one credit hour so that music majors don’t go over the amount of hours that the in-state Lottery Scholarship will pay for before they graduate is really weird
-It’s weird that I’m actually completely on track to be a Junior English major next semester, like I’m not behind on English classes at all even though I haven’t taken an English class since senior year of high school (thank you, Middle College!!!)
-It’s also weird that I’m literally one class away from completing a Minor in Music, and I’m taking that one class next semester, and I’ve only got two General Education requirement classes left, one of which I am also taking next semester, so after the next couple of semesters I won’t have to take any non-English classes unless I want to
-We’re required to take a foreign language for four semesters and my uni offers Japaneseso I think I’m going to take Japanese because it would be cool to be able to actually read and speak my mother’s native tongue and to communicate with my aunt and cousin more easily
Nice! Not every thing you love has to be your major-you can stay involved in music too.
Why English if you haven’t taken it since high school?
Well, I was taking college English courses in high school so the next English class for me to take will be the first of the Upper Division classes that most English majors start taking in their junior year.