Sarah

Hey Hawkeyes!

Glad to be back to another semester? I am! Well, ok, I’m still nervous about my classes but I’m determined to make this semester even better than last semester. But first a little catch up on some of the activities leading up to winter break.

To start of the fun of finals week, Women in Science and Engineering hosted their annual cookie decorating party for the living-learning community. As always there was lots of frosting, sprinkles, and of course ugly sweaters. It’s so nice to relax for a few hours, eat some cookies (not all of them are pretty enough to be donated), and drink hot cocoa while watching it snow. We always have a lot of fun mixing new colors and creatively decorating the different cookie shapes.

Here’s some of the cookies I decorated:

Then, of course, was the fun-filled week of studying and taking tests like a crazy person. I had five finals so I knew I had to be on top of studying. Luckily, I have some great friends in my classes so we had some major study sessions in my floor’s lounge with the white boards.

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again, you really need to know how you study most effectively. If I’m trying to learn something, I need to be by myself. But if I’m reviewing or practicing, I like to be with other people working on the same things. Especially for long math problems or complicated organic chemistry reactions, other people can catch your mistakes as you’re making them so you don’t have to re-do the entire problem just to get the right answer. I also like hearing other people’s methods for remembering patterns or formulas we need.

Another great way to study is to make review sheets for yourself. I like to go through all my notes and make a list of the main topics with a couple of the more detailed concepts and then follow my sheet. For math, I made a list of concepts with check boxes next to them and would do practice problems until I got several right and then would check it off. I would also use the back of my review sheets to make short notes about little details that I would always forget, like a step in a problem or a key definition. When I left for the final I would glance over the review sheet one last time as well as look at my list of common mistakes so the correct answers were in my head before I took the final. All of my finals went pretty well, so I guess my system works for me.

One of the other fun things that was up before finals week was the bulletin board design. Each floor has a bulletin board that’s decorated each month with creative ideas. In the Women in Science and Engineering Living-Learning Community, half the board is designed by the RA and the other is designed by the LLC programmer, who is in charge of planning events that go with the floor’s theme. I thought this design was absolutely awesome. It was a map of the United States with a world map below it with road maps as a background. All the residents received a pin with a string tied around it that had our name attached. We were to put the pin on the most interesting place we would be traveling to over winter break. It was really cool when everyone had put their pins in. Some people were taking family vacations to places like Mexico or Washington D.C., some people were taking classes in India, and some were simply going home to places like Florida or visiting family in Africa. It was interesting to stand at the board just turning over little pieces of paper to read the names and see where everyone was going.

It was also easier  to ask everyone how their break was when we got back because you knew what cool places they had been to. It was definitely awesome to see everyone again. It’s weird when you get used to seeing people everyday or just hearing the sound of their voice down the hall, and then all of the sudden you don’t have that any more. The first night we were all back, the girls on my floor were up and down the entire hallway trying to talk to everybody. It took me a couple days to unpack because I kept getting distracted with talking to everyone. My group of friends went out to eat as soon as everyone was moved back in on Monday night. When we left dinner, we realized it was snowing really heavily and, since I absolutely love how pretty snow is, I thought campus looked beautiful so I had to take a picture.

Break definitely helped me feel relaxed and a lot more ready to take on another semester. By the end of first semester I always feel so burned out and I’m so thankful to have a month off class and homework, especially the homework part. Technically, Tuesday was the first day of classes, but I only had two seminars that are actually a lot more of talking, discussing, and participating. That basically means Tuesday did not feel like a school day, Wednesday definitely felt like a school day though. I had classes from 9:30 to 2:30 and then from 7-9. Talk about a busy day. I can’t wait to fall into a routine with my schedule. I think the class I’m most cautiously optimistic for is a class called Drugs: Their Nature Action and Use. The class is about why medications react the way they do in the body and cause the side effects everyone worries about. We will also be discussing how new medications are developed. I think it will be a really interesting class and I’m going to learn a ton. My advisor says it will help me decide if I want to study the pharmaceutical side of chemical engineering or if I want to look at some other areas of chemical engineering. I know at least one person in most of my classes and look forward to making some new friends. I think the most exciting parts of new classes is the possibility of new friends to talk to and new information to learn.

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to set aside more time to blog so I’ll try to stick to it! Until next time, have a great first week!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 23rd, 2014 at 9:21 am and is filed under Academics, Campus Life, General, Photos, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.