Sarah

As great as college is, home is still the best. You start missing little things about home. Like your couch or your bathroom (weird, I know). Then you start missing the bigger things. Like coming home from a day at school and seeing your mom. Or taking a nap with your dog. Or going to a movie with your family. Everyone gets homesick and everyone needs to talk about home once in a while. Even though I live fairly close and get to go home pretty frequently, it seems like the time at home is never enough. I went home this past weekend and spent the afternoon with my pets. I thought I’d share a couple of pictures.

Emma, my lab/setter. She was very excited to see me so she didn’t want to have pictures taken.

Zoey, my hyperactive australian shepherd. It took a bit of patience to get her to hold still.

It was good to go home to see my pets and family. Unfortunately, with trying to catch with family and friends and just enjoying home, I never get any homework done. This leads to staying up late Sunday night to get Monday’s homework done. But home is still important and totally worth the late night. It’s not a bad thing to be homesick. Everyone gets homesick at some point. It’s nice to talk to friends about home. Hearing about their home lets you learn more about them while they feel better and it gives you a slight distraction from being homesick. Then you can have chance to talk about your home so you feel better.

If your next trip home is still a ways away, try these tips:

1. Do something. Get a group together and go out to eat, to get ice cream, ice skating, or just playing frisbee in the park.
2. Have a movie night. Pick one of your favorite movies that reminds you of home, like a family favorite, and share it with some friends.
3. Write emails. Tell your family about college life. They’ll be happy to hear from you and it will feel more like you’re with them just telling them about what’s going on.
4. Keep reminders of home. Sometimes, the more you try not to miss home, the more you miss home. Let yourself miss it and look through pictures. Wrap yourself in that blanket mom sent and watch a movie or read a book and imagine you’re at home. Sometimes you just need time to yourself to think about home.

Hope everyone is doing well with midterms! Thanksgiving break is getting closer!

What time of year? Fall! I absolutely love fall. I love the cooler temperatures, the colors, the crunchy leaves. Even though the rainy days are perfect for napping and watching movies, I still have to drag myself to class (and haul a dripping umbrella around). But other than that, I love fall! Campus is so pretty in the fall. Unfortunately, the pretty time of fall is very short, but I made sure to go out and take a few pictures while the colors were still vivid.

The crunchy leaves on the sidewalks turn you into a little kid again 🙂 I haven’t gotten too many weird looks 🙂

Looking out over the river on the bridge just past my dorm.

The trees that line the walkway on my way to University Band were very vivid. That’s what I call Hawkeye gold!

When I was out taking pictures I met one of my friends who was just coming back from a run. She usually finds some of the trails no one else does (she’s only gotten lost once so far) and when she saw I was taking pictures, she was able to direct me to a patch of sunflowers. I was very excited about the idea and after getting to the sunflower patch, I was not disappointed.

The different color variations fit so well into the fall color scheme.

I love the fading colors. It just looks so fall-ish!

My picture-taking endeavor was a success and acted as a much needed break from studying. I also enjoyed getting to see some parts of campus that are much quieter and more relaxed then the downtown area. Goes to show what you can find when you explore a little bit 🙂

Talk to you guys later, maybe after my Chemistry exam tomorrow! Eek!

Hey Hawkeyes!

It’s been another busy week filled with homecoming activities and homework. This past week also brought the excitement of the fall engineering career fair. For all the first year students this was the first opportunity for us to get our names out there. As a requirement for Engineering Problem Solving 1, we all wrote a resume and had it reviewed by the professional development staff. All the girls on my floor were making lists of the companies they wanted to talk to. Everyone was talking about what they were going to wear. These things are so hard for girls. Dress pants? Skirt? Dress? Heels? Flats? Hair up? Down? So many decisions to make. I was entertained by the excitement, and felt a little left out. Yes, I am an engineering major and yes, I was supposed to go to the career fair. Sadly, I could not. My chemistry lab was scheduled directly on top of the career fair. We were told that this lab would be the longest lab and it was doubtful we would finish early. This lab was the titration lab.

Coming from a small school, a lot of our chemistry equipment was under par, making it near impossible to allow every student to conduct multiple titrations in a lab. I had read through the lab in the lab manual before going to class, but I was very grateful that my lab partner had done titrations many times. We worked together and moved through the lab pretty quickly.

Titrating water samples to test the hardness of the water.

This lab was great bonding time with several people in my class. We went from working with partners, to working in a group of 4, to working in a group of 8 in that time span of about three hours. As much fun as lab is, I still don’t look forward to standing for all three hours though. I suppose by the end of the semester I’ll be accustomed to it, but as for now: wear comfortable shoes to lab.

See you later this week!

Hey Hawkeyes!

Wow, it’s been a busy week. I’ll try to give a full recap to get caught up and then hopefully I can make smaller posts more frequently. I’ll start with last weekend (the UNI game).

Last weekend began with me spending the night at a friend’s apartment. It was exciting to get out of the dorms for a little bit, but I was still close enough that I could go to the game on Saturday. My friend and I went out to dinner before she drove me to Hy-vee to re-stock on food. My study snacks had been slowly depleting with the amount of homework I’ve been doing lately. One of the highlights of staying at her apartment was taking a shower with hot water in an actual bathroom. At a certain point you just get tired of the dorm showers. Especially when you have to get up at 6:30 to have a hot shower. My friend dropped me off at my dorm in time to go to lunch with some other friends before heading to the game against Northern Iowa.

Sitting in Kinnick waiting for the game to start. The earlier you get there, the better seats you can find.

They told me that I needed to be in at least one picture 🙂

It was a nice day for the game, a little warm, but not bad. I’ve been trying to work on my sports photography so I’ll share a few that I thought were decent.

Kick-off at some point. I don’t know much about football, which means I know basically nothing. I just like taking pictures 🙂

Pushing through for more yards

Celebration after a touchdown! A very happy moment for players and fans. (The blurry black part on the right side is a happy fan’s arm that flew up at the last minute.)

The rest of the weekend was spent doing homework and getting ready for the coming week.I had plenty of homework and a few big assignments. Word of advice? Start Engineering Problem Solving 1 homework earlier. The first few problems are really easy so you put it off, and then you end up staying up until 3am to finish the homework the morning that it’s due. It did get finished (I still don’t know my grade yet) but I felt pretty good about it. Other than being really tired, Tuesday went pretty well. Then I decided to start my Engineering Problem Solving 2 homework that was due Friday. We had to write a password validity program that had multiple requirements. After sitting in the T.A. Office Hours for 4 hours, I had the entire code written and was getting ready to run the program when I accidentally over-wrote the file. Essentially, I deleted my entire program with no way to retrieve it. I did feel bad for the poor T.A. who had to deal with a pretty distraught me. I managed to re-type a quarter of my program Tuesday night. After sitting in office hours all Wednesday night and Thursday night, I finally finished my code and submitted it. Now I just have to wait for my grade. Lesson learned: back-up everything and be very careful before clicking anything that might alter your work.

Wednesday was a relaxing day(other than worrying about my program). I decided to take a photography class first year seminar so I could get away from the math and science of engineering.  So far it’s been one of my best decisions yet. The professor is awesome and the atmosphere of the class is very relaxed. We took a “field trip” on Wednesday during our class time. Our “field trip” meant meeting at the Old Capitol and taking pictures of the stair case:

The stair case in the Old Capitol. Our assignment was to get a unique picture from a different angle.

We also had to take a picture of the architecture of the Old Capitol.

I tried to go for a “up the stairs to the pillars” shot. I’m not sure how I feel about how this turned out.

The highlight of the day? Our professor brought her kids (her poodles) to class and we were assigned to take at least one picture of them.

Bailey, the shy and slightly timid one, but she still loved attention.

This is Rex(T-Rex). He was very friendly and greeted everyone that walked past the Old Capitol steps.

For a class of ten girls that all miss their pets, seeing the dogs was a great way to relax. We could pick up the dogs and move them around.

Bailey posing for a picture.

I’m sure all the people walking past thought we were crazy. Quite a few people stopped and took their own pictures and cuddled the dogs too. We just don’t see animals as much as we’d like.

Friday meant almost all my homework was due. I had a couple papers, my resume, and my EPS2 homework due. I also had Engineering Problem Solving 1 discussion. This just so happened to be our lab day. On Monday we had chosen what type of cookie and what type of chocolate we wanted. We had to have consistent chocolate coating with the majority of the cookie covered. We had to measure the cookies so we can determine if we’ve been successful in coating the cookie.

Weighing the cookies and recording mass. We organized our cookies by letters to keep them straight.

My group decided to coat half our cookie with vanilla almond bark and the other half with chocolate. My group works well together, we just need to get faster at working within our time constraints. Our final product ended up being rushed and not as pretty as we’d hoped, but they still looked very tasty(we also got to sample a few of the extras 🙂 ).

Our finished product 🙂

On Monday we’ll measure the final product and record new dimensions. I think they look pretty good 🙂

Saturday was the football name against Central Michigan(which we lost 🙁 ) but it was still fun to go to the game. I went with a few friends and we were really close to the side line(bad place for pictures) so we felt really close to the action.

A small part of my group for the game

It’s really nice now that the weather has cooled off. I still got sunburned though (I even put sunblock on!). I made an attempt to work on my sports photography again.

One of the pictures I thought was pretty cool.

Getting ready to play

Sorry for the really long post. This next week will hopefully be less stressful (ha!) so I can do several small posts instead of a great big one like this. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my week of mistakes and learning moments. Thanks for sticking all the way through! 🙂

Ok, it’s not actually a party. At least not that kind of party. It was a study party.

This was the start of the night, around 6:30pm.

A friend in my Chemistry lecture decided that we should study together. We slowly added people and papers until……..

By about midnight(yes, 6 hours of studying) the papers and people had exploded

It was a late night (went to bed at 2am) and I thought I studied really well. The study party was a lot of fun though, and it even included a last minute run to Orange Leaf for some frozen yogurt. The break definitely helped us to focus more and gave a nice 20 minute distraction, then it was back to the books (and computers and notes). Unfortunately, I didn’t do very well on my first Chemistry exam, at least not as well as I would have liked. I’ll have to come up with a new study plan. The group study party was a lot of fun and I think it’s a good form of review for exams, just maybe not a great initial study plan.

I think that’s one of the hardest things about college, figuring out what works for you. Everyone wants to do well, and it’s always disappointing when you don’t do as well as you wanted. You also need to remember to get enough sleep along with studying. It seems like we’re really full-swing into the semester. I’m basically buried in homework with a small, hopeful light at the end of the tunnel (hoping for a break from homework next weekend). It seems like you’re always trying to juggle starting the homework you were just assigned and completing the homework that’s due the next day. Everyone tells you to start the homework early but somehow, early never works out and you end up doing it last minute.

I think part of the key is learning what each professor expects and what kind of homework each professor gives. Most professors I have are fairly consistent. The homework looks about the same every week, so you can start to develop a feel of how long it will take to get done. If only the weekend were one day longer, I could be so much more productive and even operate on decent sleep!

Good luck to everyone with exams this week!

Hey Hawkeyes!

Wow, talk about a busy week and weekend. Has it already been almost a week since my last post?! I’ll give you a short rundown on last week.

Tuesday night, with no pressing homework, was the fun night of going out for frozen yogurt with some friends. Just so you know, Orange Leaf’s chocolate and carmel yogurt with butterfingers is really good.

Wednesday started the University Band, which is the non-audition band here at Iowa. Anyone can do it, and you even get a credit for it. We played through the music we will be playing for our concert which is December 3rd, for those who want to check it out. We’re playing some pretty cool pieces.

Thursday night, a few friends and I went out for ice cream with some new friends that were sophomores in engineering. We met at an engineering gathering in the Seamans Center (engineering building) and they were really helpful in giving advice about classes and professors.

Friday brought the scramble to submit the Chemistry homework by 11:59pm. A group of girls on my floor gathered in a room to help each other and we finished the homework with plenty of time to spare.  As a celebration of finishing the Chemistry homework, we went to the movie playing at the Iowa Memorial Union.

Saturday meant sleeping in (finally!) and of course, the big football game against Iowa State. This was my first college football game so I was a little nervous and a little excited. I walked to Kinnick Stadium with a friend, but somehow got separated once we were there. There were so many people! I ended up standing next to some people I didn’t know, but they were very friendly and helped fill me in on how things usually worked at the games. A few pictures from my first Hawkeye football game:

Even though we didn’t win, it was still a ton of fun. Campus was really quiet afterwards, so it was a little depressing. I’m excited for this week’s game against Northern Iowa. Go Hawks!

Hey Hawkeyes!

I hope everyone has been having a great week, especially with the great 3-day weekend. It was great to go home and see friends from high school. We all swapped college stories and talked about how college life was going. As great as it was to be home, I was actually pretty happy to come back to campus and see friends.

With the homework due this week and my first Chemistry exam next week (Yikes!!!!) we’ve been spending quite a bit of time studying. I love living on the Women in Science and Engineering floor because we’re all freaking out about a lot of the same homework. It’s also nice being able to go with a friend to a tutoring session so you don’t have to walk in by yourself. It’s awesome having people who can help understand concepts when you’ve read the same page 10 times and still don’t understand it.

So until next time, have fun studying!

Happy study time 🙂

Hey Hawkeyes!

Wow, it’s definitely not syllabus week anymore. Upperclassman always say the first week is the easiest because you always go over the syllabus and talk about expectations and policy in class. Now that we’re on to the second week of class, the homework has really hit hard. I think the best way is just to write down somewhere, the homework that’s due for that week in a list form by order of due dates. That’s what I’m trying right now anyway.

The weather has also warmed up quite a bit. The lecture halls are a bit chilly but when you’re speed walking to get from one class to another in 10 minutes, it does get really warm. I love getting to class early and not having to sit clear in the back. Unfortunately, I have a class that gets out at 9:20 and one that starts at 9:30. So far the earliest I’ve been able to get there is 9:27, at which time there are a few open seats in the back. It is also one of my largest classes(about 200 I think) so when you’re in the back, you feel like you’re waaaayyy in the back.

Anyway, homework awaits me. Hopefully it goes faster at a decent time of night rather than in the early hours of the morning. Have an awesome evening!

Hey Hawkeyes!

Well, I have successfully survived the first week of college, well, almost. I still have two more classes today, but they’re not new classes so they can’t be that bad. Some classes/professors I look forward to more than others. I’ve had a few minor panic attacks. One of which was yesterday at 6:00am when I woke up and thought I had forgotten to take a quiz that was due at 8:00am. I sat up right away (hitting my head on the ceiling) and then realized that yes, I had taken it. It had only been 5 questions and had been very simple which is why it didn’t stick in my brain.

My next panic was today when I looked at my schedule and saw I only had three class. Easy day, plenty of time to get things done. While flipping to the right page in my planner, I flipped to the wrong page and realized that I had written a class down for next week when it was this week too, and 2 hours after the class I was in at the time. Mild panic attack being that I had almost ate lunch and went back to my dorm to work on homework without going to my class. Yes, the teacher probably would have understood that it’s my first week if it wasn’t the class that I had worked so hard to get switched to the Friday session. Missing that on the first day probably wouldn’t have looked too great.

One small tip to close the post: Don’t go out and buy a fancy graphing calculator for college. Most of the Calculus classes won’t let you use it and the Chemistry and other Math classes will let you use it on homework but not on exams(which is where you really need it). So if you’re just starting your senior year of high school, go out and buy a scientific calculator and spend this year getting to know it really well. It will prepare you for college a lot more than learning a graphing calculator and then having to learn a different calculator.

Have a great weekend and recover for next week!

Hey Hawkeyes!

I hope everyone is doing well with their classes so far. I’m still trying to find the right rooms and figure out the room organization. The streets are a lot busier and the dining halls are certainly more full. You can definitely tell who the freshman are by who is 30 minutes early for a class (yes, I’m one of them). I think everyone is just so worried about being late that they think they have to be there extra early.

Getting to class early definitely helps getting to know people though. It gives you time to look around and see if you recognize anyone and introduce yourself to someone new. I’ve even met a few people that were on my floor but I hadn’t met yet.

Things I’ve Learned So Far:

• Order/ Buy books before class starts. I know a lot of people want to wait to make sure that they need the books, but in a one of my classes the bookstore sold out of the book. Now people are scrambling to find a book that, of course, is a custom edition that can’t be bought online. In another one of my classes, the publishing company is switching editions, therefor it has stopped shipping the 6th edition but the bookstore is waiting to receive the 7th edition.
• Look at your schedule, write down the room number and building somewhere you can easily access it while walking. It really will make your life easier. After a great laugh with my roommate and her friend (her friend wrote down the office number instead of class room), we realized you really need to write down the room number and be able to pull it out of a pocket instead of digging through your bag for your schedule when you finally find the right building(like I did).
• Schedule time to eat. As I learned today, waiting to eat/drink anything until 5:00pm because of class location, makes you dehydrated (major headache) and very hungry. I had two classes around lunch time in the same building, so I figured I’d just wait to eat. Not realizing I had another class right after that, I rushed off to the next class with no food. Definitely make time for breakfast too. They have great coffee in the dining hall and fresh fruit that makes the morning so much better.
• Do NOT plan your classes 10 minutes apart. Unless the buildings are really close and you know exactly where the rooms are to know the fastest way out and in. Today I had two classes that were ten minutes apart and quite a ways apart. By the time I arrived at my next lecture, I had 3 minutes to spare and had to sit at the way back where I couldn’t see the projection screen half the time because of all the heads. Tomorrow, I get to run from the College of Nursing Center (West Side) to the Adler Journalism and Mass Communications Building (East Side) in 10 minutes. Luckily, I was able to switch my group for Engineering Problem Solving because then I would have added a Seamans Center (East Side) to the time right before the Nursing Building.
• Don’t freak out too soon. A lot of classes can sound really scary the first day and make you want to rethink your major. But from what I’ve gone through so far, the second day is usually better. Instead of the quick explanation of EVERYTHING the class will cover (it sounds really overwhelming, trust me), the professor will usually start to explain the details that you actually need to know right away on the second day of class. It just makes it really hard when there’s homework the first day and you feel like you have no idea what’s going on.
• Be organized. Everyone likes to think they’re organized, then they come to college. I’m still working on my paper management, book organization, and how to keep track of things. Right now, I have two assignment notebooks. One for scheduling, like when I have class, meetings I have to go to, hanging out with friends, and events going on. The other one is for actual assignments: homework and reading. These assignment notebooks are also color-coded so I can look at a color and know what class the assignment is for(that’s the idea anyway). It’s been working out pretty well so far. I just need to see how the teachers assign the reading to know how to write the due date. Some professors go by weeks for due dates and some go by a specific day.
• Talk to the professor. If you don’t want to ask in front of a huge lecture hall of people, talk to them after class or go to office hours. Main question to ask: do I have to bring the book? Do you really want to haul all three chemistry books around with you all day until you have that class? Some classes don’t use the books in class, some use it depending on whether it’s a lecture, discussion, or lab time. For example, my chemistry book(the great big one) doesn’t have to go to any class. So the only time I have to drag my book along is if I go somewhere to study, in which case that book will be the only one I take. However, my Engineering Problem Solving II book, which covers programming has tips and bits of computer code to help you start different assignments. Which means, that book will be going with me to every class(luckily it’s smaller than the Chemistry book). Asking the professor if you’ll use the book in class will make your bag feel a lot lighter and help you be prepared for class.

I think that’s all for now. I know I’ll have more later. This week is a major learning week, both in and out of the classroom. The nice thing is: there’s about 4,500 freshman going through the same thing I am 🙂