My environmental studies class meets three times a week, and not counting the optional, but highly "recommended" readings, there are 35-50ish pages of reading assigned for each lecture. That's about 100-150 pages of reading per week.
I stopped reading for class after the first two class sessions because I was too lazy to go on electronic reserves to print out the long articles.
And we didn't discuss the articles in class anyway.
And my printer was running out of ink.
And I forgot where I put the replacement cartridges I bought last quarter.
And "my dog ate my
Excuse, excuses... but all the mental excuses in the world did not stop time from passing, and before I knew it, it was the end of Week 3, I had not done any of the readings, and the professor was rattling off a list of people, concepts, and OMG SO MANY READINGS that we needed to know for the quiz coming up in TWO DAYS.
15% of my grade... and almost two hundred pages to speed read through = NOT FUN AT ALL.
I spent Wednesday night scrambling to find my ink cartridge and staring, transfixed in horror, at the stream of seemingly never-ending pages that kept shooting out of my printer; I had more reading to do for my seminar and the first draft of my annotated bibliography to write for my writing class due on Thursday, so I essentially did not touch the environmental studies reading (aside from collating and stapling the articles together and then arranging them into a neat, but very formidable, pile on my desk) at all on Wednesday.
After classes on Thursday, I trekked out into the pouring rain to go to my first "fellowship" as a pledge down in Price Center. I ate ice cream (it was the cheap stuff that came in the plastic buckets, but there were almost one hundred mouths to feed, so I don't blame them) and "mingled" with so many people that all the names and faces became a big blur in my mind. I left early, came back to my room, grabbed my pile of articles/books and shacked up in the nerd box.
And stayed in there until 3:45 am.
I ate wasabi peas to stay awake.
(I don't even like wasabi peas; I always pick them out of the rice cracker snack mixes. I have absolutely no idea why I bought an entire bag of WASABI PEAS at Trader Joe's last week, but I paid for them so now I have to eat them.)
Of course, my mental capacity began to diminish some time soon after 1 am, so I did not retain much during the last hour and a half or so of "reading."
All I could recall as I was walking to class the next morning was constantly thinking, "REAGAN KILLED THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AND CREATED THE MESS WE'RE IN TODAY!!" as I read the chapter on government and policy in my book the night before.
I ended up not having enough time to even skim through two or three of the articles; there was a question about one of the readings I didn't get to on the quiz, but AP Gov't knowledge saved the day. (Hopefully.)
Pledge Retreat is next weekend, and the work just won't stop piling up; the final draft of my annotated bibliography and the second draft of my paper proposal are both due in my writing class after retreat, which means I have A LOT of research to do and two more drafts to turn in during class this week. I also have two "short" essays to write for my environmental studies class, an assignment to do for my "political inquiry" class, and the first midterm for my meteorology class to take on the same post-Retreat week.
And in between all that, I'll be going out to events/meetings as a pledge.
Basically, I will be living in the nerd box for the next two weeks, if not for the entire remainder of winter quarter.
A side note:
At info night, I asked someone if pledging was time consuming.
He asked me what my major was.
I told him I was a history major.
He said, "Psh, you'll be fine. I am an EE major and I still did relatively well when I pledged last quarter - I got a 3.5."
I wanted to hit him.
Like hundreds of pages of reading per week is supposed to be... easy or something?
1 comment:
ee majors are haters =P
you can do it. this will probably teach you time management so it's a good thing!
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