Hello happy people,

Over the past couple weeks I have put considerable thought into the stated purpose of these (and really any) student blogs, and the phrase ’seeing what college life is really like’ keeps standing out. I think it is valuable to remember two things when thinking about that idea. First, that life in college and anywhere else is based greatly on what you make of it (as I believe I have stated before) and secondly that college life still falls under the broader category of ‘life.’ Life here is much like life before and after graduation. And while I recognize there is a wealth of popular opinion to counter that argument, I defer those opinions to a professor I had only once (and who, despite our limited interaction, provided some remarkably insightful comments about life) who said (to greatly paraphrase) “there is no ‘real world’ when one leaves college. College is just as ‘real world’ as anywhere else. You people [students] have to balance your personal lives, full time academic schedules, many of you have jobs and extra curricular activities and I know several of you commute. This is just as real as the world you’ll find when you graduate.” The professor, mind you, when on to use this argument to discuss how if we were habitually late for class we would be habitually late for work when we graduated, etc. But the argument in and of itself stuck with me. And I was reminded of it when confronted with some of the issues of this term.
As you folks may have noticed, there’s been a lapse in my posts. I explain this only by saying that I, like any other student here, am subject to the same real life laws that people in the real world are subject to, which sometimes includes some hilarious and not-so-hilarious misfortune. To recap briefly, personal issues, a short emergency room visit, an automotive failure, academic issues, and all manner of other small and incredibly annoying misfortunes (like leaving a pen in a load of laundry and causing ink spots to appear over all of my clothing) have plagued me over the past couple weeks. But things look to be on the rise: my health is recovering wonderfully, even though I cannot say the same for my clothes.

The past few weeks, I feel, should remind us all that while some students may go to college for free, party all the time, never go to class, and in general not take any responsibility for their lives, I think that this group is in such an overwhelming minority that those students should not shape (as I feel is so often the case in popular culture) the perception of students. We, like any other population, live in as real a world as any.

And now, for the general updates.

I am making significant progress at a project I have been working on for a fair amount of time at my internship. The project involved me learning –essentially from scratch- some of the basics about Visual Basic, ASP.NET, XML, XSL, and some commercial web-services. It has been a really significant learning curve, but I have made some really appreciable progress so I’m glad for that.

Classes are going relatively well, which is to say that they are -as is their nature- challenging, time consuming, and worthwhile experiences. Hopefully in a post soon I will talk a little bit more about my honors thesis. I’m quite excited about it, as it lets me research into a subject that is important to me.

As a junior, I met with my advisor to schedule my last round of classes. We spoke at length and made sure that I would be able to graduate in four years, fulfilling the requirements for a Computer Science major with an English Writing minor while simultaneously fulfilling the requirements to graduate with honors. And there was a strange sense when I realized I would have exactly enough time to get in exactly the classes I needed. Everything fell into place, and it allowed for the moment when you realize graduation isn’t that far away. And then you also realize that doesn’t change the one paper being due next week, and so that moment was short lived.

Oh! And the first study abroad orientation met since I posted last, and I must say I am very excited about the program. Which I suppose should go without saying, but the opportunity to be able to meet the other people going on the trip, including the professor that would accompany us, was really nice. The folks seem to be cool people, and I’m glad for the opportunity to get to know them better over the course of the orientations, pre-study abroad class, and the program itself.

I think that’s about it for me.
So there.

Okay that would be awesome.

Anyway,

This week has been a busy week for everyone, for some reason or another. It seems several people I know or relatives of people I know are ill or injured, and so I would like to take this beginning-of-post opportunity to wish all of those folks well.

Also, there has been insane levels of work (at least on my end, and I know with other folks) being put into school. Around this time you get the whole ‘when is this term over’ feeling, and I once complained (unnecessarily loudly, I’ll admit) about how glad I was that the break was coming up (at that time) in three weeks. And he argued (correctly, I feel) that I would feel that way regardless of whether it had been the seventh week of a ten week term or the twelfth week of a fifteen week term. But still, the end looms in sight.

And that marks the end of serious time.

In other news, I have recently been speaking with one of my professors to try and develop my Senior Honors Thesis, which (I hope) will end up being a game. I wasn’t sure if that would end up being acceptable, but I took a brief look at the kinds of theses we have in our library (we house them all for mildly clueless people like myself). And there was a masters thesis (I wasn’t paying attention to what kinds of theses I was looking at) that was simply the user interface to a computer game, so I figure if I step down the level of seriousness -Senior Honors Thesis instead of masters thesis- and step up the level of complexity (I assume, of course, since I did not fully read and therefore cannot fully appreciate the student’s thesis) -by making a complete, or relatively complete, game instead of just the interface to one- we should be good. This is all hope and speculation of course. Nothing has yet been submitted. When everything is set up, though, I would like to describe some of my ideas.

On….. um… Wednesday? Some friends and I watched the lunar eclipse, which was really cool. Of course, it was also extremely cold – so much so that my camera would continually say that my brand new batteries were dead. But we had a lot of fun, and for you, I have a picture!
So take that.

Though a note for any of you stargazing folks out there. I don’t know what possessed me to listen to the news people when they said the time of the eclipse, because, as an astronomical event, it took like 45 minutes to get any really nifty shots.

And finally, this Saturday was the Cardinals on Wheels Chicago Symphony Orchestra trip. We had fewer people go than we had planned, and that was mildly disappointing, but that was due to about a hundred thousand things going slightly awry. But we had a small, devoted group, that was really excited to go and that had a lot of fun.
As for the performance, it was amazing. Really amazing. There was this featured solo pianist who was essentially the epitome of incredible. She was a very small older woman who would play the piano incredibly smoothly in some places, and in others slammed on the keys such that her hair would bounce. She was intense.
And a picture from before we left.