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Category: School

I make a bloggings

So, here’s me right now:

This is after an hour of failing to get to sleep. The dumb thing about going to bed with your mind on stuff is when you can’t take your mind off of that stuff and you end up laying in bed forever running over what you’d do/say, or what you should have done/said. Now if only my flux capacitor worked…

Anyways, we’re about halfway through week 5 of the fall semester. Things are a bit hectic this time around as I’m taking 15 hours of actual classes on top of having to work to cover a several thousand dollar gap that financial aid didn’t cover. And then on top of all that I decided this would be a good time to go volunteer to be MC at this year’s Japan Night, so now I’m committed to attending the occasional rehearsal in preparation for the show in November. I’m still finding time to screw around, such as right now when I’m blogging instead of sleeping, but for the most part I’ve been staying pretty busy. Which isn’t altogether a bad thing.

Ok, so here’s my official review of the trip to San Francisco last month, which I mentioned in this post. The school I checked out was on the west side of town, away from the downtown insanity. I’m not sure if I just got lucky or if that’s how stuff happens out there, but the day I went to the campus it was a full 5-10 degrees cooler than the downtown area (where most of my exploring that weekend took place), and it was foggy on top of that. The campus itself was pretty cool to walk around. I had a pretty good feeling about the visit, and as it happens a return trip is just around the corner – I’m going back to San Francisco to take the JLPT in December, and as it happens it’s being held at SFSU.

As for the rest of the city… definitely cool. I’ve lived in a lot of different places over the years but the one common factor is that they were all for the most part smaller cities. San Francisco has more people in one square mile than Papillion does total. I spent some time staring at tall buildings one evening, and I spent the whole trip figuring out the mass transit system. Probably the best part was there no way I could have seen the whole city in four days. I went to Japantown, the Asian Art Museum, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and I took in a Giants game, but I missed Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, Golden Gate Park, and who knows what else.

The most telling thing about the whole trip is that 6 weeks later – long after the initial excitement has worn off – I still want to go back out there on a long-term basis. Even if it means paying through the nose to live there.

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Six Weeks of Kicking Ass, pt. II

Made it through the second round of tests last week. Still don’t have the results on one of them 8 days later, but I’m confident I did pretty good on it. There are four weeks of class left, then finals is after that. I’ve also been hitting the gym really hard the last two weeks, and the results are coming in slowly but surely.

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The Option

I need to flesh my study abroad plans out soon. I’ve already missed the priority deadline for the application process for Tokyo this fall, but I purposely didn’t apply because my overall GPA could be counted on less than 2 fingers. (As of right now, a 3.868 GPA for the fall semester has boosted my overall GPA to a full 2.0, and once I get the two bad semesters bankrupted I’ll be sitting somewhere around 3.4.) That’s not to say Tokyo is completely out of the picture – the absolute deadline is March 1 – but that does mean I need to start looking at contingency plans in case there isn’t any room left. Looking at things now I see two possibilities (among others):

1) Go in the fall of 2010 instead. No big deal.
Advantage: I get all the way through the 300 level Japanese classes and go over a little bit more prepared.
Disadvantage: In a sandbox for 12 weeks, taking classes in English, and staying in a dorm that is by several accounts a couple steps above squalid. I get the feeling it’s the kind of program where you’re a glorified tourist who takes classes in between sightseeing.

2) Scrap Tokyo and go to Sapporo instead in the spring of 2010.
Advantage: It’s a 9 month program, and Sapporo is closer to Nebraska in terms of weather, except the temperatures don’t go near to the extremes in Sapporo as they do here at home.
Disadvantage: The 9 months are April to December. This means I can’t take spring 2010 classes at UNL because I won’t finish them, rendering me idle for three full months. I could, however, spend that time working.

Right now I’m leaning toward the latter, but we’ll see.

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So Close!

Results from this semester’s classes that actually count toward my GPA:
World History: A-
Philosophy: A-
History of Rock: A
Japanese: A+ (both sections)

Straight A’s, but not a 4.0 GPA due to the A- grades being worth slightly less. The school assigns 4 quality points per hour to an A or A+ and 3.67 to an A-. Since all of my classes were 3 hours, that gives me 58 quality points out of 60 possible, which works out to a 3.86 GPA. Enough for the Dean’s List, but not without room for improvement.

The goal next semester is to do better.

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