It has of course taken me FOREVER to finally update my blog. After getting back from Tanzania, Hurricane Irene decided to hit NYC the day I was supposed to have a connection there. Instead of returning to school with my fellow piers before classes started, I ended up arriving 5 days later. Luckily, this just gave me a a little more time to visit with family at home! It was a little stressful getting to Tulane so late, but I got it together quick (thanks Aubs for catching me up so fast!). And now I can't believe I've been back for 3 and a half weeks. Haven't done too many exciting things as I'm still trying to figure out my schedule and by the weekend I'm just ready to relax and lay in my cozy bed.
I started teaching again at Arthur Ashe Charter School after Labor Day and it's been great getting to know my new set of kids! We have a great staff team this year and so far everything has been running quite smoothly. I've been trying to think of all different types of hands on projects for the kids to do while they learn life skills and work on literacy in the classroom. I've decided that this semester's biggest project will be an ongoing film where the kids write their own dialogues acting out the life skills we've gone over. By the end we can put them all together to take home to their parents and show our sponsors. The first set of clips we videotaped about how to properly introduce yourself are super cute and my students love to act (especially the girls, my little drama queens!). I'm working in the BME department again as well as a lab tech for my work study, and luckily my boss let's me have flexible hours so I can manage it with my classes and A's and Aces.
My classes so far have been time consuming but really interesting. I am really glad that I'm done with all of my core requirements and get to take all BME classes and electives I actually want to take. This year I decided as an elective to take Intro to Jewish Civilization. I figured since Tulane's freshman class is literally 68% Jewish this year, it'd be a neat course to start understanding some of the events and activities held on campus. Projects in Embedded Design has been a pretty cool course so far as well. How many classes can you say you get to program a robot to follow you around, play the Mario Party theme song, and go through obstacle courses? Biofluid Mechanics has been good so far as well, definitely a math heavy course, that's for sure. I wish that our math wasn't so rushed our first two years, because I can't remember half of it now! It's not bad at the moment, but I can tell my calculus is going to need a little refreshers course soon. Anatomy has been overwhelming but really neat- I've now done cadaver dissection in lab twice which is still crazy to me that we actually get to do it. The vocabulary and mass memory is going to be really intense (pure memorization is not my thing) and I know when it comes time for the tagging exam- everyone will be cramming! Last but not least, Biomedical Microdevices is going well. I decided last minute to take it because it's all about the things I want to do after graduation: brainstorming and designing solutions to problems applicable in the developing world. The main goal of the course is to submit a proposal to the Gates Foundation which is a pretty great opportunity. I also recently joined my professor's lab after being introduced to a really interesting project that I'll be working on with one of his grad students. Friday, I got to help out in an experiment so I'm excited to really get involved.
Outside of class and work, I've been playing club soccer twice a week and will hopefully be starting intramural badminton soon. The weather has been beautiful so I try to get over to Audubon park as much as I can. I always forget that back home the weather isn't 80 and sunny all the time like it is here :p. I'm quite ready for it to cool down a bit though so I'm not sweating by the time I walk to my classes!
What does all of this mean? I'm busy! But everything I've been doing are all things I'm really interested in or enjoy doing. So even though I like to complain about it, not having down time during the week isn't all that bad. Although I'd like there to be, there's not much time for procrastination this semester... so I'm still working on that one (hence this blog). I'm sure the next few weeks will be flying by as well so I figured I'd update while I can!
My classes so far have been time consuming but really interesting. I am really glad that I'm done with all of my core requirements and get to take all BME classes and electives I actually want to take. This year I decided as an elective to take Intro to Jewish Civilization. I figured since Tulane's freshman class is literally 68% Jewish this year, it'd be a neat course to start understanding some of the events and activities held on campus. Projects in Embedded Design has been a pretty cool course so far as well. How many classes can you say you get to program a robot to follow you around, play the Mario Party theme song, and go through obstacle courses? Biofluid Mechanics has been good so far as well, definitely a math heavy course, that's for sure. I wish that our math wasn't so rushed our first two years, because I can't remember half of it now! It's not bad at the moment, but I can tell my calculus is going to need a little refreshers course soon. Anatomy has been overwhelming but really neat- I've now done cadaver dissection in lab twice which is still crazy to me that we actually get to do it. The vocabulary and mass memory is going to be really intense (pure memorization is not my thing) and I know when it comes time for the tagging exam- everyone will be cramming! Last but not least, Biomedical Microdevices is going well. I decided last minute to take it because it's all about the things I want to do after graduation: brainstorming and designing solutions to problems applicable in the developing world. The main goal of the course is to submit a proposal to the Gates Foundation which is a pretty great opportunity. I also recently joined my professor's lab after being introduced to a really interesting project that I'll be working on with one of his grad students. Friday, I got to help out in an experiment so I'm excited to really get involved.
Outside of class and work, I've been playing club soccer twice a week and will hopefully be starting intramural badminton soon. The weather has been beautiful so I try to get over to Audubon park as much as I can. I always forget that back home the weather isn't 80 and sunny all the time like it is here :p. I'm quite ready for it to cool down a bit though so I'm not sweating by the time I walk to my classes!
What does all of this mean? I'm busy! But everything I've been doing are all things I'm really interested in or enjoy doing. So even though I like to complain about it, not having down time during the week isn't all that bad. Although I'd like there to be, there's not much time for procrastination this semester... so I'm still working on that one (hence this blog). I'm sure the next few weeks will be flying by as well so I figured I'd update while I can!
RSS Feed
