Friday, September 12, 2008

Great Expectations

Alright, so for my first official act of “documentation” I guess I’ll give a little recap of my first couple days of college; the good, the bad, and everything in-between.

Shortly after moving in to my apartment in Wyview Park and meeting my roommates, Liz and Sydnee (you’ll hear more about them later) it was time to begin classes and since it was Labor Day we began classes on a Tuesday, big mistake. Now maybe this is my own fault, having never sat in on any classes at BYU or really discussing the actual classes with anyone, I had certain picture in my head of what it would be like. We’ve all seen the TV shows and the movies depicting college classes as taking place in big fancy lecture halls with snobby professors wearing some sort of stuffy old fashioned suit, glasses and preferably sporting an impressive accent of some sort; it is overall a setting completely different and overwhelmingly more intimidating than that of a high school. This is what I had in mind when I set off to school that Tuesday morning. As I reached campus I was both terrified and strangely excited when I became hopelessly lost looking for my first class. The massive buildings and hundreds of anxious students moving between them was exactly what I expected. I eventually found the building where my first class would be held and began searching for the right room. To my surprise, I found myself walking past average size classrooms filled with average desks for approximately 30 students, very similar to your average high school. I immediately thought I must be in the wrong place. But to my dismay when I found my classroom it was just like all the rest, average. My confusion was increased tenfold when the person I thought was just another student turned out to be my professor!
I left the class confused but I shook it off and began looking for my second and final class of the day. When I found the building it looked far more promising than the first. It opened up to a large and very inviting atrium, brightly lit by outside light with classrooms lining every wall. This was more like it! I found my classroom, took a deep breath and prepared myself to receive the full college experience at last. I opened the door and… what I beheld was beyond disappointing. It was a broom closet! A matchbox! A freaking sardine can! 30 desks crammed into a space no larger than my bedroom! To put it politely I was pretty ticked off. How could this be true? I’d thought I was done with high school and moving on to bigger and better things (with an emphasis on bigger)I went home sulking and feeling completely robbed, but told myself things would be better tomorrow.
And they were, my Humanities class turned out to be in a lecture hall with approximately 150 other students. There was even a large projector screen where the professor displayed a detailed syllabus from her computer at the front of the class. My professor wasn’t old or stuffy, but I could live with that, she was at least entertaining! It only got better when I found my Anthropology class to be in a massive auditorium with 800 students, and my professor, using a microphone to communicate with the sea of faces, spoke to reveal a terribly interesting but completely unidentifiable accent. I nearly wet myself! I had one more class that was about on the same scale as the one earlier that morning and I left campus completely satisfied.
As for me now, I'm loving all my classes (even with the tiny classrooms) and I'm enjoying the whole experience. I'm even a little ahead in my homework, but I'm sure that won't last long :P

I would like to apologize the extreme detail included in this "blog", I'm not really any good at summarizing and I never have been. Hopefully the next one will be shorter and include a little bit more visual stimulation. :)

1 comment:

Rachel said...

Excellent writing skills my Stink. Very nice. Very "college worthy".