wavesoflife

I’ve decided to drop Petrology. I’d been thinking of it the past few days. Today I looked up my grades online and saw that I had a 66, which would be a D. I looked a few minutes ago to see if she had graded the midterm. She had. I got a 46 on it (the class average was a 60). So now my grade is a 59. An F. I have never gotten an F in any class before. I don’t plan on getting one now. I don’t need that class and even if I did decide to return to geology, you have to get a C (or D?) in all your major courses. So I’d have to take it again anyway. I don’t think it’s likely my grade would improve before the end of the semester. I’m lost in that class and I can’t identify minerals in rocks to save my life. Not to mention that I don’t want to go on the mandatory weekend field trip this weekend or write the 20-page report or do the labs that are all based on that field trip.

So I think that tomorrow I won’t go to Petrology but will go in about 10:30 or so, get her to sign the paper (if I can find her), get my advisor to sign it after geodynamics, and then turn it in sometime before Friday at 4:30 (the cut-off date). I plan to change the hours I work to MW 12:20 – 2:50. I hope she’s okay with that. She’s usually not available at 12:20 (lunch) but Dr. Price usually is. I enjoy entering his dissertation data more than doing things for Dr. Marquez so maybe I’ll end up doing that mostly. I hope anyway.

For those of you who read my journal entry I wrote on Saturday, I did apply to AIU Online over the weekend. It was indeed for the BFA in Visual Communications (digital design concentration). The acedemic advisor called my parents house today and left the message that he put my application before the committee and that my essay was very well written. He said he’d be calling mid-morning to early afternoon tomorrow to let me know their decision.

I just finished writing a little over 3 pages for my lab group’s first proposal. It took me from about 9 till now (11:40) with a half hour break. I wasn’t expecting it to take that long. Or write that much. I’m not used to spending all evening doing schoolwork. Especially school work that involves actually thinking. We had to design genetic crosses to answer certains questions about fruit fly genes. The two other guys in my group met yesterday but what they came up with wasn’t very helpful (and some wrong). They asked me if I’d write the paper and I said yes because I was kind of afraid after I saw what they came up with. I really want to do well in the class. I just hope that what I came up with is right. My brain is tired. I’m not used to thinking like that. The only other time I have to think like that (extreme problem solving thinking) is website related, usually when something isn’t working, and that can be frustrating. So I’m really not used to thinking without being frustrated. It’s kinda cool. I probably would have done better in some of my classes if I had actually thought about the stuff more but things like physics or chem just don’t interest me that much.

Fall semester 2003 is finally OVER. This was really a semester from hell and I hated most of it. Today was my last final, physics, at 8 am. Which meant I had to get up at 6:30. My brain just does not function when I get up that early, so I don’t think I did that well. My grade for Mineralogy is up: a C-. I’m not very thrilled, as I’m trying to get my grades up so that if I do go to grad school, I can get a fellowship. I don’t think I could have done any better, it’s one of those things you either understand or you don’t. It makes me nervous about Petrology next semester, I did the worst on the rock thin section labs.

I’m so glad the semester’s over, but it hasn’t quite sunk is as I’m extremely tired and out of it. I’m going to celebrate by doing a whole bunch of web design stuff over the weekend. Yeah, I’m a geek.