1st Week Down!

Warning: This blog may contain information that you do not care about and deem as unimportant and self-absorbed. Please feel free to skim.

1. Classes
2. Write like a Woman
3. Staying Connected with Friends

1. Classes
I feel like the gun has gone off, and I am out of the blocks, sprinting down the track. After my first week of classes, I believe I can say it will be an interesting semester- busy, but a good one as long as I can stay on top of everything. My classes include creative fiction writing: write like a woman, anthropology of Native North Americans, archeology of North America, a BPMI illustration studio, and a 3D modeling studio (clay, wood, glass).

During my freshman year, my classes still had a lot of homework and tests every 2-3 weeks (similar to high school), but now they have transitioned into a more independent approach with more reading and only two to three tests and some papers for the whole semester. Besides classes, I am also staying busy with undergraduate assistant work with the First-year Honors Program and co-leading two leadership classes with faculty members. I am working with two different faculty members, and the first one and I lead the class equally whereas the second faculty member expects me to take the lead while he is more of a soundboard to bounce ideas off of.

2. Write like a Woman
The creative fiction class has been an eye-opening experience already, and although I feel naive sharing this, I never knew there was literature so revealing and liberating for women. Some of the short stories also use very creative styles I have never seen before. Our professor said one of the mistakes beginning writers make is sharing too many details about things that are not important while leaving out things that should be explained more. To work on this, one of our future assignments will be writing a two-page short story with only 3-word sentences or phrases about the past five years of a woman character's life.


3. Staying Connected with Friends
My roommate Julia and I hosted our first Friday Night Dinner with some delicious stir fry. Because most of my friends are scattered around Ames now, I am trying to keep a group of us connected through weekly Friday night dinners/potlucks. I also want to maintain friendships with the now-sophomore Andersians still living in the dorm, and yesterday I attended an Anders house reunion/picnic/crumpets game(similar to field hockey). Last fall I was the social chair which was fun, but it is pretty nice now to be able to attend and enjoy the events without trying to organize them.

I also attended a small birthday party for a fellow BPMI-er, and my friend Audrey and I created a beautiful (well, beautiful in our eyes) princess birthday cake. Our major is so small that we plan on throwing a small birthday bash for all of the juniors this year. Today I will be trying out the Collegiate Presbyterian Church college group for the first time. I still plan on attending Cornerstone Church for The Salt Company, college ministry program on Thursday nights, but I am hoping to be establish a church family in the smaller environment of CPC and its college group.

Have a fantastic rest of the weekend, and shoot me an e-mail about what is going on in your life if you get a chance.

~Rachel