Time flies when you are studying...

This semester has flown by faster than any other previous semesters. My classes have me going 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day with homework breaks in between. Then, I work 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. at night. Let’s just say I have no trouble sleeping at night. In the past three or four weeks, I’ve gained more experience and knowledge which has built on to what I absorbed the first four weeks of classes.

 I’ve taped, edited and produced my first broadcast news package. It covered the Frogs for the Cure Music Video event and it was a great, chaotic first experience in the world of broadcast journalism. I’ve entered the realm of Microsoft Access, a program I had always assumed no one ever used, and have discovered that it is actually pretty useful when dealing with databases for news stories. For my Buddhism class, I have read two more novels by different disciples of Buddhism who have shown me that there are many different kinds of Buddhist studies. The Pure Land and Zen traditions are extremely different. In Zen, the monks beat each other with sticks, whereas in Pure Land, they don’t. So I guess that’s a big, kind of ironic, difference.

                While promoting eleven40seven, TCU’s journal of the arts, I discovered that students can be cruel and will ignore you if you stand at a table in front of Market Square trying to hand out flyers. My rhetoric class has taken me full cycle from Socrates to Plato to Aristotle and some Gorgias and Isocrates in between. There are a sprinkle of other classic philosophers and rhetoricians whose works I have read countless pages of that fly well above my level of comprehension. But for some inexplicable reason, I find myself actually understanding the timeline and arguments of rhetoric and philosophy as we slowly make our way to the medieval era. In Literature and Civilizations, I’ve learned that writing a satire is almost as hard if not harder than writing a serious essay. Props to Jonathon Swift for his creativity – it’s not too easy.

                And finally, though sometimes I do forget, I have one more class – environmental science. I recently decided to pass/no credit this course as I am not a science person and much prefer reading books to studying and regurgitating scientific facts and data. This class seems to get lost among the two books I read and five essays I write on average each week. I at least have learned that an energy crisis exists, air pollution is bad, and trees are good. But I have a couple more months, so I’ll probably ingest some new facts about the planet soon.

                Like I said, this semester is going fast and information is being thrown at me faster than I can swallow it. I’ve gained more knowledge thus far this semester than it seems like I did in the entirety of last year.