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September 27, 2004

First day of classes!  When riding to class I saw tons of chalking Frosh dorm staff had done all over campus, wishing their residents good luck.  I immedietely thought of Freshman year, when I was riding to my IHUM:  Citizenship and feeling a little better and not so nervous because I knew 1600 people were going through the same thing.  This year, I didn’t have any jitters – I actually hadn’t even bought any of my textbooks and ended up going to the bookstore this morning to get notebooks for the quarter.  Just like Stanford schedules everything last minute, I to have succumbed to doing everything late as well.

My first class was “Africa in the 20th Century.”  It seems like an interesting course, and I know if I take it I’ll actually learn about African history, a topic I embarassingly know little about.  However, the Professor doesn’t seem terribly engaging, and the workload seems heavy.  I plan to check out another course, “Colonial and Revolutionary America,” so see if that is any better than the class I went to today.  The Professor ended the lecture today talking about the origins of hurricanes from the Ethiopian highlands and climate changes and locusts swarms.  I was like wo.

Second class – Middle East in the 20th Century.  This class seemed really promising.  Plus, the workload seems pretty light and we can get EXTRA CREDIT by watching movies and then writing responses to it!  Extra credit in college!  Sweetness.  It’s amazing though, the Professor commutes to Stanford M thru W….from L.A.  I gotta respect her for that.

After lunch in Manz with Anna and Harry, I went to Intro to International Relations (from hereon Intro to IR).  The class doesn’t seem nearly as hard as it used to be with Krasner as the Prof.  There’s only about 100 pages of reading a week, which is really light for a course of this nature.  Professor Tomz is really intelligent and even though it’s a huge class, it’s one where I actually feel I know what I’m doing amidst all of the students. 

So that was my day of classes.  I picked up books for Physics 16 and Intro to IR in the library.  $270 already on textbooks, with 2 more classes to go.  Argh.  I went for a jog this afternoon and after dinner in Wilbur, Harry and I went to Ikea along with Chris, who was already procrastinating.  Harry and I got a coffee table for only $9.99.  Ikea is a fabulous store – I love it!  I kind of did my IR reading tonight but it was really dry and doesn’t seem that useful in the long run in the course.  Harry and I finished up our locator board and I made popcorn.  That was Monday.