Verbal Snippets & Snapshots

Well, my three-part narrative of my Intersession experiences is now coming to an end! The first part was a blog entry about an outlook on life that helped me enjoy Intersession immensely. The second part was a blog entry about some of the things I did for leisure during Intersession. The third part is this blog entry, which will soon describe why I was at Hopkins for Intersession in the first place.

Like last year, I chose to came to Hopkins for Intersession, so that I could earn academic credit at no extra tuition. (Intersession tuition for academic courses is covered by fall tuition! It’s quite nice.) Last year, I took two one-credit courses; this year, I took one two-credit course and did one credit of neuroscience research.

The two-credit course that I took this year was called “Musicianship Intensive.” While I love music, my formal music education has only consisted of taking private piano lessons and learning some music history in the classroom. Meanwhile, my knowledge of music theory is very basic; I thus decided to take this course to expose myself to the rudiments of counterpoint, keyboard harmony, and solfege. Now that the course is over, I feel that I definitely have a basic grasp of the aforementioned musical concepts, which is a vast improvement from my pre-Intersession ’08 knowledge of them. As dry as my account of this course sounds, I found it to be quite fascinating, because it increased my appreciation of music a lot. Now, when I’m learning a new piece to play on the piano, I find it much easier to see why the notes I’m playing are arranged the way they are. In addition, I now understand why music from different historical time periods is divided into the classifications that musicologists use. In short, I found “Musicianship Intensive” to be a lovable dry course, because it’s so helpful in understanding a field of study that I’ve loved for most of my life (i.e., music).

While the other academic reason for my stay at Hopkins sounds very different from taking a course in music, it isn’t. During Intersession this year, I started my new position as a research lab assistant and earned one credit for the work I did. That might sound like the opposite of taking a music course, but I worked in the lab of a medical school professor who does research on mammalian auditory systems! Dr. David K. Ryugo, Ph.D. is currently focusing his research on various cats and mice who are congenitally deaf or “normal hearing.” Even though I learned about the auditory system when I took The Nervous System I during the Fall ’07 semester, being an assistant in Dr. Ryugo’s lab definitely has helped reinforce my knowledge of the auditory system. When I secured a position in Dr. Ryugo’s lab at the end of the Fall ’07 semester, I did it with the intention of staying for a long period of time, probably until graduation. Indeed, even though the first week of the Spring ’08 semester has passed, I’m still going to Dr. Ryugo’s lab and doing research there almost every day.

On different days during Intersession, I also managed to work at the undergraduate admissions office to join several other Hopkins students in filing applications. (By the way, good luck to all of you who are currently applying to college!) As a recent blog entry by Admissions_Daniel has indicated, I wasn’t the only member of SAAB (the Student Admissions Advisory Board, which runs the Hopkins Interactive website) to work in the admissions office. Even though filing applications sounds like a mundane task, it was quite fun! One reason why was the large number of students present; during the regular school year, only one to three students are working at the same time. During Intersession, however, there are usually about ten to fifteen students working at the same time. Therefore, the admissions room seemed very festive with several students opening mail and filing applications while glancing at a TV playing DVDs every now and then.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my three-part account of Intersession ’08! With that said and done, my next blog entry definitely will have something to with Spring ’08.

Photo Captions: (1) This is an image of the word “counterpoint” that I found via Google Image Search. (2) This is an image from the website of the European American Musical Alliance (EAMA); the Peabody graduate student who taught “Musicianship Intensive” participated in some of EAMA’s programs in the past and used several of its lesson materials in teaching “Musicianship Intensive.” (3) This is an image from the website of Dr. Ryugo’s lab. (4) This is an image of a file folder that I found via Google Image Search, in honor of the work that I did in the admissions office.