Verbal Snippets & Snapshots

As a high school friend of mine likes to put it, life is “not always rainbows and butterflies.” As I’ve mentioned in a few previous blog entries, I’ve had both my ups and downs over my two and a half years at Hopkins. This past Intersession was no different.

I’ll admit that it wasn’t horrible. Nothing physically, emotionally, or financially (as you know, joking about money isn’t appropriate these days) devastating happened to me during the past three weeks. However, I guess what really makes me far from excited to write about my Intersession is the realization that I had during the last week of Intersession: Intersession 2009 was a huge personal disappointment for me.

Granted, I wasn’t even hoping to do anything spectacular this Intersession. I wasn’t planning to do a mini study abroad trip or go on an adventurous vacation with my family or even attend the inauguration. (Call me a scaredy cat, but while I consider myself a decently social person, I’m the kind of person who’d rather stay at home than attend a high-profile event that expects a very, very, very large crowd–like, say, the annual New Year’s Eve celebration at Times Square. Or a presidential inauguration.) All I was looking forward to doing was taking three credits’ worth of satisfactory/unsatisfactory courses, continuing to help out with research at the Ryugo Lab, working part-time, dancing, and spending my free time socializing with people at Hopkins whom I know. They weren’t extraordinary plans, but I wanted to enjoy them after a hectic end to the fall semester and then two weeks of doing almost nothing at home–besides sleeping, watching a lot of Disney movies, surfing the Internet, and occasionally going out of the house to shop or meet my friends or go to church with my family. When I returned to Hopkins at the beginning of this month, I was hoping my Intersession plans would strike a wonderful balance between the typical busyness I have during a regular semester and the sloth I had when I was at home.

Out of all of those things, I think it was only research and dancing that met my expectations. Research was research: I continued helping the postdoctoral fellow of the Ryugo Lab analyze data for her project, and despite the tedium of analyzing data, I still enjoyed the excitement of wondering what the results would be once the project is finally completed. Meanwhile, my dancing plans involved practicing a little ballet on my own as well as with a few other girls from the ballet company–plus taking a three-session beginner flamenco dance class offered through the Department of Student Development and Programming. (You know you’re jealous about the flamenco.) Okay, I’ll put it out there that I’m far from the greatest dancer on Earth. Even at Hopkins, I’m not the best dancer around. But still, those hours I spent dancing either ballet or flamenco were just…wow. I felt so happy with the combination of vigor and serenity that dancing gave me: vigor coming from the fact that dancing is a physical activity and serenity coming from the fact that dancing is, despite being like a graceful workout, an art form. Oh yeah, and I was tickled pink that I got to use the flamenco dance practice skirt I had purchased for my flamenco dancer Halloween costume–I knew that when I bought that skirt in October, I’d be able to find another use for it!

Otherwise, however, I found myself not enjoying everything else as I had hoped I would. I don’t want to sound like a whiner, but I’ll try to explain what I thought was disappointing: first of all, the two classes I took weren’t engaging at all. I took a two-credit classics course called “Jupiter Triumphant: War and Victory in Ancient Rome” and a one-credit music course called “Philosophies of Music Composition.” The first course was supposed to explore what happened in triumphs that were held in honor of some victorious generals during the Roman Republic–and, during the time of the Roman Empire, that emperors frequently decided to throw to glorify themselves and entertain the people. The second course was supposed to explore the influence of historical events on the way in which composers structured their musical compositions. While I knew these courses probably wouldn’t be academically rigorous, I was at least looking forward to class sessions that would pique my interest.

Unfortunately, I realized only during the second class of each course that I didn’t like either of them as much as I hoped–and it was too late to drop them. The course about triumphs covered fascinating material, but I found myself being one of those few people who almost always raised their hands to answer questions while the majority of the class remained silent. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find it fun. And I didn’t find it fun that the teacher of the course was so disappointed with overall class participation that she gave us all a test on the last day to see if we were “actually learning the material.” (I remember joking to a friend on the night before the test that I might as well have been one of those people who stayed silent during class.) As for the music class? We hardly analyzed the musical composition of the works we covered. We spent most of our time listening to samples of music from different eras of Western music history and learning very basic music terms. I think the course would’ve been a good introduction to Western music history for people with little to zero music experience–but for and yours truly and a friend of mine who was also in the calss, because we both had taken some degree of music theory, we both play the piano, and she’s a singer, it was like being a college student attending a class on the ABCs.

On a positive note, I got some enjoyment out of the reading for the classics course (which had a lot of reading assignments for homework), and I got a bit of enjoyment out of sitting for two hours straight two days a week listening to some beautiful music.

As for work? I worked as an Intersession-only office assistant for the administrative office of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences on campus. Because it was Intersession, the office was so quiet that I probably spent at most 20 minutes out of every two-hour shift actually conducting errands such as delivering packages or retrieving the mail. The rest of the time I spent doing homework for one of my Intersession classes or surfing the Internet. Now, I know lots of people who’d find that an ideal work-study job–but considering I like working for my money by doing something that keeps me busy and that I enjoy, I felt pretty guilty knowing that I was getting paid for essentially doing the same thing I’d do on my own at home if I didn’t have a job.

And…well…that leaves the “spending my free time” part. As you may recall from the three (yes, three) entries about my Intersession last year, I had a blast spending lots of time doing random shenanigans with my friends around Baltimore, from going out to dinner to playing video games. This year, while I still knew a lot of people who were at Hopkins for Intersession, a good number of them were busy either working all day or studying for the MCAT (or the LSAT or some other important standardized test). Added to the fact that I also had a lot of homework daily (do you remember how I said that my classics course required a lot of outside reading?), I found myself not socializing as much as I had hoped. To top it all off, during the last week of Intersession, the following happened: numerous heating and electrical issues with my apartment arose, some roommate conflicts happened among my roommates and yours truly, and more. (I won’t elaborate on everything that happened for the sake of discretion and for the sake of preventing this blog entry from sounding whiny.)

Catch this, though: I wouldn’t take back anything about this year’s Intersession, even though it was undoubtedly my least favorite out of my three Intersessions so far. Even if I were told beforehand that I had a choice between staying home and continuing to “do almost nothing” and coming to Hopkins and having the kind of Intersession I had, I’d choose the latter. Despite the fact that I found myself being disappointed at how most of my expectations for that three-week period of time were far from fulfilled, I learned a lot from what I did experience. I learned how to deal with freezing indoor temperatures (yes, my apartment is that cold), I refreshed my memory of some concepts I learned about electrical circuits in General Physics II when an electrician came to repair some burnt wires in my room, I realized that I should keep fire safety a priority in looking for another apartment next year (I plan to move out of the one in which I’m living after the lease expires), I learned a few skills in diplomacy in dealing with roommate conflicts, I learned that all interpersonal relationships–whether they’re platonic friendships or romantic relationships–are filled with pleasant and unpleasant surprises…and more. And if you think about it, if I didn’t like this Intersession, that just means chances are I’ll like my next–and last–Intersession more than this one! I hope it’ll be my best. When you’re at the bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up.

I was well aware of the fact that college is a learning experience beyond the classroom. This past Intersession was a reminder of that–and I’m grateful for that reminder.

N.B. The images used to illustrate this entry are taken from AllPosters.com.

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.

Note: If you think you don’t have the time to read the whole entry in one sitting, make sure you at least peek at the video I made! It’s at the bottom of this entry. Thanks!

My last blog entry was the first of three entries about my Intersession ’08 experience. The previous entry discussed what I perceive as the major difference between Intersession ’07 and Intersession ’08; this entry will discuss some of the things I’ve been doing for fun during Intersession. By the way, as you’ll find out in this entry, many of the things I’ve done for fun involve friends and food.

For instance, look at the highlights of my first week of Intersession:

TUESDAY: I met my friends Aparna and Phil for dinner at Tamber’s. During the fall semester this year, the three of us took study breaks together at Café Q–a coffee shop at the library–almost every night; this dinner was a post-winter-break reunion for the three of us. By the way, Tamber’s is an Indian restaurant near campus that has a ’50s diner atmosphere. THURSDAY: With a few friends, I rode the Homewood-JHMI shuttle to the bus stop at Penn Station and watched the movie Sweeney Todd at Charles Theatre. Charles Theatre isn’t a typical movie theater; it shows several first-run films and foreign films, not just mainstream Hollywood flicks. Plus, it’s in a historic building, and it’s in the lovely Mount Vernon neighborhood. (Mount Vernon is the “Cultural District of Baltimore”–I love it!) FRIDAY: I ate dinner at P.F. Chang’s at the Inner Harbor with five of my friends, and we played Wii Sports afterwards.

On a similar note, take a look at the highlights of my second week of Intersession:

SUNDAY: Aparna and I cooked dinner for six of our friends. We were thinking of hosting a bigger, more formal dinner party at her apartment the following week, but we wanted to make sure that we knew how to cook certain Filipino and Indian dishes properly. Our “guinea pigs” (i.e., the six friends for whom we cooked) liked the food, so we deemed the trial run a success. MONDAY: A group of my friends and I went to Dukem, an Ethiopian restaurant in the Mount Vernon neighborhood, to celebrate my friend Dave’s birthday. While Dukem is Zagat rated, we didn’t like the food. Our entrées were served with a lot of injera, like the way entrées are served with a lot of rice at Asian restaurants. Injera is a type of flatbread that is made from fermented dough. It looks like a pancake, but it tastes very sour. Unfortunately, my friends and I simply didn’t like the sour taste of injera. (However, the restaurant has a cozy atmosphere, and it’s located in MOUNT VERNON. Therefore, if sour pancakes sound appetizing to you, check out Dukem! According to its website, it also has a sister restaurant in Washington, D.C.) Anyway, to forget our dining experience, we ended up playing several rounds of Wii Sports late into the night. WEDNESDAY: Aparna and I had another dinner at Tamber’s, but this time it was just the two of us girls who ate there. We ended up spending little time eating and a lot of time having a fabulous “girl talk” as a result. Then we reprised our fall semester Café Q coffee breaks with Phil afterwards, and all three of us ended up chatting for at least two hours. FRIDAY: I went home for the weekend, but shortly before I left Hopkins, I managed to attend the surprise party for my friend Piyush. Oh yeah, and guess what I was eating as I left the party to return to my dorm room? A piece of birthday cake dipped in rasmalai sauce, which is a sweet and milky Indian sauce that consists of milk, sugar, pistachios, almonds, cardamom, and saffron. Yum. I’m quite grateful that my friend Shamini, who organized the surprise party, insisted that I have a piece of cake before I left.

Here are the highlights of my third (and last) week of Intersession so far:

SUNDAY: I returned to Hopkins in the evening, and my family and I ate dinner at Niwana, a Japanese/Korean restaurant near campus. MONDAY: Aparna and I had a very successful dinner party at her apartment! We spent most of the afternoon cooking dinner for about 20 people, and we requested that our guests dress in cocktail attire. It goes without saying that as the hostesses, we dressed up as well. Watch the video below. TUESDAY: A few of my friends and I who were doing research at the medical school took a lunch break together. We bought our lunch at Northeast Market (a huge indoor public market on E. Monument Street), and we ate at the lobby of the School of Public Health. If you’re ever near the medical school, you should check out Northeast Market.

There are still two days (tomorrow and Sunday) left before the spring semester starts on Monday, so I’m pretty sure there are a few more fun times to come. Anyway, I hope you liked this overview of some of the things I’ve been doing for fun this Intersession. Now watch the video below! Please. :)

Photo Captions: (1) This is the Charles Theatre. (2) This is a movie poster for Sweeney Todd. (3) This is the image on the box for Wii Sports. (4) This is a photo of some of us at the surprise party I attended last week. (5) This is a photo of the birthday cake and rasmalai sauce that were served at the aforementioned surprise party.

P.S. Except for the last two photos, I found the images illustrating this entry via Google Image Search.

P.P.S. Despite all this discussion about food, I actually lost weight during Intersession this year!

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I returned to Hopkins on the evening of Sunday, January 6, because the first day of Intersession was on Monday, January 7. I took advantage of this optional three-week winter term before the spring semester last year and enjoyed it overall, so there was no doubt in my mind that I’d come to Hopkins again for Intersession this year! So far, this year’s Intersession is only halfway over, but I already think that it’s been much better than last year’s Intersession.

So many things have happened over the past two weeks that I don’t know where to begin. If I can summarize my Intersession in five things, it would be the following: (A) academics, (B) admissions, (C) food, (D) friends, and (E) happiness. The last item on my list might sound odd, but I’m mentioning it for a reason. In fact, since discussing all five items in my list will take up a lot of time, I’ve decided I’ll write about Intersession 2008 in three entries. (Yes, that means you’ll have to read my next two entries to get the full picture of my Intersession experience!) So, which item will I discuss in this entry? Item E, the “happiness” component–because as a friend and I have agreed in a recent conversation, while you may be doing amazing things, the mood and attitude you have can affect your experiences a lot.

Looking back at the past year and a half, I’ve enjoyed my time at Hopkins overall. Sure, there have been times when I’ve been irritated or frustrated with my experiences at this school. Sure, I don’t like everything about Hopkins. Ultimately, though, I love this place. Nonetheless, for almost a year, I wasn’t as completely happy at Hopkins as I could’ve been, although it didn’t have anything to do with Hopkins as an institution itself. Intersession 2007 was probably my emotional nadir–although my friends have said that if I didn’t tell them otherwise, they would’ve thought everything was peachy keen for me, since I was pretty cheerful on the outside.

During the fall semester of my freshman year, I had a deep misunderstanding with someone I knew. Not much–if any–harm was done. However, the experience was enough for me to feel shaken. From the Thanksgiving of my freshman year until sometime recently, I had a long emotional recovery process. This had to do with the fact that I was so engrossed in dealing with school and extracurricular activities that I often was “too busy” to think about my emotions, despite the fact that I kept wondering why I felt somewhat hollow inside. (Looking back, that wasn’t a good idea.) Meanwhile, as I’ve said, Intersession 2007 was the worst phase of my emotional emptiness. I had a lot more free time at Hopkins compared to a regular semester–so with fewer classes and extracurricular requirements, I had a lot more time to walk around campus and recall memories from the fall semester.

I don’t need to describe any more details of how I felt during Intersession last year. As I’ve said, it was the low point of my year of emotional emptiness/hollowness/sadness/et cetera, because once the spring semester of my freshman year started, I once again became pretty busy. Plus, I started becoming closer friends with people with whom I didn’t spend as much time back when I was ahem during the fall semester of my freshman year. Slowly, but surely, I came to realize that I can be happy on my own, and that family and friends can be enough company to make me content.

I don’t know why it took as long as it did, but I recovered. One night last week, I was hanging out with a group of friends after we had spent the day taking classes or doing research or working part-time. While we were in the middle of laughing uproariously at something, the following fact hit me: it was only after the fall semester of my freshman year that I started to know this group of friends–in fact, I knew them only vaguely during Intersession 2007! However, during the year that I’ve gotten to know them, I’ve become close friends with them–and of the many people I’ve come to know at Hopkins, they have hung out with me, they have helped me out when I needed aid, they have conversed with me during the late hours of the night or the early hours of the morning, and so on. Then I realized that this was the case with not only the six or seven people I was with that night, but also with other friends of mine at Hopkins.

Before this blog entry becomes a sap-fest of words, I just want to say that during Intersession 2008, for the first time in a while, I can say that I’m as happy as I could be–not just happy, but as happy as I could be. For me, that’s a huge change between Intersession 2007 and Intersession 2008. It’s a change that I like.

N.B. I got the images illustrating this blog entry from AllPosters.com. Given the theme of this entry, they’re images of some of the things that make me happy.

After a pleasant two-week vacation at home, I returned to Hopkins on Tuesday, January 2, since the first day of Intersession was Wednesday, January 3. Intersession is a three-week period between the fall and spring semesters in which students are allowed to do anything legal on or off campus. I’ve chosen to take advantage of what Hopkins has to offer on campus for this year’s Intersession, and my main activities are (1) taking “Power, Glory, and Gladiators,” a one-credit, satisfactory/unsatisfactory course offered by the Department of Classics; (2) taking “Noir,” a one-credit, satisfactory/unsatisfactory course that’s cross-listed with both the Department of English and the Program in Film and Media Studies; (3) taking a non-credit, recreational ballroom dancing class; (4) working at the Hopkins undergraduate admissions office (i.e., filing applications, supplements, et cetera); and (5) filling my free time in various ways.

“Power, Glory, and Gladiators” is a very enjoyable course! While each class is a dry lecture accompanied by slide shows of images, the topics covered in each class are fascinating. Gladiator fights? Military triumphs? Other types of spectacles during the late Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire? Fantastic. Meanwhile, in each class for “Noir,” we either talk about a piece of hardboiled fiction or watch a film noir and discuss it once we’re done watching it. So far, we’ve read an excerpt of the novel The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett and the entire novel The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler; we’ve also watched the films The Maltese Falcon (i.e., the 1941 version starring Humphrey Bogart) and Double Indemnity. The non-credit ballroom dancing class has been okay. Most people registered for it with partners, so JHU_Roxi, one of my female housemates, and I, who registered for the class without partners, have often ended up dancing with each other or by ourselves. While people are supposed to switch dance partners every few minutes in each class, most people stick with the partners with whom they registered, which is why the three of us have danced by with each other or by ourselves often. Sometimes, we dance with other girls who don’t have partners. Occasionally, we dance with guys who are willing to cooperate with the partner-switching rule, or we convince our guy friends to come to a ballroom dancing class with us and be our partners for that class. Nonetheless, we’ve danced with other girls more often than with guys, so we’ve often had to learn both guys’ steps and girls’ steps.  Learning two sets of steps is confusing sometimes, although knowing both guys’ steps and girls’ steps is quite handy.

Despite my academic courses, ballroom dancing class, and job, I still have plenty of free time! I’ve spent much of this free time hanging out with my housemates, since about half the members of my house are on campus for Intersession. Ah, that reminds me of a joke that my housemate Mariadina said one night when a few of my housemates and I were eating dinner at the FFC. Question: What is the integral of 1/house? Answer: A wooden boat house! Why? The integral of 1/house is the natural log of house plus sea! (In symbols, ln (house) + c) Besides eating meals together, my housemates and I have often hung out in each other’s rooms, either chatting or watching DVDs. One night, a few of us watched Gladiator. My housemate Parker–who’s one of my classmates in “Power, Glory, and Gladiators”–and I had a fun time watching it in light of what we had learned in class.

Two particularly memorable moments that I’ve had with my housemates during Intersession are (1) my dinner with three of my housemates at Sascha’s 527 Café at Mount Vernon (i.e., the neighborhood in Baltimore where the Peabody Institute is located, not George Washington’s estate in Virginia) and (2) a night of frolicking and mud wrestling in the rain with five of my female housemates. (By the way, I also went to Sascha’s 527 Café with another group of college students–including Roxi from SAAB–exactly one week after I had gone there with my housemates; it’s such a good restaurant that I didn’t mind going there twice in eight days!) Meanwhile, the night of frolicking and mud wrestling in the rain was quite fun in a childish way, and after the six of us girls finished playing outside, we continued our female bonding by rinsing our clothes in the bathroom and then watching a DVD of the movie The Fight Club. Embedded in this paragraph is a photo of a bathroom sink filled with muddy water and a piece of clothing belonging to one of my housemates after she rinsed it.

While I’m not using my Intersession as pure vacation time at home, my classes, job, and out-of-class adventures have been so enjoyable that being on campus for Intersession already seems like a vacation compared to the fall semester!

N.B. I found the photos of movie posters via Google Image Search. Meanwhile, the photo of muddy water and clothing in a sink is one that I took with my own camera–whee!