A New Beginning

First of all, I'd like to thank Cassi for the perfect blog title. I certainly couldn't have come up with anything better.

So this blog has been lying abandoned for about three years now, and as I've been reminded of its existence - to quote myself from earlier, "I have a blog?!" - I've given this thing a bit of an overhaul and I'm determined to write something on it every once in a while. I'm keeping my three original posts both because Cassi and Veronika begged me to, and as a kind of reminder of where I used to be.

The rest of this post is going to be about university, and how you shouldn't expect the image everyone tries to sell you. Not in a bad way, necessarily; it's just been something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and this is as good an outlet as any.

When I started university, I had a life path in mind: four years of undergrad, med school, residency, maybe a specialisation, then work. I had myself in a pretty firmly pre-med route, but even by the end of first year I started to consider law school. It wasn't until third-year Human Physiology that I realised how much I would hate being a doctor - the course is known for being what you can basically expect in med school, and I derived no real enjoyment from it. At least, not to the degree that I enjoyed Population Ecology.

Had anyone told me after first year that I would be enjoying ecology so much come second-year Intro to Ecology, I might have laughed in their face. And yet despite dreading having to take the course for my major, I ended up loving it! I couldn't get enough, so I took Population Ecology, which I loved even more. In second semester of third year, I've now dropped any illusions of med school and am focusing on ecology, with the hopes of going to law school for environmental law.

But even now, my plans are changing. I've decided to take a fifth year so I can spread out my course load a bit, and take more time for work and extra-curriculars. I've started thinking about doing a master's between my bachelor's and law school; the School of Environmental Science here offers a course-only Master's of Environmental Science. With a year and eight courses, I'd have another degree - one that would definitely give me a leg up if I continue toward my current goal of environmental law.

Basically, the moral of the story is that plans change. People like to give you this idea that university is very one-track, when in reality it's a very flexible system. Sure, some will follow along the track exactly how you're intended to, but it isn't mandatory. You're allowed to take your own pace, and honestly? The most important tool you can bring with you to university is an open mind.

Summer Sleep Cycles

As the summer draws to an end, one thing becomes painfully clear:

I am in no way ready to be waking up at 7 AM (sometimes 6:30) to go to school.

This thought has been occurring to me for a few weeks, but it struck quite painfully last night at 6:40 AM when I was sitting on my floor, staring out my window and waiting to watch the sunrise. I'd finally pulled myself away from video games at 4:30, and away from the computer at around 5:30 - I crawled back out of bed at 6 when I decided that no sleep was going to be happening.

So as I stared at the sky, it came to me that maybe going to bed at 6 AM and waking up at 4 PM is not the healthiest sleep cycle to adopt a week before school starts again.

I mean, sure, for half of the summer I was doing fine. I still had school (technically), so I was going to bed and waking up at perfectly normal hours (for me, that is; I can usually work on less sleep than the general populace). But that was in a time zone five hours ahead of what I live in. I got back and hey, I was waking up at 10 AM! It was mostly because of jet lag, but I had a nice cycle going on for a while there. However, good sleeping habits never last long with me.

It wasn't long before I started falling into the usual routine of waking up in the afternoon and going to sleep in the wee hours of the morning. And before long, I'll be a part of the sleep-deprived teenage masses, shuffling into the classrooms like zombies because as soon as summer hits, all reason is thrown out the window and we decide that it's better to be awake at night rather than during the day.

This morning, while I was sitting, I thought a lot. It was nice to take some time to think, especially when the world is still quiet and there aren't the usual distractions. I didn't see the sunrise; while my window faces east, it was cloudy and my house is surrounded by trees. This was a little disappointing, but I wasn't staying up any later to see if it would happen eventually.

In any case, let's hope I don't stay up that late (or early, however you look at it) again!