Yay first month done!
Sooo something new…for this semester all of my classes are asynchronous. I am both excited and a little worried about that, but so far it’s going great. This style of classes is very freeing and I’m doing well. I think the biggest thing that concerns me is how I’m missing out on a lot of social interaction with my classmates and also just making sure I stay on top of my work and classes. However, this has allowed me to be even more independent and really focus on the balance between school, work, and social events. What I try to do is get majority of my schoolwork done earlier on in the week, then I workout with a friend on campus about three times a week (which really helps me feel included and like a “true campus student”), and then I work and/or babysit about 2-3 times a week 🙂
I think what helps add to my happiness is that I really like my classes; this semester I’m taking ENR 2000, ENR 3000, ENR 3500, ENR 1150, and a women in the Bible course. One thing in my ENR 3500 class, which is like a class more focused on EEDS with community development, is that we are doing a semester long project. What happens is all the students work with different leveled communities (high, middle, low class) and then they focus and figure out ways to make the community better. There are these things called community capitals, these capitals are areas that determine the strengths in a community. There are seven-social, human, built, financial, nature, political, and cultural- they all can overlap and affect one another (for example colleges and schools create more of all the community capitals except nature). For my community I picked the lower class one. I picked this one because what I wish to do with my major, is to help work on sustainability worldwide on all levels of wealth and development (and in my personal belief I think it’s much easier to change a middle/high class than a lower class community with very little resources). It’s a really fun project because we get to make our own ideal community, make the culture, and see all the progress and development.
Everything is pretty mellow, not struggling with anything nor have “achieved” anything (I mean I have A’s and a B if that counts lol).