Ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls

I'm not at Harvard every day. I live about an hour away from Boston by train, and that just gets me into the city. Getting to Harvard once I get to Boston is another half an hour or so on the T. Doing that every day would be unnecessary and expensive. (To go to any other school in Boston is kind of equally as inefficient.) I live at the end of a commuter rail, which therefore makes me "near" Boston. In reality I live in what I call Southern Massachusetts, which is not quite South Shore but not quite central MA either, but somewhere between there. I do live very close to Rhode Island; from my house, I can get there in about 10 minutes.

But I do live near a lot of colleges. Between Providence, Worcester, and Boston there are easily around 40 colleges within an hour of me. I am very bad at working at home - I'm easily distracted and really just want to be left alone when I'm working - so I generally just go to one of these schools and use their libraries. Besides Harvard, I've been to a few other schools in the Tour De La Bibliothèques. One school is in my hometown, offering a BA only in dance; it is not very legitimate. The other is Wheaton College, which is about a half-hour drive from me and a lot more legit. I spent a couple of afternoons at BU, too. Most of the time I work at Wheaton College, because it is probably the closest to me and offers more than one Bachelor's degree.

If you spend enough time on college campuses, you quickly realize that they are all exactly the same. Did you guys go on a million college tours when you were in high school? I did - I think I visited something like 10 or 12 colleges. And at each one, someone very charming and friendly would lead you around: This is the student union. Here is our library, with many books. Here is our gym! That giant pile of construction supplies is going to be our New Science Complex! Here is a dorm, people live here. You could live here, if you come to our AWESOME SCHOOL BECAUSE WE ARE THE BEST. It's all about selling someone on what sets this one school apart from the 83 million other schools you could apply to.

In the Northeast, at least, a college campus seems to be fairly uniform. There's a bunch of brick buildings with some white trim or accent. These are neat and orderly and usually organized in a line of sorts - around a quad, perhaps. There's at least one hypermodern building that looks super out of place, with weird glass and angles. Sometime in the 1960s-1970s, every school had a lot of money to (re)build stuff, so there is a collection of fairly horrible concrete monstrosities somewhere; some of them are a mix of bricks and concrete. There might be a bunch of repurposed houses scattered around.

Does this sound like your campus? Probably. It's kind of comforting, actually, to know that the collegiate experience is pretty much the same everywhere you go. Walking around Wheaton or BU or even Harvard feels exactly the same as walking around UNH. Walking around BU this summer was strange because I felt like I had already gone there for years, even though its citiness had turned me off five years ago. I definitely love the way that UNH is set up, but I think could love the way any campus is set up.

we're half-awake in our fake empire

moving out for the last time. i loved this room.



(graduation updates coming soon)

Greetings from SNOWMAGGEDON 2010

I didn't own boots for my first three winters in NH. It was only last year I finally bought a pair... and now I don't know how I managed for so long!

Though I'm from the Northeast, I'm always amused at how much people freak out over snow up here. The joke is that we're always prepared for snow (unlike the rest of the US), but in reality a lot of New England freaks out and overreacts to snowfall every year. Like, really, it's going to be okay, everyone.

dining hall road rage

I live in a nondescript, early-contemporary 1960s style dorm on campus, which is next to a dining hall that is never open. To be fair, The Inconvenience Shack (as I prefer to call it) is open Monday-Thursday, from 7 am - 7 pm. This would be helpful if you are going to be on this part of campus and/or want to go a bit out of your way to eat here. Too bad WEEKENDS are the part of the week when people are most likely to be around. I generally avoid The Inconvenience Shack, as I keep weird hours anyway (read: not 7am-7pm) - and if it is open, I'm probably not around. I frequently eat at HoCo, just because it's more likely to be open when I will want to eat. That, and it is next to where I have most of my classes, shortening the commute from meal to class.

Today, for the first time in about year, I have class on Fridays again. My undergrad career has been a small scheduling miracle: no 8ams ever (I've supposed to have them - they just kept getting changed last-minute), my classes have mostly between 11am-3pm, etc. Granted, this class is at 1 pm, and it's Linguistics Lite. The hardest part of this class is merely getting myself across the street every Friday afternoon. My life is hard, I know.


And so today I went to HoCo, as the The Inconvenience Shack was busy being inconvenient. Coincidentally, UNH is hosting some sort of Great American theatre festival.

I present to you a mathmatical equation for today at 12:30 at HoCo:
Funnel all the people from The Inconvenience Shack + The Normal HoCo Crowd + A Theatre Festival - Seating Space To Begin With = UNAMUSED.
At what point was this a good idea?? Surely the Theatre festival could have used The Inconvenience Shack, right? It's just sitting there! Empty! This is a poor use of resources, UNH.


In related news, class on Friday is going to be difficult to readjust to.