Even though I'm a Writing Studies major on the "Creative Writing Track", my university requires that every student needs to take a certain amount of general education courses in order to graduate. This situation is extremely unfortunate for people like me who are awful at math and science, and who prefer having more than just one right answer that is not at all straightforward, but more so open to interpretation. And even though I'm on the "Creative Writing Track," I still needed to take a few technical writing courses that were not at all fun, but manageable at least.
So, to fulfill these general university requirements, I registered for News Writing, Oceanography, and Principles of Web Design; classes that are the least compatible with Senioritis, and classes that I had no prior background knowledge to that also happened to be very fast-paced with only one right answer. A good student probably would have taken extra time to study or get help outside of class. But, I'm an awful student, and have maybe only studied for something like, seven times over the past four years.
So, I was pretty bummed when I got my first Oceanography lab packet and realized it mostly consisted of unit conversions and scientific notation formulas, or the task of finding the accuracy and precision of water salinity. I had absolutely no idea that Oceanography would even involve math, and I assumed I'd be learning about dolphins or something.
It didn't help having these "what the fuck is even going on" classes and work all day, every day. Some people can function on this type of schedule while doing even more things on top of that, like raising a family or working two jobs or living out their passions, and that's super cool and admirable. But, I'm a gal who requires a fair amount of lounging around/doing nothing time, which I did not receive much of this quarter, so I went a little cuckoo.
I guess the "school" part of my brain went through a bit of a shock, because my college career had mostly consisted of literature and writing classes that were mostly opinion based; you'd read a book (or Sparknotes) that was usually written by a dead author, and then you'd talk about what your thoughts/connections/resonations were in group discussions, and then you would tie your thoughts/connections/resonations to a larger topic in the form of an essay. It didn't necessarily matter how you connected your thoughts to the topic, as long as you were actually able to do so in a way that was clear to the reader. As far as the creative writing classes went, you could write about pretty much whatever you wanted from a given prompt (sometimes prompts weren't even given) then share it with the class, receive feedback, and get an A as long as you followed story structure guidelines and used correct grammar and punctuation. Sure, these classes were hard at times, but in a thought-provoking way that is easier for me to understand compared to hands-on learning.
Even though this Oceanography class did not have anything to do with dolphins and nearly killed me, I'm glad I took it. The class forced me to inquire within myself about things both related and unrelated to this article that I'd love to explain further, but it's 12:30 AM and I actually have a paper for this class that is due tomorrow, so I think I'm going to go to bed now.
I'll have a Bachelor's Degree in Writing Studies in 13 days, but that doesn't mean I'm good at conclusions.
