Shout out to my Arabic teacher that looked at us yesterday mid-lesson and said, “I’m worried. You all look exhausted and depressed.”
Of course we were all like, “Oh yeah we’re dead inside, you haven’t noticed?”
And he snapped shut the textbook, threw up his hands and said, “That’s not healthy! No more vocab! Time for dancing!”
And he taught us a dance from Iraq and we danced instead of doing vocab. We didn’t stop dancing until he saw all of us laughing and was satisfied that we were all feeling better. It was perhaps the coolest, most kind-hearted thing I’ve ever seen a college instructor do.
kids, when you’re choosing your college schedule, you’ll hear a voice saying “just take the 8AM class. it won’t be that bad. you’ve done it for this long” that’s the devil talking
Heed this wisdom.
I keep on seeing this post. As a college grad and a “morning person” here’s my two cents.
Don’t take 8ams! Don’t even take 9ams if you can help it. Always start your class going day at 10am or later. You can get up at 8am to eat breakfast and study/work on classwork if you like BUT DON’T SCHEDULE “I HAVE TO BE SOMEWHERE AND FUNCTIONAL” EARLY.
If you are going to be full-time, also don’t schedule night classes. Classes that start after 6pm are not fun either and leaving class to pitch black darkness will mess with you in a very different way.
As soon as you can, don’t take classes on Fridays. It boosts your morale to only have required classes 4 days a week, trust me. If Monday is easier to do this with then that works too.
If you work during the school year, don’t schedule more than a 4 hour shift on the same day you have class unless you want to be dead inside.
Random final note: Don’t forget to eat, shower, hydrate, sleep, and socialize. If you cannot breathe between class, work, and homework/studying you are over doing your schedule. You are going to make it through this. I believe in you.
1. After two people dropped out of the class (bringing the total enrolled to 9) He said “looks like now we have the right number for a journey across Middle Earth to destroy the One Ring”
2. He referred to the end of Iliad Book I’s feast with the gods as “the real gods of mount olympus”
3. Referred to the greek gods as being like the subspecies of humans known as “entitled teenagers”
4. Always seems to bring in cookies on the day when you absolutely need a cookie
5. Once I started crying in his office and he started crying too because he doesn’t like when other people are sad
6. Referred to Alexander the Great as the “sexiest conqueror the world had ever seen”
7. Outright said what everyone was thinking after reading the epic of gilgamesh “yeah so Gilgamesh and Enkidu were so fucking gay”
THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD ALL TAKE CLASSICS/ HISTORY CLASSES
To all my freshman babies who are panicking right now about how much your college textbooks cost: Yeah, you’re right, that’s some highway robbery. No, you don’t have to lie down and take it. You have options. Follow my advice and fly on your own debt free wings.
1. Forgoe the bookstore entirely. Sometimes you can get a good deal on something, usually a rental, but it’s usually going to be considerably more expensive to go through official channels. Outsmart them, babies.
2. Does your syllabus call for edition eight? Get edition seven. Old editions are considered worthless in the buyback trades, so they sell for dirt cheap, no matter how new they are. It’s a gamble, sure; there might be something in edition eight you desperately need, but that never happened to me. However, I’ve only ever pulled this stunt for literature/mass comm/religious studies books, so I don’t know it would work in the sciences.
3. Thriftbooks.com, especially for nonfiction and fiction. Books are usually four or five dollars unless they’re really new, and shipping is 99 cents unless you buy over 10$ in books, in which case shipping is free.
4. Bigwords.com. It will scan every textbook seller on the internet for the lowest price available, and will do the same to find the highest price when you try to sell your books back at the end of term. Timesaver, lifesaver.
5. In all probability, your library offers a service called interlibrary loan which is included in your tuition. This means if your library doesn’t carry a book you can order it for free from any library nationwide in your library’s network and it will be shipped to you in a number of days. Ask a librarian to show you how to search for materials at your library as well as though interlibrary loan; you’ll need to master this skill soon anyway. If you get lucky you can just have your required reading shipped to you a week before you need to start reading, then renew vigorously until you no longer need to item. I’m saving over 100$ on a History of Islam class this way.
You professors might side-eye you for bringing an old edition or a library copy, but you just smile right back honey, because you can pay your rent and go clubbing this month. You came here to win. So go forth and slay.
Can I add to this? 6. Find PDFs of your book to store on your computer. I managed to find an up-to-date edition of my textbook for sociology by doing this, and other books for other classes. It may be risky to have to look high and low for them, but it’s a godsend trust me
Sometimes the hardest thing about having a mental illness is the time you can never get back. The time before you got help, the time before you realized that you had a problem. The choices you made out of fear or expectations that may or may not have come to pass.
I never applied for college when I was in high school. I was a solid C student (though everybody said I was smart. I now know it was inattentive adhd). But I barely coasted my way through high school, i was certain I’d never make it in college. And besides, this was before the Internet, I had no idea how financial aid worked. But I was certain I wouldn’t get any scholarships with my grades and my parents had explained for quite some time that when we were 18 it was military, college or paying rent, and they weren’t helping with college. So I went military. (I did finally go school, getting my associates at about 30, and now, at 37, finishing up my bachelors)
There’s been other things through the years, that looking back at it now, I realize it was my depression telling me lies. Or my inattentive adhd making me scatterbrained. My house has never been neat or clean.
What I’m mourning today is that, two years ago, pretty much when I hit rock bottom, I lost a semester and a half of college to depression Because of that lost time, those failed classes, I need to go for one more semester, so I can graduate in December this year. (That failed semester also forced me to wait a full year to get the job I have now while I got my GPA up.)
A couple days ago I got an email from financial aid that I’ve hit the max for student loans and so I’ll get no financial aid for fall.
Today that was coupled with learning I got a D in a class, which means it doesn’t count towards graduation, and instead of needing two more classes I need three.
I know I missed a couple assignments in that class and I’ve resisted looking to see that if I’d done them if that would make a difference. Of course it would have, but I can’t change it so no point putting myself through that.
So I have no idea what I’m going to do. My credit is too awful for private loans (another side effect of adhd is being bad with finances). I’m a world better off now then I was last year (for those of you who know what a bitch of a struggle last year was for me). We make enough right now to pay the bills, but not enough to save.
I’ll do what I’ve always done and figure it out. I need to knuckle down and start writing again. I may have depression, but, oddly enough, I tend to be naturally optimistic. I’m upset and worried, but I just have to have faith that, somehow, it’ll all work out. Though as of right now I’ve given up on the idea of being able to travel to Arizona to walk in my graduation. The important thing is to finish, and I only have a little farther to go, depression and lost time be damned.
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Very pleased that that the 4 page paper I kinda last minute pulled out of my ass about the Sherlock fandom got me a 97/100. I had to critically analyze a digital media work that shows how it’s digital format affects human activity. So I wrote about the fandom and how we use digital media, since I’m kinda well versed in that.
