A month…

Wow. It’s been that long already. It totally doesn’t feel like it; part of me still thinks that I’m at camp, and will be going home any day now. But I’m not, and I’m gonna be here for about 8 more months, and that doesn’t bother me at all. I haven’t blogged much in the last month, so I guess I’ll summarize a bit here.

I am definitely happy with my choice to leave Arizona, study CIS, and do so at Colorado State. I think that even though Santa Cruz was (and maybe still is) my top choice, it would have been a much harder transition to make; I wouldn’t just be around totally new people, but I’d be completely new to my surroundings as well. I know CSU like the back of my hand already, from spending about 6 months here over 3 summers, and that has helped. It’s kind of like the best of both worlds: I’m in a completely new set of people, so I can start fresh without everyone nagging me about the stuff I did freshman year, but I still feel like I stayed at home because I know the town, I know the campus, and it doesn’t feel foreign to me.

Colorado is so beautiful. CSU is a land grant campus, so there are tons of big, grassy fields that you have to cross in order to get to class. They also provide a majestic view of the Rocky Mountains, which are only a couple of miles away. They knew this when they were building everything here, too; many buildings have huge walls of glass on the west side facing the mountains. One of my favorite spots to study in the early afternoon is on the third floor of the library, where you can sit down on the balcony and watch everyone walk across the fields and just take in the landscape.

The people here are really great, too. I don’t feel like I have to be in a gifted program or an advanced group like band to find good people. Everyone here is really down-to-earth and genuine, and they don’t have to be in honors classes or anything to be that way. Part of this surely is because it’s college, so everyone who is here wants to be here, so there is none of that high school crowd that’s like, “I’m legally required to be here, but I don’t want to be here, so I’m just going to be a jackass and make everyone else’s time here suck.”

Living on my own is nice, too.  It doesn’t feel like something drastically changed and now I’m suddenly making tons of decisions for myself- I was so all over the place my senior year that sometimes home felt like it was just the place I came home to sleep in every night. But being completely in charge of my time and activities is nice. My floor turned out to be a really good one, and everyone is very outgoing. We just leave our doors open all the time and one can easily spend an entire day without leaving Corbett hall, and not get bored.

Classes here are interesting… It is just class, so it feels a lot like high school in some respects, but it’s a lot more relaxed. I’m in class for 15 hours a week instead of 30, and the profs are way less restrictive; they don’t treat you like a criminal or someone who needs to be tied down to their chair and pay attention. Instead, they actually figure that you’ll either take responsibility for your education, or you’ll fail. They don’t care either way.

I feel like I have a good balance of my logical and creative sides, doing a Business Administration major (that’s the one with the CIS concentration) and a Spanish major. I miss a lot of the fun liberal arts-type classes that I’ve taken before… I still miss Pullen’s history classes. A lot of the fun Honors classes would be great to take, but my AP credits already covered their degree requirements, so it would be a waste for me to take them.
I’m not really enjoying the business core classes, though. I decided to do Computer Information Systems, which is 27 credits of programming, instead of Computer Science, which is 60, because the CIS program provides a good business background (read: My job will not go to India and I won’t have to sit in a box all day writing code.) But I am honestly dreading all of the accounting, marketing, and business law classes… There are 34 credits in the core, meaning that it’s more than the actual programming classes themselves 😛
But I’m going to stick with it. At least for now. If I want to take more programming, I’ll get a Masters degree in Computer Science.

I miss drumline and band. Not terribly, but just playing electric drums in my dorm isn’t the same. I think it’s just a need for more musical involvement, not necessarily at school. I need to find people to jam with. Especially a bassist. Someone who can competently improvise melody would be AMAZING, too.

I’ve been listening to a lot of different music now. Here are my current favorites:

• Regina Spektor
• Louis Armstrong
• Bill Bruford’s Earthworks
• Acoustic Alchemy
• Wendy Woo
• The Mars Volta (like I’ve said before, Amputechture is amazing)

An interesting observation before I go: Colorado is much less diverse than Arizona. I think McClintock was something like 50% white, 30% hispanic, 12% black and maybe 8% asian. CSU is a LOT more white overall. But in the minorities that are present, however, I think that there is a lot less interracial tension here. People just happen to be different, but there aren’t huge cliques centered around race, which are definitely present in Arizona.