Expect the Exceptional

I wasn’t on campus from Sunday evening through Monday evening, so I’ve had an exhausting time this week cramming all of my assignments, obligations, and activities into what time I was left with.

Academically, I’ve been working on keeping up with my reading and writing for my memoir writing class, having had to turn in a rough draft on Wednesday. However, I wrote that draft more last minute than I would have liked to because I had to give a group presentation for my Shakespeare class the day before the draft was due. The presentation, which analyzed themes and passages through close readings and critical perspectives, went really well. My group members and I worked hard to make sure it was packed with quality content, and we were rewarded with an excellent grade. We also used the assignment as an excuse to learn how to use Prezi.

In my linguistics class, we’ve be learning about speech acts and the exchange of speech between others, in addition to how other people perceive various features of speech, such as accents and dialects. On Thursday, we were assigned an 8 to 10 page paper due at the end of the semester in which we have to analyze the exchange of speech in a type of situation of our choosing. I decided that it would be interesting to look at speech that takes place during the question and answer sessions between lecturers and audience members at scholarly lectures. So last night, a mere hours after the paper was assigned, I attended a lecture given by Dr. David Ganz of King’s College London called “Early Medieval Terms for Scripts,” which talked about how various medieval thinkers viewed scripts, or different ways characters are written. While a lot of the lecture was over my head, I took enough quality notes of the question and answer portion of the lecture to bang out five pages of my paper.

While academics worked me hard this week, the McDaniel Free Press kept me somewhat busy but mostly entertained. Our editorial staff decided that we wanted to do an April Fools’ Day issue this year, so we did, and I spent a little more than half an hour on Tuesday distributing copies outside of Glar. I contributed three stories to the issue, which we named The McDaniel Funion in honor of The Onion. The story of mine that people most seemed to like was “First Year Student Accidentally Calls Professor ‘Mom.'” We put out a lot of funny content in this issue, and I’m so glad I was able to have a significant role in its success!

My week ended on a really positive note when I finally got to choose where on campus I live next year. I’m a rising senior, but since most of my friends (who aren’t graduating this year) are rising juniors, we weren’t able to get an on-campus apartment together. However, we got something even better. On Friday afternoon, the five of us participated in the substance-free housing lottery; the substance-free housing for this coming year is all going to be in campus houses, meaning that my friends and I will have a kitchen. I’m living in a substance-free house this year, and I’ve loved it. The house I’m living in now has a lot of character, and living in it has taught me a little bit about some of the responsibilities of having a house with a yard.

This week was an exhausting one for me, but things all turned out pretty well. Now I can breathe a huge sigh of relief knowing where I’m going to live next year and focus more of my energy on having fun and getting stuff done!