Another chapter has closed on my life. I graduated this weekend from OU, packed up my stuff, and moved out today. I’m done being an RA, and I’m done with college.
I’m leaving OU with a dual degree (as opposed to a double major, which is a single degree with two concentrations), which is two wholly separate degrees: a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology, summa cum laude, and a Bachelor of Science, with distinction. I also completed minors in French, Computer Science, and the History of Science. It took two hundred and eleven credit hours and five years to get through it all, but it’s over and done.
…Until I leave in August for Illinois to spend another seven years getting two MORE degrees.
I’ll always have good memories of my time at OU. I met a ton of people, did so many new things, and grew up a lot. I lived in Housing, worked for Housing, and met the girl of my dreams thanks to Housing. I took classes from good professors, bad professors, and sit-in-class-and-play-video-games-they’re-so-bad professors. But mostly, I had fun.
Thanks for all the fun.
Tonight Caitlin and I made nummy Christmas cookies together. We got two giant cans of frosting, four tubes of glitter gel decorating stuff, and two tubes of sprinkles. I took the opportunity to put as much frosting on my cookies as I wanted, and no one told me that I couldn’t eat spoonfuls of frosting out of the tub. So I did.
We made a lot of cookies.
I got out of my PChem final this morning and found Caitlin waiting for me. “How are you doing this morning?” I asked. “I fed the squirrels!” she proudly replied. I saw a couple scratches on her cheek and jokingly asked “Did the squirrels scratch your face?”
Oops. Yes they did.
Apparently she was feeding a runty squirrel when a big mean fat squirrel decided that it deserved the food more than the itty bitty one. So it gave the little one a smack and hit it hard enough to knock it into her face, where it scrabbled around a little bit before escaping. Don’t feed the squirrels!
The semester is finally drawing to a close. With all the med school apps, essays to write, and work to do, it definitely wasn’t one of my easier. It’s been one of the best, however, thanks in no small part to meeting such a wonderful girl to spend each day with. Although the classes this semester haven’t been the most strenuous, they have definitely stretched me in some new ways. Most notable among them has been my Literature and Medicine class, an Honors Colloquium. When I showed up to the first day and was given a syllabus, I was taken aback. Every single time I walked in the door, I was expected to hand in an essay, the topics of which ranged from “Write about what it might be like to give birth” to “Discuss an issue of medical malpractice present in the readings.” This added up to well over 30 essays that had to be turned in for this single class. I left that first day disheartened— could I really handle such a requirement?
34 essays and a term paper later, I guess I survived. I really did enjoy the discussion that went on during class, most of it being so topical to my future career plans as a physician… it was just a lot more writing than I’ve ever really had to do for any sort of class. I guess that should be expected from an Honors course.
Sidenote: our Honors curricula requires that you take a certain number of courses that are designated “Honors”, from any discipline you like. Most of these courses are smaller than their corresponding non-Honors section, and most are GenEds (Music, Art, English, etc.) Having come into the University with credit for so many of my core class requirements, most of the Honors offerings simply weren’t available to me. I came into this semester realizing I needed one more class. What were my two choices? Honors Meteorology, or Honors Accounting! I picked Accounting simply because it sounded easier, but boy what a waste of a class that does nothing to prepare me for much of the real world.
Today in Lit/Med, the professor held up a small print of a painting that he had gotten at the Shanghai Museum while he was presenting at a conference in China. He decided that we should have a vote to decide “who among your peers has taught you the most while in this class” this semester. We passed around papers to ballot, and the top three stepped out of the room “until the white smoke signalled that the voters had decided.” I happened to be one of those three, along with a professional writing major and an English major. Together we represented the Literature and the Medicine, surely. When we came back in, I found that I had won this little prize! Rather flattering.
Today I finished the last experiment of my summer class, Quantitative Chemical Analysis. Chemistry has never been something I’m particularly good at (I consider it my weakest science), but the horror stories I’d been told in no way matched the course. It was split into a lecture component and a lab section; the lecture was basically Gen Chem III. I actually like inorganic chemistry quite a bit because it’s basically all math. However, the lab was… pretty terrible. Of the seven experiments:
- Argentometric Chloride Analysis
- Iron Ore Assay
- Antacid Strength Measurement
- Mercurimetric Blood Chloride Analysis
- Calculation of Water Hardness
- Bleaching Power Assay
- Detergent Phosphates Measurement
I only got the first and the last right on the first try. And in this lab, if you aren’t extremely accurate, you fail. There’s very little difference— tenths of a percent— between a 0 and a 100. My lab skills run more towards bacteria, not mixing chemicals until you get just the right color (some of the color changes are pretty hard to discern accurately, and if your samples are different shades of wine rosé red… yeah.
There’s not enough time to do every experiment twice, and if you’re not careful there’s not enough time to do ANY experiment twice, so you have to be efficient. I got done with the seven experiments at the end of June… but that still wouldn’t give me enough time to redo five. So I took advantage of the fact that you can keep turning in results until you get the right answer. I would select some data points but not others, massage my standards, and even average my answers with the guy’s next to me (each sample is different, you can’t just put someone else’s number in for yours). This got me through two more experiments. I had to redo a couple, and thankfully got better grades the second try. And one of them, I just don’t have any idea how to do it better. So even though I’ll end up with a middling B in the lab, the class is so easy that it balances out. It seems silly now that I almost forewent getting a Chemistry major because I was afraid to take this class!
I’ve gotten lots of time to spend with Caitlin these past few weeks, which has easily been the best part of the summer. Friends are awesome. She comes with Val and me now to lift weights, so we can all get buff together 
