Today's the first day of classes in my... 123..4.5? 5th year in college? Wait.. 5 semesters + 2 semesters = 7. This is my 8th semester of most likely 11 semesters trying to get my undergraduate degree. I gradauate from high school in June 2006, I think i'll graduate sometime in 2013 with a bachelor of science in Chemistry. The choice of a double major or minor or graduate school has not been set into stone yet as I have not put in the minimal amount of effort to make a decision on such a matter.
There is a bunch of reasons why I am on the 5 1/2 year college plan and not the 4 year plan. For those of you who have IQs on the right side of the standard deviation curve, you might be asking yourself, 'but wait? 2013-2006=7 years?' I'll answer that, so you can chill out compadre.
The first reason stems from my childhood and schooling. The lowest grade I had ever achieved in K-12 had been a C-. Always passing, even when it came to learning new material without paying attention to a teacher. When I was in my second semester at CU boulder, I had to drop calculus II because I was not going to pass it at all because I had not paid close enough attention in Calculus I. The derivative was a mystery and this integral thing was just impossible to learn with a bad foundation to begin with. "Well fuck," I thought.
Having never seen Batman Begins with Christian Bale, I had never learned to pick myself up and try harder when I fail. Yes I can be labelled as Asian American; more specifically 4th/5th generation Japanese American. But I'm still American. The association between Asians and posessing superior mathmatics skill is not always true. I'll touch back on that in a different post someday. Dropping doesn't equal failure, but when it's a prereq in college to continue at a smooth pace to graduate in 4 years, it's kinda a big thing. So retake Calculus I i did first semester sophmore year. I passed Calc I & II, but then got my first true F in Calculus III. F really does mean Fail. So there is officially an F on a transcript of mine. Distraught with my progress at the time I didn't even care enough to get higher than a D in a history of world art class the same semester.
'I love Chemistry, but God Damnit I Hate Calculus. So fuck it!' and I took 3 semesters off school to work as an emergency medical technician in Centennial. I'm sure the rampant drinking I did freshman through first semester Junior year and spending hours on end playing a MMORPG called Final Fantasy XI didn't help my concentration or grades. I even slept through my Physics II final. That was a big time academic momentum killer there. Luckily I was able to get the appriopriate signatures to take the final the following semester. Damn electromagnetism right-hand-rule was the epitome of just random bull shit that I didn't care about. In hindsight, I have changed my views on everything I learned in that course and personall I love understanding how electricity works.
I don't think I had the maturity to attain an undergraduate degree when I was 18-20 years old, but now that I am almost 23, it's... well... different. Today will be tomorrow's yesterday, but I am astonished how different I was as a person just a couple years of yesterdays ago. I guess it's less video-gaming, less drinking, less tortinos and ramen haha. Gonna try and take a nap now.
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