It's been 5 years. Five years since I first enrolled at college, and now five years later I am finally moving on to my major. My grades were good, although I've certainly done better (I got a 4.0 GPA last semester). And as per usual I like to review my semester at the end to figure out what I liked and what I didn't like.

My grades:
Creative Writing-Poetry : A
Special Projects-English: A
Survey of Shakespeare: A
Elementary Statistics: C
Biological Psychology: B

I'll start from the top.

Poetry was a good class, although the professor bugged what little patience I had for him. I don't necessarily mind poetry, but just my professor's constant stuck up nose attitude at my Shakespearean sonnets really really peeved me off. One sonnet I spent easily about a half hour on focusing on the iambic pentameter and making sure it all lined up with stresses and no stresses. I handed it in and my professor rolled his eyes and said "Well when Tony Barnstone reads sonnets they're not end-stopped...blah blah blah" I'm not a Tony Barnstone, I'm Melinda S. What was probably more disturbing about this class though was that my professor seemed to have an odd obsession with eroticism and poetry. I wrote a poem about going out to dinner with a villain, and my professor claimed that going out to dinner wasn't "ALL" they were doing. I'm pretty sure it is because I wrote it....but whatever. He was one of those professors you might as well just say "Believe what you want, you will anyway". One positive note about the class though, is I met a good network of writing contemporaries. Everyone of them I'm sure will be famous one day if they're willing to work their little tushes off. But I believe in them. One of them is also going to UCR in a few months for the Creative Writing major so I'm excited for that. I'll at least have him as someone who I know. Overall it was an interesting class...but I probably won't take it again ever if I can avoid it.

Special Projects English was actually just a fancy way of saying I was receiving college credit for a Writer's Retreat that Mt. SAC had. I wish a lot of the sessions had been longer. I left the weekend wanting more....and so I gave more. The assignment after the weekend was to do one of three things. One was to write 5 poems, One was to writes 2 short stories and last was to write a few chapters for a novel. I originally decided to write short stories....but I couldn't come up with a second one. I wrote a really steller piece about a infanticidal doctor, but I couldn't come up with a better short story to add to it so I ended up doing five poems instead. Taking poetry at the same time helped on this front for sure. I got an A because I turned that stuff in. Woohoo!

Survey of Shakespeare was probably one of my harder classes. I've read Shakespeare all through high school and even through a good part of my time at BIOLA university, but I had never had a professor who was so incredibly learned that I found it dizzying to keep up with him. What didn't help was having to work just before the class. So I would come from screaming children and whiny parents to a man who's famous crutch phrase was "HOW does this poem mean?" Very dizzying, but he was very smart. I'm pretty sure there will be a few more professors like him as I move on to my second attempt at a University...and the fact that I got an A in it really means a lot to me. Not only for the fact that in some weird way I actually understood what he said, but I also impressed him with my assignments and presentations. That--in my own opinion--is where I usually have difficulty.

And now we make our way round the English subject matter and into the much harder classes for my verbally inclined mind. Those of you who took part in my "Help Melinda" thread would have to be daft to get the vibe that I am good at math. I struggled though Elementary Statistics. Part of it was the professors fault, and part of it was mine. My professor was a Chinese man who had a very heavy accent. So heavy that he would struggle over words like "discrete" and "continuous". The subject matter when he would present it--would make perfect sense. Then coming home to the math problems at home would present an entirely different story. I would figure out the formulas and then come test time, all the formulas I used would become irrelevant. I had a five page long cheat sheet with z-scores and formula set ups...and I have never seen so many mathematical pages for just ONE test. I passed Elementary Statistics yes, but by the skin on my back. And thank goodness because I don't think I could have stomached taking that class a second time.

And now Biological Psychology. Perhaps one of my more interesting non-English related courses. I took it for my Biological science credit since my Biology class at BIOLA didn't transfer (again, my fault-I failed it). But I found that at the beginning of the semester I was told it was a lot of reading and engaging with the course material. I thought for sure it would be one of those classes I'd have to study for. Not true. I studied perhaps a grand total of about 10 minutes for that class. As long as I showed up to the lectures and took notes--and I'll have you know, I took STELLAR notes--I passed the tests and exams. What was the real struggle for this class came in the middle of the semester with the Term Paper. My background in MLA format came in to bite me in the butt here. Psychological disciplines use APA which is no different than MLA except you are NOT allowed to use a source that is more than 10 years old....because the research is always changing. MLA--it doesn't matter. Use whatever source you can find that helps you support your thesis. So the Term papers assignment was "write about the research". Now in MLA that could mean something completely different. Writing about the research in MLA format is basically the equivalent of plagerism. You use the research materials in MLA as backup for your OWN points. So I felt insulted and belittled when I spoke to my teacher about it. I asked him "It says to write a paper, but write about the research. So do we write about the subject matter or write about the research?" His response was "It's the same thing". In MLA, these elements are not the same...and rightly so. You can't just grab someone elses ideas and claim they're yours. But APA is all research based. When you write a paper it's basically the equivalent of a research paper. I ended up writing my paper in one day on the Biological Factors of Postpartum Depression...and I got an A on it. Not only did I get an A though, I got asked for a copy so he could use it for teaching purposes. That part of it made me feel accomplished. Once I saw that A i knew I would pass the class....although the problem with this class later in the semester was it was during all the Fullerton College rehearsal points so I had to ditch it....which is why it's a B and not an A. But a B makes me feel just as good.

And so here I am. I'm done at Mt. SAC and off to the Upper division at UCR. I will hopefully finish my coursework there within two years and then i will be back to enter the world as a Bachelor of the Arts.:D Plans from there include graduate school at CSU San Bernadino, but we'll see how the BA program goes first. In the meantime, I can now officially enjoy my summer...because I have somewhere I know I'm going to in the next few months.