Finals are Over!

Berries on Campus [Near Mckenna Language Building]

Horray! I know I can speak for everyone when I say I am BEYOND relieved to be done with all my finals and starting winter break!

Being in the dorms with everyone studying all the time- and 24/7 quiet hours- was really weird! I got very used to being able to visit all my friends and take breaks from studying at any time during the semester, so so many tests at once was sort of overwhelming. At my high school students could be finals exempt, which I was except for one semester my entire time there. It was sort of shocking then to have to actually take all my finals and not be able to relax at the end of the semester. Time management was way more important while I was still in classes as well- I ended up having two of my finals at CU on the first day finals could be scheduled, and they were my hardest ones! :( It was tough, but since I had studied well for the Intro to Business midterms I didn't have to spend nearly as much time on the material for the final. Yay!

Overall, taking finals wasn't too bad, but I think I would have done even better if I had taken that type of exam after more classes in high school. For now... it's time to enjoy winter break! Happy Holidays everyone! :-)

Reflecting on the Semester

Last night was the last horrah night for my floor friends before finals- we were all just hanging out, attempting to get motivated to study, and decided that it would be an awesome idea to bake some cinnamon rolls and wait until tomorrow to worry about it. It was a celebration of sorts, and lead to a really intense and honest conversation about our college lives so far.

Susanna, Emily, Jessica and I all came into CU for varying reasons- Susanna and I partially because there was nowhere else to turn after not being admitted at different schools, Emily didn't get in at her dream school but found CU amazing, and Jessica came as an out-of-state kid to escape her native Houston and experience the mountains.

Reminising, Susanna mentioned how she had just been really angry at the beginning of the year about even having to go to school in state, and after working incredibly hard through the IB program at our high school she was left high and dry (like nearly half of the IB class) to come to CU, which for many kids had been a backup school. As the semester wore on though, things improved immensly- after all, college is college, and it's really hard not to have a little fun. :) Now she's really built a community at Colorado because she still got involved, even though she wasn't super psyched about the school- and she's much happier than she expected. :)

Emily came in going for a serious college experience and wanted the whole nine yards- football, dorm living, and bleeding black and gold. The semester went really fast for her too, and her enthusiasm for being here was evident in how many people she has gotten to know over the course of just a few months.

As for me- school is great. I'm bad at adjusting, and going to college was not a happy thought in my book because I had such great friends in high school. Watching everyone go off and create new lives, be in pictures with people I'd never seen before, was almost hurtful at first. I couldn't figure out why I just wasn't getting the same amount of joy out of being at CU that they were from being at different schools- in our hometown even! I managed to force myself into meeting people- I moved out of a single room and in with a roommate (which was the best choice I could have made) and tried to start talking to the people in my classes. Overall the semester has gone well, and now that I know how things work around campus next semester should be amazing!

Emily, Jessica, Me (right to left) [My Room]

Norlin Library

[Norlin Library]

In honor of the ever-dreaded finals week, I decided to scout out Norlin Library and see exactly how packed the place was getting with finals rushing towards the entire school while we finish up our last week of classes. I discovered several things, well known to most CU students:
1. Anywhere in the library where you have a chance of talking/being loud and studying at the same time is totally full. All the time.
2. If you don't want to talk, there's around a zillion nooks all over the place that you can use to study, in every library and most buildings on campus.
3. Construction is never-ending on campus, and although useful, is rather irritating when half of the library's usual study space is taken up.
What I discovered, instead of the lack of space I previously found when wandering through the main parts of the library, was the most extensive collection of books I'd ever seen and tons of room to spread out and work in a quiet place. That's so handy after attempting to do anything resembling studying in the highly distracting dorm environments!

For those of you who haven't been in Norlin, imagine this (and yes, that black dot is a person!):Now multiply that by 3 levels and 3 or 4 shelves wide. THAT IS SO MANY BOOKS! I'm a total bookworm, so I find this to be a really impressive feature of CU. I couldn't even find exactly how many books there are in the Norlin collection on their website, but it's not of any great importance- with an extremely adept inter library loan system, CU-Boulder can put just about any book in the world in your hands.

The Library's typical Boulder view [Norlin Library]

So if you're scrambling to prepare for finals or just want to find some more info for a research paper, I would definitely recommend hitting up Norlin- once you enter the "Norlin Stacks", which are the huge collections I mentioned above- there's some great desks and tables where you can get your work done. But simply wandering around until I found a new room seemed to unearth plenty of empty seats for me as well. :-)

SNOW!!!

[The Koebel Building]

Hey everyone!
Hope that break went swimmingly and that everyone is gearing up for their finals! My break went pretty well and consisted mainly of cooking my first ever turkey solo and sleeping in... pretty typical I suppose! : ) I didn't even realize it when we went to break, but we only have one more week of classes coming up after this Friday- and then finals are upon us!

Everyone should know that after your last final, you need to "vacate the building" after 24 hours- and all the dorms are closed over break. Don't forget anything here, because no one will be around to let you in! : (

Today was the first real snow of the year, and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it! It's really funny to be around to see my friends who haven't seen snow before- I can't even imagine how weird it must be to see it in movies and on TV all the time and never get a chance to make a snowball or build a fort! Outside Darley Commons today people were so psyched for snowboarding that they built jumps along all the stairs, which was pretty funny to watch when I went to get dinner and my mail.

Campus looked even more picturesque than usual (hard!) and even though my feet were freezing because I left my boots at home, I managed to snap a few shots of our first storm of the season. Biking around campus in the snow seems like a feat within itself... somebody told me earlier this year, "Once you fall off your bike in the snow once, it never happens again." Sort of scared me into taking the bus for a while. : )

My camera even got snowed on! [Norlin Quad]

Snowfall, measured in bicycles [Norlin Library]