My First Week of Classes

I am exhausted. This morning, to combat a bought of homesickness, I headed out on my bike to explore Boulder. After striking out in a random direction, I biked along a few large roads on the outskirts of town before veering off into a quaint little residential area. After about half an hour of admiring the pretty domesticity of the scene, I looked up to find that I had no earthly clue where I was. So, I turned down a random street and wandered my way around for another three miles until I found a bridge over a highway. As I paused to look around at the top of the bridge, I spotted the mountains through the clouds. For a moment, I enjoyed a glimmer of hope, only to realize with a sinking feeling that this view looked nothing like the view from campus. By my calculations, I was at least ten miles south and another six mile east of campus. But, having no other choice, I climbed back on my bike and struck out in the right direction. It took me another forty minutes of winding my way through back streets, crossing church parking lots, and in one strange scene, crossing a stream, before I found Broadway. I eventually made it back to campus, after running into Williams Village, the somehow making it up to the hill, crossing a lake that I had no idea resided in the middle of campus, and finally stumbling into my hall.


Now, as I sit curled in an amazingly comfortable chair in my dorm, I realize that this morning’s adventure is a perfect analogy for my first week of classes. I wandered around aimlessly in interesting directions until I realized that I was hopelessly lost, then headed toward the largest landmark I could find, and eventually ended up in the right place.

Thanks to my peer mentor, and a good quantity of dumb luck, I never got physically lost finding my classes. But, I did have an adventure finding the classes in which I should be enrolled in the first place. I started out in Intro to Business, Intro to Environmental Studies, Ethnic Literature, and Calculus Two. On Monday, everything was going well, until I sat down in my first class—Calculus Two. My professor rolled in on his long board, wearing cut-off jean shorts and a Polish beer tee shirt. He spent the first five minutes of class going over the syllabus—while I took a few notes and admired the tattoo of the man who meets a tragic end as an ink splat, adorning the back of his shaved head. I was just settling into the class, and enjoying having such an eccentric professor, when he abruptly stopped discussing the syllabus and launched into a full-blown calculus lecture about the nature of functions that need to be integrated by parts. As he took off discussing at marathon speed a back door approach to logarithmic functions, I sat in the second row, drowning. I was so overwhelmed by the end of class that I was nearly in tears. So, after escaping from that terrible classroom, I headed to the only place I could think to go—the Leeds Advising Office.

There I met Jose′, who proved to be my lifeline. He agreed with gentle good humor to see this particularly petrified looking walk-in, after hours (oops), and help her out. He took me to his office and asked me what I needed. That is when the floodgates broke, and everything came pouring out; about how I thought I could handle the class, how lost I was already, how everyone else seemed to know the answers, how there was a quiz the next day, how I couldn’t face that right now, and please, please, please save me!

Poor Jose′ was stuck sitting in his office with a quasi-hysterical teenage girl breaking down in front of him. He was extremely nice about it though. He told me that it was all right, and that he would be happy to switch me out, and that I could take calculus later—or never—if I wanted. So he switched me into Business Statistics and Anatomy (for fun). It seems I never learn.

The next day, I went to Anatomy, and realized that I had once again gotten myself into an upper-division course that I was woefully unprepared for. This time, I did enjoy the class, and it broke my heart to walk into the Leeds Advising Office again and ask to drop the class. But, it was a huge time commitment, I did not have the pre-requirements for, and it was just not feasible. So, I left behind Anatomy (for now) and picked up a second RAP class in meditation, which looks like fun.

I ended up walking out of Leeds that first week feeling that the Business school really was my haven. I stumbled around, with no idea the direction I was going; I have seven different book-return receipts to show for it. But, because the people at Leeds put me in classes I can handle, give me tons of support in those classes, and occasionally let me break down in an emotional fit in their offices, Leeds has quickly become the big landmark of safety, which leads me back to where I need to be.