Independence Day!

Another Fourth of July, gone. It isn't necessary to bore you with the details of what happened on campus. The libraries were all closed (depriving me of my study spaces), there was a lot of loud music, and there were fireworks before I went to bed last night. Very fun stuff. I also went swimming in the Connecticut River for about an hour, which was very cool. Perfect water temperature near the surface, COLD water at the two feet level. But I don't want to bore you...

I just read an article in the New Yorker about how little we, as a country, know about our constitution, and indeed, the structure of our government. A great majority of people, for instance, have never read the Constitution. It quoted John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, misquoting the Preamble of the Constitution while holding a pocket copy of it. He substituted it with the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Instead of saying "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union..." he said "we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal..."

This give you a lot of confidence on who is running our government, no?

But the truth is, despite my government major and my public policy minor, even I haven't read the Constitution in its entirety. Neither have a lot of you. And while this isn't the end of the world, I think that I'm going to remedy this problem. On this, the most patriotic of days. It's the least I can do for a document that established one of the richest, freest, and most powerful nations that the world has ever seen.

Whoa!

Did Mark Halperin really just call President Obama a d*ck on air for his (deserved, in my opinion) rebuke of Republicans to "Get it done"?

I guess so...

Best Place to work and study

There's this scene in Inception, where the Dom Cobb (the DiCaprio guy), visits his father in law, an architecture professor. Dom finds him working in an empty lecture hall.

Cobb: "Never did like your office, did you?"

Prof: "No space to think in that broom cupboard..."

I think I share the basic sentiment. If you placed me in a white room, with nothing on the walls, and deafening silence, I would get nothing done. It's not natural. There's no stimulation, either visual or auditory. One might think that this would help me get stuff done–after all, there's nothing to do but work and there aren't any distractions– but paradoxically, it doesn't work for me. It's the same reason I could never study or work facing a blank wall in my dorm room at my desk or on my bed. Small and cramped dorm common study rooms don't work for me either.

The library is a good place to study, but it can get crowded during finals, when everybody's working on that final project, paper, or outline. There are well lit tables and hard-backed chairs, which allow me to spread out and shuffle my (disorganized) notes all over the place. There are some comfortable couches, and the food is never far away. It can get somewhat quiet, though, and I sometimes find myself skipping the library in favor of my favorite study space: the cafe.

My school recently opened a beautiful cafe in the middle of campus. An outside company runs it, but accepts college meal plan money. The atmosphere is like Starbucks–comfortable chairs and generous tables, the aroma of coffee and soft yellow lighting. It has become my favorite study space, instead of the other campus run cafe that was always crowded, noisy, and bustling with traffic. I need a bit of white noise and an attractive environment, and this cafe seems to fit the bill perfectly. I can order a latte and just start writing without the normal fears of taking up valuable table space in a Starbucks. Not many people have discovered this cafe's virtues yet, but I'll indulge in a selfish moment: here's to hoping that not a lot of people do...

Leaving the nest...

Sometimes, as I'm walking through a dorm hallway, I'll see a tough canvas bag with a name and room number label sewn into it. I know then that either a concerned parent, or a coddled student, purchased a ridiculously expensive laundry service plan from an outside company. The company provides you with a bag, and you fill it with a set amount of laundry (a certain number of shirts, several pants, several pieces of underwear, depending on the plan) and leave it outside your door. Someone from the company picks it up, and depending on the services you purchase, wash, dry, and press your clothes. Your clothes are returned to your dorm, and left in front of your door.

I guess I can understand why some people may purchase these plans for hundreds of dollars every term. They want their kid to focus on studying. Having done their children's laundry since the day they were born, they are worried that their poor, vulnerable children will sink in the brutal world that is the college dorm laundry room.

I can understand these concerns, but neither I nor my family could justify these laundry service plans. Cost was a pretty big factor–each use of a college washer or dryer set me back a mere $1.25. Assuming that I had a lot of clothes, and wanted separate light and dark clothing, I paid roughly $5.00 per laundry session. Assuming that I did laundry once every week for each week of my 10 week term, my clothing laundry costs did not exceed $50 dollars. Add in some laundry sessions for sheets, towels, etc. and my total laundry costs set me back a mere $60. This certainly compares favorably with the $400-600 that a laundry service would have charged.

But more broadly, unless there's a compelling reason for doing so (maybe a student goes through sportswear like underwear), parents do a disservice to their children if they hire a laundry service for college. I think budding college students need to step up and do their own laundry. Children eventually become adults with their own households and their own children. As a parent, you don't want their cherished "first time" doing laundry to be in front of a newly purchased machine in a newly rented apartment. Washing your own clothing is a sign of living independently. And isn't that was college is all about?

Rain, rain, go away...

Today, after a short email exchange with the Gym scheduler, I signed up for a Tennis PE class for beginners! The process is usually done online using a quick and easy drop down menu, but the backup class time for one of my courses fell at the same time as the Tennis PE schedule. The backup times, of course, are rarely used, so this wasn't too much of a problem. I'm very excited to be learning a new sport, and I can't wait for next week.

The weather this past weekend hasn't been cooperating. Bursts of sunshine, with black clouds almost invariably forming in the afternoon. I was caught in the rain last week on my way back from my Engineering class without a raincoat. People thought I had just come out of the shower. Ahh, hopefully this means that summer's getting all of the rain out of the way so that we can bask in uninterrupted sunshine later. After all, I have swimming plans for the coming weekend at the river =)

First week of classes, and I already have a 2000 word essay due on Monday next week! Yikes! Of course, I guess I shouldn't complain, since I jostled and fought for my place in this course. But still. 2000 word essay due July 4th at noon? Not cool, professor, not cool at all...

The start of something new

I'm taking classes during the summer. No, this isn't because I'm in need of remedial classes, nor is it because I want to graduate early. My school, Dartmouth College has a quarter system instead of a semester system. I think these changes originated from my small college trying to fill the same number of dorm buildings with more students. This new system has several things going for it: fewer classes each term, quite a bit of flexibility in choosing which terms we want to be "on" or "off," and a class bonding period (all undergrads are required to be "on" in the summer of our sophomore year). But there are drawbacks: our terms and breaks don't often correspond with the schedules of other schools' semester schedules.

This has led to a few phenomena that aren't usually seen on other campuses–the campus is alive with students, and tour groups get to view college students in their actual, natural habitat. Sophomore Summer is also known for being more laid back– BBQs every weekend and quite a bit of river swimming, frisbee throwing, etc. Some students usually just take two classes instead of the usual three to make the most of this experience.

As for me, I've taken the complete opposite tack. I'm taking the usual three classes because Dartmouth has certain requirements on which we must take before we graduate. Basically, the requirements expose us to different areas that we may not be completely comfortable with. There's are requirements to take some sort of art class (Film studies, Photography, Art history, sculpture, calligraphy, etc.), some sort of science class (Biology, Chemistry, Astronomy, Biochemistry, etc.), some sort of literature class (too many to name), some sort of social analysis class (Government, economics, etc.), and several more. What usually happens is that all of the pre-med students have trouble filling their literature and social analysis requirements. Government majors have trouble filling science requirements. You get the picture.

I'm taking an introductory Engineering class, and an introductory Astronomy class to get several pesky science requirements out of the way. The class that I'm taking "just because I want to" is a public policy course titled "Contemporary Issues in American Politics and Policy." It basically explores all of the issues that make the news today: environmental policy, fiscal policy, health care policy, education policy, and more. It's taught by a very popular U Chicago graduate school professor named Charlie Wheelan, who is here every summer as a visiting professor. He's one of those legendary professors who gives you the sense that you're getting every penny's worth of the $40,000 tuition that students pay nowadays. He wrote a very popular book called Naked Economics and if you take nothing else away from this post, I suggest you buy the book and read it. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times become so much more intelligible once you read this book. The almost unanimously positive reviews speak for themselves. I took one of his classes last year and jumped at the chance to take another.

This particular class is unusual because it is guest-lecturer-heavy. Former and current movers and shakers of the economy and of the government come in and give both private talks to our class, and public lectures to the campus. Timothy Geithner (Dartmouth '88), the current Treasury Secretary came in last week to give a small lecture. The former NH senator Judd Gregg also stopped by. Depending on their schedules, Jon Huntsman Jr. (the Republican presidential candidate) is also slated to give a talk. So is Henry Paulson Jr., the former Treasury Secretary who's going to talk about (you guessed it!) financial innovation and regulation. It's promising to be a very interesting summer...