Main Street UCI

is a project putting on my school to chronicle different views and experiences of/on the campus. Check out my submission here:
http://sites.uci.edu/mainstreetuci/2011/10/11/the-transfer/#respond

Science

Believe it or not, I'm kind of liking the fact that I go to a college where my major is (in terms of the number of students who go here) rare. UCI has a great English program, but just about everyone here is majoring in some kind of science. And as far as I'm concerned that's a good thing.

Science is one of those fields that I find endlessly interesting, but have never really done too well in a formal class setting.. (Remember when I took astronomy my first year? Yeah. ) So, now that I'm at a place where just about everyone's scientific knowledge far exceeds my own, I just want to soak it up.

Seriously. I just want to listen to science people talk science talk.

If any of you still had any small, glimmering ray of hope that I'm not a complete and utter nerd, I probably just squashed it. Sorry about that.

I promise that my next post wont be about school or something that no one cares much about.

Only, you should probably take that promise with a grain of salt.

So I've been at school for a couple of days now

and I’ve been trying so, so hard to make new friends. I’m beginning to realize that the bad thing about having such a fantastic core group of friends for a long time is that you kind of forget how you got them as your friends in the first place. How do you break past the “Oh, you like food? What a coincidence because I like food too! Even if it wasn’t necessary for survival, I would still love it!” stage to the place where other people actually have some measure of interest in your life? How do you get to the place where they can ask you how your day was and actually mean it?
Then again, I’m still trying to get to the part where we talk about our mutual love of food, so I probably shouldn’t get ahead of myself.

Obviously I don’t expect to make friends in a week. I don’t really even expect to make friends in a month. I’ve been trying so hard here and I’ve met so many people - nice, kind, interesting people. I just want to feel reassured that some of these people might start to become more than just passengers on a bus or people in front of me at the Wendy’s line.

One More Time For Emphasis

Things are starting to get down to the wire. It seems like most of the people who have tried to "guide" me through college have all been wrong: getting in as a transfer student is easy, figuring everything else out is the hard part. I'm going from knowing everything like the back of my hand, to knowing nothing, but I'm still trying to plan and prepare for the year like I do. I'm panicking that I'll miss sending in something, or that I'll find out I still have a ton of lower division work I have to do, or that - you know - I'll just fail at life.

Despite all of this fear and insecurity at my abilities in what people have over and over again told me is my field, (where are you now, community college teachers?) I am so excited to explore my major. UCI offers two emphasises in English, which basically means you take a couple extra classes to develop you skills in a specific area of English. The two offered are creative writing and literary journalism, and in my mind, the two are distinctly intriguing but also have their downfalls.

I feel like you can't be an English major and not consider creative writing as the end goal of your career, and I know that being in the program would push me - hard. But looking at the program's website makes me more fearful than excited. It looks intense, strict, competitive - exactly the kind of thing that I'm afraid would unleash my doubts in my ability and cause me to become a writing zombie - just going and going, praying that I get somewhere. Not to mention, coming up with a complete idea for a fiction story, even in my head, has eluded me. I can always get the beginning, but never the end.

Literary journalism is a little less clear cut, but from what I can gather it is essentially writing factual articles on a more personal and thoughtful level, existing on a different level than typical journalism. This sounds more like where my current writing style lies, but I also feel like I might find the field to restrictive to the kind of writing I want to do. Focused more on facts than on feeling, more on a story than the image -the emotion- that the story creates.

All the research that I've been attempting to do results in a frozen computer from the twenty Internet windows open, and more questions than answers. I guess I'll just have to hope that the match for both my talents and my desires finds me.

Or, you know, that my counselor is the bomb diggity.