Welcome to the home stretch.  We have two more weeks of classes – excluding dead week- and I still have one more exam in every class before Finals; the professors sure like to see us squirm.  To be honest, I’m more stressed about this last round than I am for finals; cumulative exams don’t require as much specific knowledge and are far less difficult.

This week we registered for next semester’s classes.  Registration is no peaceful cake walk; it’s more like an epic nail-biting battle as you organize variations of the schedule you want to get and watch as classes fill up.  Everyone is given a “randomly assigned” registration time according to last name and year.  When your time slot opens up it’s a scramble to input the course numbers you want to get, hoping that your computer is just a little bit faster than everyone else’s.  I got lucky, and got into most of the classes I wanted – I did miss out on Beginning Badminton :’(.  Looking at our final schedules, my roomie and I got a little confused about a building code that we’d never seen before; MZ.  Turns out that a lot of classes are scheduled to be in Marquez Hall; the brand new building by CTLM that is currently a work in progress.

Marquez Hall - it'll be a beauty

E-Days was a great time and a much needed distraction from toiling away at homework.  My friends and I hit up the trebuchet competition.  It was fun to watch, and exciting when one of them managed to launch a gallon container of water backwards into the crowd and got us all wet.  We also decided that it would be good fun to all win prizes at the carnival games and I almost took out one of the booth workers with a bean bag trying to knock down a pyramid of bottles (I still managed to win a little blue sticky frog).

Tuesday was my last actual day of BELS 311 lab (it’s a tough course, if you want to know).  Like all the classes here, Bio lab took up a lot of my time and effort, but it was all worth it.  We’ve studied things like allele frequency, enzyme efficiency, electrophoresing techniques, and, as a last hurrah, the qualities of various hominid skulls.  It seems that slowly but surely, with every last day of new material and every course evaluation, I’m starting to say goodbye to Spring 2012 semester.

One last thing I’d like to mention is how awesome the campus facilities are.  The library offers weekend tutoring for many classes; CTLM offers copying, computer labs, and homework help; Brown has an espresso machine – need I say more?; Green Center hosts weekend events (just went there to see a play by Mines Little Theatre); the Student Health Center is highly accessible and helpful; and my personal favorite, the Rec Center, is proof that geeks can be athletic, too.  New buildings are in the works all the time, and campus is already beautiful.  I couldn’t think of a better place to live.

Our awesome and well equipped rec center