Life Update

I have the hardest time keeping people updated on the major things going on in my life. So, I decided to write this blog post!

Family
I guess the biggest change in my family recently has been my parent's house in Minneapolis. This past year my parents have been working SUPER hard to renovate our house, with the aim of renting out the second floor. They did a lot of renovations on the first floor, where we live, and then they put the finishing touches on the second floor to make it a functioning duplex. And now, they are officially landlords. Currently the house is a bit chaotic (moving from an entire house to only one floor of it is hard!) but I'm really proud of all they've done. I've been at college during most of the process, and it's amazing to see the progress every time I go home.

Jobs
This semester my jobs have been quite different than the rest of my semesters at Wellesley. I'm still working at the campus library, but I also have a couple other (paid) projects going on too. I am working with a math professor, grading the problem sets for his calculus II class. It's pretty common at Wellesley for classes with weekly problem sets to have graders, so the professor doesn't have to spend their time doing it. My other project originated this past summer. I attended a Humanities Lab where I worked with a Wellesley professor exploring how to use digital maps to study mythological stories and artifacts (he happens to be an archaeologist as well as a classics professor). At the beginning of the semester he asked if I would continue to work with him, mostly preparing materials for classes he is teaching. Both of these have been very interesting experiences, but I'm finding myself having a harder time this semester managing my schedule, since I have fewer scheduled work shifts and more things I need to do on my own time.

Classes
This might not seem like a major life update, but my classes consume a lot of my time so I like talking about them. I'm taking four classes this semester, which is the normal amount at Wellesley, but my new challenge for this semester has been that two of my classes also have labs. (Basically that means that they meet an extra time each week, for two or three hours, and sometimes there are extra assignments to turn in.) I'm taking two computer science classes, one on computer graphics and the other on computer hardware and digital logic (which also has a three hour lab every week).

This is an example of what we do in my graphics
class. It looks deceptively simple, but it wasn't
simple to program!

This is part of what we do in my
computer hardware lab.

I'm also taking Astronomy 101, which has a lab as well. Astronomy lab is really fun, it has been cloudy a lot this semester so its also been a bit disappointing (its rather difficult to observe the sky when its cloudy). Finally, I'm taking Intermediate Latin (currently we are reading Latin love poetry).

College Major
I have officially been a computer science major since last fall, and that is still something I am very passionate about. There are two other things I am still considering adding on to that - I may be a math minor or I may be a Classical Civilizations major. Unfortunately at Wellesley you can only declare two things total, so I can either do one or the other. People ask me a lot what made me decide to take so many classics courses. I took one class my first year which was really interesting, and then the next semester the same professor (who I really liked) was teaching Latin 101 so I took it, and now here I am reading Latin Love Elegy and making digital maps about Greek mythology... Honestly it just kinda happened.

Study Abroad
One of the most exciting things in the works right now is study abroad next semester. There are still a lot of details to figure out, but things are starting to come together. I will be spending the semester at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. I am quite sure you will be hearing a lot more about this as time goes on! But I honestly don't have a lot of details to share just yet.

And that's about all I can think of right now. As always, I'll talk to you guys again soon!