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Serious Business? A Senior’s Reflections

by chathamscholars
Being a senior means business, serious business—and funny business. There is this thing called a tutorial to take care of, meetings to hold, clubs to be officers of. You have to put on your respectable face, give the underclassmen something to look up to. You have to dress well, show up for class on time, and get the best grades you ever got.
Well aware of all this, I woke up at seven a.m. on the first day of my senior year (even though I didn’t have class until noon). I looked out the window of my little room in Laughlin to the dewy treetops and made the first cup of coffee of the year. I had just, only two weeks before, come back from studying Arabic in Egypt all summer, and was feeling on top of the world. I was going to take on the next level Arabic at full-swing, I was going to get my tutorial started, I was going to be so ahead of the game in everything this year.
Enter into First-Year Science. Being a transfer student, I haven’t gotten around to taking a science yet, and so I find myself, three days a week, sitting in the basement of Buhl, trying to wrap my brain around mitosis and the parts of the cell. On Tuesdays I am often found with a furrowed brow, attempting to make what little sense I can of the intricate universe of Microsoft Excel.
Then, of course, there’s Arabic (nothing is ever as easy as it seems). For much of our first week, my fellow Arabic students and I found ourselves without an instructor, without a class time to attend at all. We spent the first few days jumping from office to office, email to email, trying to get our class under way. With only four to five interested students, getting a teacher and time and place configured had become an epic saga. By Wednesday, we were in the dean’s office, pleading our case before an understanding, if slightly bewildered Dean Skleder. By Thursday, alhamdu’allah, our voices had been heard and we were speaking Arabic by the mid-afternoon.
Enter The Tutorial. In the spring of my junior year, I thought I had planned well. I had my foot in the door, my toes in the water, and my head in the game, but when the time rolled around, I wasn’t sure I was ready. My topic, a post-colonial analysis of the novel The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif, seemed somewhat dry and, although I was excited about having been to Egypt, I had already drilled into a new well of other new and exciting ideas. But I was stuck, and really, this was for the best. After what was essentially freaking out, I made peace with my topic, and have, in fact, developed a new interest in it. With further research, I found that the author herself has written a batch of non-fiction which supports my analysis of her novel, and have been riding high ever since.
Let the literary games begin.

At Least Now I’ve Got A Helmet – A Junior Scholar’s Fall Musings

by chathamscholars
I check the time on the dashboard as I slam my car haphazardly into a spot on Shady. Swearing loudly to no one, I put next to no effort into caring about which direction the ‘No Parking’ sign is pointing. It’s 9:25 and far later than I would have liked to be on the first day of junior year. This is just the first of many occasions in the next few weeks that will lead me to the following conclusion: Living off campus doesn’t necessarily make it more difficult to convince yourself to get up and go to class. It does, however, make it far more difficult to be on time.
Bounding out of the car, I flout oncoming traffic and rush across the street to the small pathway that will lead me up onto campus. Sure, it was dangerous. But when being late makes you more anxious than you really care to admit to anyone, you tend to live your life a bit further on the edge than most. It’s not even that I’m running that late—but I still need to buy books, etc., and as a scholar, it’s also my duty to be almost disturbingly early for every class. It’s an unwritten rule in the non-existent handbook. You can look it up. I clutch my coffee to my chest as I half-run, half-totter in my three-inch heels. Yeah, heels on the first day of class. Now that I’ve had caffeine, I recognize what a poor choice that really was. Oh well—with home over twenty minutes away in good traffic, I’m just going to have to deal with that particular decision (and beg the post office boys for band-aids later).
Twenty minutes and almost seven hundred dollars later (you think I’m kidding), I stumble out of the bookstore in shock. I keep glancing down at the bags in my hands, giving a particularly nasty stink-eye to the French book and workbook set that made up just about half of the total cost. (I will later learn that I have bought the wrong workbook and then spend approximately half an hour metaphorically patting myself on the back for not removing the shrink-wrap.)
For the rest of the day, I enjoy the feeling of being a first-semester junior. (Mostly since I know that the euphoria will vanish instantly as soon as spring semester and tutorial planning rear their ugly heads.) It’s a great feeling—that of knowing where you stand and what to expect. As a first-year, I think I was so confused and overwhelmed that most of the time, I didn’t even know I was confused and overwhelmed. Sophomore year, I made a lot of changes to my plans and my major and had to deal with the aftermath of all of those changes. I feel as though while I still may not be the best hitter on the team—at least now I have a bat. And a helmet.

Never A Dull Moment The Thoughts Of A First-Year Scholar

by chathamscholars

As my first month at Chatham draws to an end, I find myself invigorated and excited for my future.  At first, I was definitely homesick.  More than homesick though, I was afraid of the unknown of my future and the loss of a past I truly enjoyed.  It was daunting.  I couldn’t help but think, “I’m still just a little kid!”  It’s different now, though, as I knew it would be.  I knew I just needed to get past the awkward adjustment phase and that just took time and the settling into a routine.  It happened.  Going to classes and hanging out with newfound friends have really helped me find my place here, if even just a small one now.  The Scholars program here has also helped me adapt, allowing for me to see a set group of people who are just as in love with learning as I am Monday through Friday.  We are all so unique and our discussions in class are refreshing and interesting, delving into the intricacies of Plath or the practical purposes of standard deviations.  I find myself engaged in classes, appreciating the instructors’ knowledge and willingness to go that extra step for their students.  I love the breadth of subjects that I’m studying both for my major, English, and for fun, such as Arabic and Philosophy.  I simply love being in classes, as nerdy as that may sound.

It’s not all about school though, being in the city is so much fun, as well.  University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon are both about a 20 minute walk from Chatham, or a short bus ride away.  Just last Friday, I went swing dancing at Carnegie Mellon.  It was so much fun!  There are so many activities here at Chatham as well.  There truly is never a dull moment.  Last week, I helped host a screening of the new Invisible Children documentary “Go”, and went to an additional showing of it at University of Pittsburgh.  Everyone here is so active and interested in social justice.  The community is involved in not only having a good time, but helping out, whether politically or socially.

Being here is an amazing experience and I’m so excited to see where it takes me.