Earlier in the year, I bragged about my impermeable immune system, so perhaps it is merely bad karma that I am now the most ill I have been in years. The frosh flu has destroyed my voice and sinuses. Unfortunately, while I have a good excuse to stay in my bed (which, I realized this past Reading Week, was more comfortable than my bed at home), my voice and sinuses have been suffering immensely. Aside from my body pains, the academic comeback that I had meticulously planned for the second semester has been disrupted. The psych readings I swore I was going to begin once back to campus remain begging to be read.
Thankfully, all my midterms were before the break, so that does alleviate much of my potential stress. Perhaps I am speaking too soon, as half of the grades have not been released, but I can confirm that none of them brought me to tears or the brink of a mental breakdown like last semester! Growth should be celebrated, no matter how small, right?
Unlike many of my peers, eduroam never failed me. The network always had my back, even when I was in the most obscure of locations. This was until my accounting midterm. All my midterm quizzes and exams were online this semester, so my accounting midterm could be written in the comfort of my own home. After my lab ended at 11:30, I rushed home to my residence to continue studying and I felt confident—at the very least, orders of magnitude more confident than the beginning of the semester, when I was Googling, “What is a derivative?” while my professor was going through the introductory slides. Maybe I should have seen it coming, as things had almost gone too smoothly up until this point, because less than 30 minutes before the scheduled time, my wifi crashed! I troubleshot like a maniac; I might have even broken the world record for number of times a laptop has been restarted in 20 minutes. The mathematical equivalent to the results of my efforts would be a p value greater than 0.1. Suffice to say that I did not end up writing my exam that day. But instructor and I quickly came up with a solution, and I ended up writing it the next day in my actual home since the midterm had been originally scheduled on the Friday of week 6 and I was scheduled to go home for Reading Week.
Reading week is bizarre. In any other circumstances, imitating an abiotic entity would make me bored out of my mind, and time would move agonizingly slowly; strangely though, when I become one with my bed during Reading Week, it seems to be over within the blink of an eye. Approximately zero reading was done during Reading Week.
Although my health is not currently abundant (it will be soon!), I feel as though this semester has been abundant in wealth. Not monetarily, but in all other forms. As I have begun to countdown the days until summer, I have reflected on my experience in residence. I feel so privileged to have been able to have this opportunity because, thinking about it now, the opportunity is so finite. There is likely no other time in my life where I will be living with 50 of my friends, staying up regularly until 3am, talking about anything and everything.
I’m also thinking about having access to higher education in any capacity, especially as a woman. The first ever university was founded in 1088, but it was less than 100 years ago that it became a social norm for women to continue their studies in higher education. Even when comparing literacy rates, 100 years ago there would have been a much slimmer chance that I would be in this position, or even be literate at all. Beyond that, I feel wealthy in happiness. Emotion is a finnicky thing to quantify, but the courses I am taking now are infinitely more fulfilling and simulating, and I feel so prosperous to be learning about what I am passionate about. With less than six weeks left in the semester, I hope to be able to channel the wealth I have accumulated and utilize it towards the finale of my first year.