School Thoughts

Well, I did my med­ical ter­mi­nol­o­gy quiz today, and I think I aced it. We’ll see.

My “foun­da­tions of TCOM” class was split up into three teams. Two debat­ed the place of rhetoric in tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions, while my team act­ed as judges and were sup­posed to do a pre­sen­ta­tion on the his­to­ry of tech­ni­cal writ­ing. I’m glad that I was­n’t on either of the debate teams, since 1) I had more than enough debate in high school (I was on the team); and 2) I haven’t had the required rhetoric class yet.

I some­how got appoint­ed to stand up and give the final deci­sion, anyway—which was that the two teams had been split up over a false dichoto­my, pit­ting tra­di­tion­al rhetor­i­cal meth­ods against more task-relat­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion styles. There’s a place for both. I hon­est­ly think the pro­fes­sor was pleased that we did­n’t pick win­ners and losers.

We did­n’t get time to do the pre­sen­ta­tion, so it’ll be done on Tues­day. To be more spe­cif­ic, I’ll most like­ly be doing it Tues­day. There were five peo­ple on my team. One was absent when the assign­ment was made. One has a very heavy Kenyan accent (I mean VERY heavy). One is a very young fresh­man who got the info on the time­line hand­out WRONG (so I’ll be redo­ing that, too, but I need to find a gen­tle way to point out the prob­lems to her). The oth­er per­son could do a per­fect­ly good job, but he’s very, very qui­et and just does­n’t like to speak in front of people.

When I got home, the team super­vi­sor from the data entry com­pa­ny was here installing stuff on my com­put­er (under Sam’s super­vi­sion). I helped her fig­ure out the set­tings for Cit­rix and changed things back to my pre­ferred FTP pro­gram instead of the one she’d installed, just stick­ing in the set­tings for their serv­er. I have an employ­ee num­ber, and should be able to start key­ing in batch­es by tomor­row morn­ing! It’s a tem­po­rary thing, but hey, I’ll take it.

I have a bunch of read­ing to do, an essay to write that’ll serve as a quiz grade, anoth­er chap­ter of the med­ical ter­mi­nol­o­gy book to learn, some project man­age­ment stuff for the web design team to do, one graph­ics project to do, and anoth­er to revise.

Dr. Hop­per, who teach­es the med­ical com­mu­ni­ca­tions class, sor­ta chid­ed me for hav­ing too heavy a sched­ule. I’m not sure how to take that. I’m tak­ing a nor­mal full load, four class­es, 12 semes­ter hours. I think the fact that all four class­es are in my major is part of why he con­sid­ered that too much-there’s no “blow-off” course in there. I don’t have any room in my col­lege years for blow-off cours­es, okay? I mean, when­ev­er I take the speech course, I expect it to be pret­ty easy. Oth­er than that, there’s not real­ly any fluff.

I only HAVE to take six hours to be a full-time stu­dent, due to the whole dis­abil­i­ty thing—but I’d rather get done with the degree soon­er if at all pos­si­ble. And I’m going to pay the same tuition whether I take 6 or 12 or more hours, so why not? I guess we’ll see how my grades are at the end of this semes­ter. If I main­tain an A aver­age, I may add more hours next semester.

I had this weird thought while doing my morn­ing pages—I’d like a psy­chol­o­gy minor. That isn’t offered at my school. I don’t know where it came from. But I want one any­way. So now I’ll go about fig­ur­ing out how to do it.