FINAL QUARTER!!

Crazy crazy, I'm just a mere 10 weeks away from having my Master's degree! SO excited!!

It's still freezing cold here - apparently I brought crap weather back with me - but at least it's sunny outside, so it's not super miserable. Sunshine pours into my apartment all day, which is quite pleasant.

I started classes today! I'm taking "Making a Scene," taught by the same professor, Rothfield, that taught my Cultural Policy class in the fall. No books to buy - he uploads all the reading as PDFs - and he's just as chill as he was in the fall. I think it'll be nice. Here's the course description:

"This course seeks to explore the arena of social interactions—from flirting to striving for status to solidarity-seeking and beyond—that is captured by the term "the social scene." We make use of literary fiction (i.e., Austen, Flaubert, Wilde), artwork (i.e., Manet), film (i.e., Warhol), and television (i.e., Jersey Shore) that helps bring into visibility the morphology, power dynamics, and ethical or political possibilities inherent in scenes. We also look at some efforts to conceptualize scenes (e.g., Benjamin, Lefebvre, Fischer, Jameson, Bourdieu, Foucault)."

Then I'm taking a class on Academic and Professional Writing. Day 1, and I already learned some significant things about more effective writing. It's not a glamorous literature class, but it'll give me a very practical skill.

My third course is officially a Thesis Writing Workshop, which doesn't have regularly scheduled meetings - just a couple of peer review sessions. Otherwise it's just assumed that we'll be spending a significant amount of time on working on that.

So it looks like this quarter is going to be really chill! I only have six hours of regularly scheduled class; otherwise, I'm fending for myself. I don't think I want to audit a class with my extra time; instead I'm thinking that I should just make it a priority to take advantage of all the extracurriculars that Chicago and UofC have to offer: plays, events, one-off lectures, socializing . . . stuff like that. I've gotten a lot of school work out of grad school, I'm thinking it's time to enjoy the other things available to me for 10 more weeks.

Oh, and I have to use my extra time to look for and apply to jobs. VERY important!!

Then there's my thesis: it's coming along. I have a 20 page draft due next week that I'm trying to methodically work on throughout the week - rather than hurriedly busting something out, like I had to do all last quarter.

Speaking of: I should go work on that for the rest of the night . . .