Back to School Craziness

Unlike a good majority of college students in the United States, my school runs on the quarter system. Basically, our year is divided into four quarters, three of them being during the academic year and the final one being split into two sessions over the summer. Because each quarter is only ten weeks (plus one week for final exams), we don't start school until late September every year. However, because of the Jewish Holiday falling on the typical first day of school, the UC system decided to push back the start date until the following week which meant I didn't start school until October 2nd this year. Crazy late! 

It's been almost exactly two weeks since the quarter started and I am already swamped. I'm taking a  full course load (two upper division history classes and my last survey class) which makes for tons and tons of reading. I've been to the library a record number of times in the past eight days and I am still not completely up to date in all my classes. I have about 500 pages of reading per week and since there is no time to waste on the quarter system, my first midterm paper is due tomorrow!

In addition to school, I'm also active in a few clubs on campus (Circle K International, Red Cross and Colleges Against Cancer), and I am finally starting my volunteer position at our local hospital. The hospital in our area has a fairly new program for college volunteers that allows us to work in the Emergency Department and take shifts at any hour of the day. There are also opportunities to work in Labor and Delivery as well as the NICU which is what I'm most interested in. I'm super excited to get started, but I'm currently waiting on immunization records from my doctor as well as the TB testing clinic to open next week. I did get to go to UC Davis this past weekend for the 12th Annual PreHealth conference which was very informative, reassuring and motivating in terms of where I am in the process (*ahem* barely starting out, more on that later) 

Anyway, I'm going to try really, really hard to keep writing on a fairly regular basis since it's nice to look back and see what I was up to and how I was feeling at different points in the year. I'm still kind of riding the high of the start of the school year, but the reality of senior year is quickly setting in and I can tell this final year of undergrad is going to be a crazy good one! 

Time to keep working on that midterm paper...