Dan Luu '15

Hey everyone, been a month, things have been hectic since I got back on campus and all the students are here. I don’t have much time at the moment, but hopefully you will get another update from me within this weekend. To basically summarize this semester so far, I’ll tell you what I am doing.
I’m taking Genetics with a 3 hour lab

Continuing with Organic Chemistry 2 with a 4 hour lab

Taking Intro to Psychology

Taking Intro to Sociology

TA the intro biology course lab! (3 hour lab)

andddd I’m continuing my research as a volunteer (not paid unfortunately) because I found my lab and lab mates super awesome. I’ll also give you an update on the Summer Research Symposium, I meant to post that sooner. I have a lot of things on my plate, but I promise I will try to get it all written down for you!
Bare with me while I’m still settling,

Best,

Dan Luu

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So school is starting again in a few days… and I’ve been busy with all my summer plans and trying to work on my poster along with other things, but I’m writing to give you another blog right now!

So did you already move in yet if you’re an entering college freshman? If you are this may be a bit late, but I still want to tell you this anyways. I will first do an emergency check list for people who are moving in within a few days or have yet to pack or don’t know what to buy. I’ll break down by the essentials and go from there. Also this is more of a freshman/possibly sophomore list because Juniors and Seniors have much nicer housing and some things will be changed.

The Emergency/Bare Minimum Check List

  • Bed Sheets, Pillow/s, Blankets
  • Notebooks, pens, pencils, paper
  • Clothes (preferably a small section of summer clothes and winter and a large selection for fall), possibly some hangers too
  • Laptop
  • Shoes
  • 1 pair of slippers/flip flops
  • Shampoo, conditioner, comb, toothbrush, cosmetic needs
  • medicine (if you need it)
  • 1 basket for dirty laundry and detergent
  • college books

That’s all you really need here to really survive in college and pretty much the bare minimum.

The Essentialist list

  • Boxes to hold all of your extra stuff (for supplies, utilities, etc). This can be large bins or thin bins.
  • Small-Large fan. It gets really hot in the dorms depending where you are going, here it’ll be hot when we still move in but the temperature will go down as Fall approaches. The small/large is basically for what you can and can’t fit into your luggage for move-in.
  • Hangers (if your dorm has any closet type space, which they will most likely have)
  • Some snacks because sometimes you’re lazy to move out of the dorm for food anyways
  • flip flops (more than 1 pair)
  • Shower caddy (to hold your shampoo, toothbrush, etc. Very useful)
  • Bed raisers (if your dorm beds don’t raise on their own)
  • Mattress pad for your bed (it’s not really necessary, but the beds aren’t all that comfortable so you should get one anyway, unless you like a stiff bed, then you don’t need it)
  • cups (If you’re pouring drinks for tea, coffee etc), also a sponge and soap
  • umbrella (it rains)
  • 1 or 2 pairs of nice clothes (this is depending, some people dress up all the time but if you’re like me you just need 1-2 pair of your fancy clothes, I only had to wear mine once and over packed, girls will probably need more)
  • headphones

The Recommended list (but not completely necessary)

  • Printer, printer paper, and ink (mainly for color prints and when you are lazy)
  • Water filter if you’re being eco-friendly, water bottles otherwise.
  • Mini-fridge/microfridge: This is for convenience really or if you have stuff that need to be kept cool, then it’s very useful.
  • Posters (for decoration)
  • rug (decoration)
  • Trash bin (they provide you one, but if you’re lazy like me then you’d want to bring another one so you don’t have to take out the trash as often)
  • Cleaning supplies (hand sanitizers, wet wipes)
  • Vacuum (Holy Cross has very lovely cleaning helpers that come in to wipe the floor or vacuum the carpet and take out the trash once a week, BUT you will probably make messes on the weekend and a mini vacuum would be useful. They don’t let you borrow their cleaning supplies, from my experience)
  • Cooking supplies in case you would like to do your own cooking
  • speakers if you want to have some fun

This is pretty much it and all I can think of now. I’ll edit it later on and add things more as I see fit and what is needed. I’m going to be moving in this Sunday myself, and I should probably get packing and cleaning (and work on the poster) but I have a lot of blog ideas and I would like to get out some more posts for you guys so I’ll continue updating.

All the best!

Dan

The Edits.

  • A camera for pictures of your year, or your smartphone camera would work just fine
  • Lamp for your desk, or in general to just light up the room some more

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Here's me doing some PCR work and getting my DNA ready to be sent for sequencing

Hey everyone! So this is the final week of the summer research project and a lot of things have been going on.

I had hope to write this before I finished my research, but things don’t always go as you expected, but here are some final remarks and stuff that happened during my time there.

Some final remarks about my research:

We have currently put a stall to most of the actual research we have been doing and waiting for the semester to start up again. My lab partner and I are working on building our poster and just submitted our abstract for the annual Summer Research Symposium and then it’s pretty much a wrap up on what we have done for the summer. There are a lot of revisions going around at the abstract, and some a challenge is changing your scientific language to fit the general audience and making sure the abstract can be understood. After about probably 8 or 9 drafts though we were able to send it. Now all that is left is to work on the poster.

My lab partner has been out doing stuff for the Jesuit Leadership Conference on our last week of research so she finished her research already and I’m doing some new stuff. As you can see on the left, I’ve had the awesome opportunities to try out PCR (polymerase Chain Reaction), make my own DNA preps, and send out my results for sequencing. Which basically means I grind up the flies and extract their DNA, then I make a lot of more of that DNA through PCR and then send I send the DNA out so I can get back a DNA sequence with all of those ATCG base pairs that make up the DNA and look at the genes that are on the sequence. Pretty cool.

There have been also seminars every week during the 9 week program where a speak from the college comes in and talks about his/her research and it’s been great to listen to all the professors come in and talk about their work and hearing something in a different ideas go around.

I went out with a couple of people to a restaurant called Hiaku for sushi.  Those couple of people were actually people who read my blog and wanted to have dinner with me, so we did! We talked and then ate some froyo (frozen yogurt) at Wooberry and talked more about Holy Cross (this is where I realized she was definitely crusader worthy.). They were Giulia and her dad Joe, and Giulia is going to be applying this year to Holy Cross and I think she’d be a great asset to the college if she was let it. Anyways, best wishes to her!

Giulia, her dad and me at Haiku

The Menu

The bar area where we sat

My froyo
My froyo at Wooberry

Going back in time, earlier that week some of the biology professors held an ice cream party with their research students followed by a seminar by my professor about graduate school and it’s pros and cons which was really helpful. I personally had never had liquid nitrogen ice cream before so having it there was really interesting to me and the ice cream tasted great, and super creamy. Thanks to Professor Bellin for talking through it and demonstrating it and my professor, Professor Webster, for stirring. It was a great time. Excuse my laughing and enjoying sighs of deliciousness. (Professor Bellin gets cut off at the end, but he goes to say that the carbonated ice cream made with dry ice will be fizzy when you eat it, I’d also like to try that someday)

Finally, with the last week of research we had a concert and barbeque outside to finish off the summer research. I really enjoyed the whole experience this summer and would definitely do it again given the chance that my housing experience is better. I’m not too sure what my plans are for my next summer yet, but if I’m not doing anything new, I’m definitely going to research during the summer again.

Best,

Dan

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Hello everybody! I just thought I’d tell you all about the Summer research experience and a little of what I do.

(there is a quick version of this at the bottom; skip this if you want) I’m going to try to give a quick summary without too much science talk, but currently I’m working with Drosophila melanogaster also known as the fruit fly. I’m working in a lab with my professor and one other student. What the lab is doing, is genetically modifying the flies so they express certain mutations. Then we are going to test their behavior by touching their bristles and observing whether they lift their legs in response.  We want these flies to first behave in a manner which they respond to our touches as a reflex. Then, once we have mutant flies, we want them not to respond. If the flies do not respond to our touch, then something is wrong with their neurological circuitry/pathway which we will then examine more closely. We hope to find out where in the pathway that the touch response went wrong. If we find out what is wrong with the pathway then we can look at the genes to see if there is any relation in human hearing loss problems. We are far from looking at pathways. What I am currently doing is setting up control flies to compare to the mutant flies we are going to be making and testing their behavior in our assay. Hopefully you can get an idea what I’m doing there now…

TL;DR (too long; didn’t read)/ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5): We want to make flies glow (using genetics) in a certain way so we can test them and observe how they will behave and hopefully find a relation to hearing and sensation.

Things that I’ve done directly and accomplishments in the lab is we just got our first MARCM fly (Mosaic Analysis with a Repressible Cell Marker – basically means we get glowing dots in specific areas of the fly), and we named her Wendy, she’s the first of many flies that the lab has been building up for 3 years so it is really exciting to see the results we have. What we wanted was flies that showed this green on certain sections of the flies that we would use to test. What I’m doing is developing the best way get the expression of these green spots on certain areas of the flies that we want, so we can test them.

The green glow is known as GFP (Green Florescent protein) and flies will express this because they have the gene to do so. Wendy is different from the the other fly because she can only glow in certain areas because she has different genes that are expressed differently.

Completely Glowing Fly (photo taken from my phone)

Wendy The Fly, Glows in specific areas

Completely Glowing Fly (taken from same camera as Wendy)

Now that all that research stuff is out of the way, let me talk to you more about my experiences. Overall, I’d rate it pretty great with a few minor exceptions. I’ll weigh it out with pros/cons. I’ll do cons first to get them out of the way.
Cons

Housing: The room I got is really big and nice, but No AC. Also the communal bathroom on the hall I’m in is really dirty and there are no urinals, suggesting I’ve been placed into a female floor with males for room fitting issues. The housing I’ve been placed in could be better, especially if we could have got in the senior apartments. There is a communal fridge downstairs in the basement where everyone’s stuff is packed, and there are two stoves which was placed to allow us to cook for ourselves. The only problem is that again, stoves are dirty. Perhaps this more reflective of how the Holy Cross community and students treat their dorms/shared possessions. Although to be fair, we are paying 50$ a week for rent, which is really cheap, so you can’t complain.

Food availability is also somewhat related to the housing issue as the dinning options and hours (if you want to pay for really overpriced food –the same price during regular school session–) are not that great.

Athletic center isn’t open as much and I’d have to workout right after I get out from lab and by then I’m usually tired to go right away and I like to rest a bit before the workout. The pool (my forte is swimming) is closed for the summer for maintenance although hopefully that won’t be the case next summer. So not being able to use the machines and resources of the Hart Center during a wider range of hours is kind of a bummer.

Lastly, being a freshman going into summer research, you could possibly be presented with not many people to interact with and without a car going around places is hard, so I recommend getting a zipcar or bringing a car along. On the weekends most people go home since most people here are from MA otherwise sometimes roommates might be able to go home with their other roommate who lives in MA to not die of boredom.

Also to note, the pay you get may or may not be more than what you would get if you got a nice internship or had a job that pays better. You get paid 420$ a week BEFORE taxes during the whole session (470 if you’re not living on campus).

Okay, now the PROS

Depending on your year, the room you get depending on your choice, is a significant improvement from the sophomore and freshman dorms. I have a suite with 3 other roommates and the room is big relative to the double I had.

The experience so far for me, in the lab has been excellent. Just being on campus for the summer is a lot more relaxing than in the school year, because basically I just do my work and not have to worry about tests or lectures and that competitive feel.

You learn how to use a lot of instruments and the experience is wonderful. I’ve learned how to autoclave things, lab techniques such as PCR (polymerase chain reaction), microscopes, identifying virgin flies, and having the independence to do my own things. You also get to go to seminars that the science research department holds every week with a free lunch and learn what other people around the campus are doing. I also got to go a seminar/talk relating to what my lab does at the UMass in Worcester where there was a talk about flies and other related topics of neuroscience. You also get into practicing and reading published papers, which maybe hard at first but it’s a great skill to develop.

There is also a lot of talk and discussion of Graduate school and studies and I had a lot of experiences learning about the different types of programs and situations people can get into. There were talks and discussions of ethics trainings in science, and I got to experience lab meetings which are really cool and my professor, lab partner and I come together to discuss our work and read over a published paper.

These are only just a few of the many things that I’m doing and learning while researching here, tip of the iceberg sort of speak. I’ll hopefully make another post about the summer research soon since it’s ending in two weeks and add anything I’m missing. Sorry for the long post but hopefully it was informational.

You can find out more about the summer research here: http://academics.holycross.edu/sciencecoordinator/research

Best,

Dan

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So… I said I would do question Fridays if people would leave in the comments section about what they’d like to ask me and about Holy Cross or contact me via e-mail and I would do my best to answer their questions. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, leave them in the comments (you can be anonymous) or you can email them to me at DDLUU15@g.holycross.edu with the title “Question Fridays” or just give me a creative title. With that all said, let us begin!

(1.) Do you feel that your grades and your research work puts you on the correct arc toward perhaps taking the MCAT, applying and being accepted to Med School 1-3 years after graduating from HC?

short answer: I’m not really qualified or knowledgeable on this topic yet, but sure. With regards to the research I’m doing now, I’m not too sure.

I don’t think as of right now my grades are not good enough for med school and I’m not that ashamed of it right now but I know if my GPA stays this low, it’ll be unpractical for me to get in a good school (unless I somehow get a very good MCAT score). I don’t know what the MCAT is like, so perhaps I should be looking into that and what the test is like really…

However, I do think that I am learning a lot from Holy Cross, and their STEM departments and Biology depart is great so far teaching me a lot of things that weren’t tested in the AP Bio test and that I didn’t learn from AP Bio (there’s only so much we can learn). I also wouldn’t say my ‘grades’ put me toward the correct arc to taking the MCAT. Even though I know I got Bs for grades, it doesn’t show how much I learned, what I learned, or what I gained in insight from those classes.

Which brings me to say that when you learn through a professor, they basically teach you what they believe is important in the field. Often they will cover what they are researching or what they find important, but if you have faith in your professors and you’re interested in what you’re learning you’ll have no problem. All in, all, we shall see when I start looking deeper into the application process and tests so I have an idea to compare the material I learned to the material I’m going to be tested on.

On the research end, I don’t think my research I’m doing as of now will particularly help me for the MCAT as much as it would help me outside of med schools and with graduate schools. What ‘research” and med schools (again all me speculating from what I heard about others) involve is doing bench mark research. Bench Mark research is like working with diseases and other more clinically based research the med schools would like to see you have.

The research I’m doing now is involved with genetics and testing the behavior of flies, and it’s still a long way before we’d be doing research relating to more clinically based stuff. But just because it’s not considered bench mark doesn’t mean I’m learning nothing. I’ve been gaining different experiences in the scientific field that have been opening my mind to a lot of things and I’m pretty happy with the research I’m at now. I’ll expand more on my research in a later blog.

That’s all I’ll answer for now, I have some other questions to answer within the next weeks and I’ll do my best to answer them quickly, and if I can I’ll try to get them out as soon as I can and not release another one on Friday.

Best,
Dan

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Hey everyone! I just finished my first year as a student at the College of the Holy Cross, or Holy Cross for short. So what has happened throughout the first year as a student? My first year went overall, OKAY, not that great, not terrible. What made the experience for me “okay” was not the college life or anything, but simply the grades. I’m a very grade orientated person and I would have had a much better year if I got better grades. I ended up with pretty much straight Bs throughout the whole year, and only B’s during spring semester. My GPA at the end of this year is a 3.2, so not that great because I’m hoping to improve to a 3.5 at least by the end of sophomore year.

Some recap:

The Classes/Professors: I found adjusting to my classes to be one of the new experiences that felt weird to adjust. Going to college on your own is different than high school classes, your professor won’t know your name unless you go talk to them in office hours or become an active participant when they ask questions. It’s not like high school where you have a close relationship with your teachers and they know your name by the end of the week (although most professors here know your name within two weeks or so depending on your class size). After this year, I feel much more comfortable getting to know my professors personally, and I’m going to try to for next semester to go to more office hours, or to at least visit once.

The Roommate: When you get a roommate who you’ve never known your whole life in the beginning of the year, it’s going to feel weird that you’re going to be suddenly living with them for a whole year. There are some ground rules you should probably clear with your roommate and what I experienced was a bit of a handful. You two (or three) need to adjust to each others sleep patterns, which for me and my roommate we had no problem. Although there is also a noise/how deep of a sleeper you are that factors into this, because if you can sleep through anything like me, you won’t care what your roommate does. However, my roommate was a really sensitive sleeper and light and noises could have woken him up so I had to be really quiet or stay somewhere else until he slept. The cleanliness of the room was another thing that I just want to mention. My roommate was messy and left stuff on the floor and his side often got messy compared to mine, but I’m a really flexible person so I didn’t mind that much. If you get a messy roommate, I’d just say that you should learn to be a bit flexible and sometimes remind your roommate to clean up his/her side. I became pretty close to my roommate and we were good friends (though I’m not rooming with him next year), I learned to be more flexible with his habits and I got a new friend with amazing musical tastes and an awesome library of songs.

The Whole “Freedom”, I’m On My Own Now: Well this is going to feel quite different for different kinds of people. If you’ve been to boarding school, been comfortable living alone, been fine without your parents for long periods of time, I don’t think much would change for you. If you’ve been sheltered your whole life and never allowed to go to a sleep over like some of my friends, then you’re going to be in for a huge change that you’ll need to adjust too. I’ve always been fine on my own as long as there was food to eat and a good internet connection, so it didn’t feel much different to me. Some others will be home sick a lot or just not know what to do with themselves, others will go wild with the new found freedom and party it up and let their grades suffer. I just kept on doing things like I normally did in high school, except maybe procrastinate more than I should have.

The Distance: You move into a new culture is what happens when you move into college. For me, I was submerged into this new College Life scene and it felt weird to be surrounded by new people. Once I adjusted and accepted the stereotypical culture I just weaved my way around the scenes that I didn’t want to be a part of and staid for the funner parts. However, when I moved back home, things were so much different and so many things had changed around my home town even though it wasn’t very far away. I’ll probably make a separate post about this, but I felt really out of place when I came back home, like I was in a limbo between my teenage years and adulthood. When you move to college and move back, you’ll notice a big difference in your hometown, the people, the old friends and acquaintances, the buildings, the workplace, the restaurants, the stores and all the little things you didn’t notice before but you notice now and its changed.

These are just some of the things I though I’d recap you on for the freshman year. I’m currently back at school doing research with one of my professors and I’ll update you on that soon!

Enjoy your summer!

Dan Luu

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Hey everyone, just dropping into to say it’s the last week of classes and week of finals. I have two finals to take left, and so far I’m predicting my grades won’t be as good as my grades last semester because this semester’s courses were harder and harder to get used to. With that being said, I’m going to try and boost my grades as much as I can with my finals coming and getting the highest grades I can before the final grade is calculated.

Also Happy mothers’ day! I hope you all are grateful for the lives that you have and thank your mom for all her hard work she does. If you do not have a mother anymore or never did, then I’m sure you have that guardian who took care of you like a motherly figure and she/he helped you get through those hard times and took care of you. I hope everyone has a great mother’s day!

I’ll post as soon as I’m done with Finals

Dan Luu

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So I hope you guys have all made your decisions on your colleges and if you haven’t yet because you aren’t a senior or because of some other reasons then I recommend still looking around other colleges and universities. If you’re decided to choose Holy Cross, I hope I see you next semester and I hope you have a great rest of the senior year.

Now a few updates on me: I’m pretty busy with the end of the semester coming and I have a lot of tests coming up along with a final paper that is pretty gargantuan in importance for my grade. Thus I won’t be able to up date as many things for you as I’d like. However, with this being said, I have some pretty cool things for you in the summer because I plan to make some more detailed and image engaging posts. So please bear with me for a bit, I will get on more quality posts soon.

On an exciting note, I’d like to say that I’m going to be doing research in the summer and I’m going to stay on campus and see what the life is like at Holy Cross during the summer, needless to say I’m very excited. I’ll keep you guys up to date soon and I explain more about it soon.
All the best,

Dan Luu

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So I’ve heard Holy Cross sent out it’s letters of admission, and I’m here to tell you congrats! (if you didn’t get one, I’m sorry.. there are plenty of other colleges out there..).

Are you stuck between two schools or you are just re-thinking about what you want to do and where you want to go? Well I’ll give you my prospective, and here is the full transparency, I don’t get paid to say these things about the College, I’m just given the privilege to write my opinions and feelings about daily life and people read it. Other colleges may pay their bloggers or may not, who knows.. anyways this is what I like and don’t like about Holy Cross:

For starters.. if you come here declaring pre-med advising or the biology major, then I have good and bad news for you. The good news is, the professors are amazing in the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (aka STEM) areas and I can only give you information on this because basically all my class this past year have been just that (Intro to Bio, Chem/Orgo, Calc1/2, and Montserrat).

The professors have office hours throughout the week and are really available whenever you need them and I’ve enjoyed all my professors so far. Your classes will be somewhat larger from regular high school classes, but here at a small school; large is like 50 students MAX in intro courses (I know for certainty big universities and other colleges there intro courses can go up to over a 100 and state schools probably past 300 but if you applied to other small colleges your class size should be similar). The professors are willing to work with you and chat about their research and I’ve really liked that part of Holy Cross. Although you do have to go out to seek help from the professors yourself first, they aren’t going to go up to you and ask you to be your best friend.

Once you get to know your professor, classes become much more enjoyable and you will find out for ALL the professors here (from what I’ve seen so far) is that they are really into the subject they are teaching. That’s probably the most enjoyable thing you will see, is that the professors are really passionate about the subject their teaching. Be it in intro bio 1 with my professor really excited to teach you about viruses, in intro bio 2 with your professor giving you the map of the T and telling you how similar it is to how botany will be set-up, and then raving on to tell you about how awesome botany can be, or how math can be enjoyable and have all practical uses in any career path you pursue (believe me, I almost considered switching my area of concentration from what they told me). The professors here really enjoy teaching and talking about their own subjects.

What is also nice about the sciences is if you actually like the subjects it’ll be much easier to learn and you have access to a ton of help and resources if you’re stuck. In every science department there are going to be various tutors (in addition to office hours already available) throughout the week to help you with what you need. In chemistry, you will get tutors through PAL (peer assisted learning not a TA), who are required to go to your chemistry class and sit in on a course they have already taken (even if it is at 8AM) and take notes so they can help you reinforce the material so you can get a better understanding of the subject. For math you will have the calculus workshop which basically runs for 5 days a week where you can drop by and just ask for help. Biology is run the same way with tutors available during certain days. These are all pluses in the sciences..

The bad news is that if you’re going in Bio/pre-med major… well your freshman life is basically limited to constant studying, stress, anxiety, and chaos (but that’s what life is normally like anyways.. subject to entropy and disorder). I’m almost positive no matter where you go and you’re going to be on this track, the feeling is going to be mutual (My friends at other colleges all feel the same stressed out tension as I do and I can’t really compare their classes to mine). Even though the professors are great and are willing to help you, and you have plenty of resources, it does not make the coursework or material any easier. You can go to office hours as much as you want, but if you do not study yourself and spend time by yourself to learn what is taught, it almost makes you going out and seeking help moot. You can learn in office hours and help/review sessions but it may or may not be enough for you to really learn everything you need to know. So the gist is the work and material you learn is hard, tough (unless you’re one of those prodigies or really study all the time).

Also something that is not fun is the amount of work assigned at Holy Cross.. and this isn’t just in the sciences it seems, some of my peers have told me that they get a lot of assignments and readings so this may be exhibited throughout the other top tier schools because my friends at those school seem to be getting a lot of work too in general, so this may not be just a Holy Cross thing. Regardless, you should keep in mind that you should be expected to work and work hard when you get here.

Other things that are pretty cool here: The science complex is pretty sweet and everything looks fancy.. the other large building Stein looks really cool too, but when you’re taking all STEM classes you are most likely going to be stuck in the science complex.
Montserrat is its own topic that I will discuss later in detail. I believe it has it’s pros and cons and a touchy subject for me but I’ll do that in another post since this one is already so long.

Also what I would like to make just as a general remark about choosing colleges in general, is to look at the opportunities that the colleges provide you for while you are in school and when you graduate, I’ve heard great things about the Holy Cross alumni network and what people do after they graduate. You should also look at location to see if places are good for you but the main point I would like to stress is if you are going to a private school, you’re going to be paying $56k approximately per year, where do you think that best $56k is going to be spent and if you get financial aid, which college gives you the most? In cost Holy Cross isn’t better than any other school so you weigh what you can gain from the college with what you pay. If any college doesn’t give you a good experience or something meaningful and useful after you graduate then you’re just wasting $56k a year (with inflation and rising costs maybe up to $250k for 4 years w/o financial aid). So you should also make the time at college worth the money you spend.

I wish you best with your decisions, and if you have any questions just leave them below and I’ll answer them on Friday, for question Fridays.

-Dan Luu

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Warning: Somewhat a bit too personal?

So as weeks passed by and Spring break seems so long ago.. Holy Cross really knows how to provide people with tons of work and things for do (or perhaps all colleges are like this). I’m still managing myself and finding that I procrastinate a lot and I should probably set myself straight since my grades aren’t looking so well and to be frank I often feel overwhelmed. I think for myself, a result from being overwhelmed, I tend to procrastinate more and sometimes I just need to get it going and do work. While I am a bit sad right now, I’m excited for the coming weeks and weather because I know it’ll get better with more practice!

That’s all for now, but as you can see, I’m pretty stressed about my classes, but it’s the college life and you have to work hard for what you want.

I’ll see you guys soon!

Dan

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