Senior Year has Officially Begun!

My first week of classes is almost over, and I feel as though I've been here for months already. Let me back up and let you all in on what's been going on so far. This semester's going to be craaaaaaaaazy.

Last Tuesday I had jury duty. Despite the judge being a Williams alum, he was completely unsympathetic to the fact that classes would start on Thursday. I was placed on the jury. Mind you, this was in Pittsfield, which is a good 45 minute drive south of Williamstown. The case was a sexual assault charge-- a 40-ish-year-old man supposedly went to an 18-year-old girl's window and said something lewd, and then punched the window in. He was charged with accosting and annoying a person of the opposite sex and also with breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony. Long story short, the trial went all week and the jury deliberated on Friday. On Friday morning I was told I was selected as an alternate juror, which meant I couldn't vote or even be in the deliberating room. He was found guilty of the comment charge but innocent of the breaking and entering. After the verdict was read (his sentence was 6 months), the judge told us he was already serving 6-8 years in a state prison for kidnapping and sexual assault, and he's also facing 6 other charges of sexual assault. Don't you just love our wonderful justice system?

So beyond my annoyance at watching a criminal get off easy because of stupid jurors ("you can't prove his intent, but I think he was definitely guilty of breaking in"), I missed the first two days of classes. At the risk of sounding nerdy, I felt a bit robbed of my last First Day of School. My classes this semester are: Psychology Senior Seminar (which will probably be referred to as 401 from now on), Clinical and Community Psychology ("my internship class"), Cognitive Development ("Cog Dev"), and The Middle Ages (which I may refer to as something having to do with Goldberg, who is the professor). I love my professors except for 401. The professor for that class, Professor Solomon, sounds like a hypnotist, except he's extremely intelligent and full of himself. That class will be the end of me, I swear it. I have to lead the discussions in two classes and debate in a third. I don't even like going around the room to say our names and majors on the first day of classes. My heart rate goes up, I stammer and forget things (yes, including my own name), my face gets red...it's just disastrous in every way. Besides the forced participation, the topics are Free Will, Intelligence, and Romantic Love (don't be fooled by the last one- it's at Williams, so of course Love = Sex). Can you picture me leading a discussion about sex? Yeah...but all in good time. I may not survive my debate, which is for the Intelligence section. I hope I get to argue against it, because I sure will be proving that I don't have any. We're discussing free will at the moment, and whether it exists or it's actually our minds unconsciously deciding actions for us and then letting us know that we'll be doing them right before the action is executed. If that doesn't make much sense to you, it doesn't to me either. This class so far seems like a philosophical debate, which I totally did not sign up for when I chose Psychology as my major. There's a reason I've never taken a philosophy class. Anyway, enough time wasted on that class. I just talked to the director of my internship today, which got me very excited. I'll be interning 6 hours a week at Early Intervention, which is a program for kids from 0-3 years old who come from at-risk families (either the parents are super-young, or on drugs, or very poor, etc). Tomorrow I get to go observe a play group through a one-way mirror and set up my weekly schedule, and then next week I get to participate in a play group! I have a feeling that young children are my calling. I love working with little kids. Speaking of little kids, I'm also meeting with the director of the Williams College Children's Center (AKA, the daycare program for professors' kids) tomorrow. Hopefully my schedule will allow me to work there this semester. I'm also awaiting a phone call from a mom in Professor Kavanaugh's longitudinal study (he's my prof for Cog Dev) who has a 4-year-old daughter. I'm thinking that this semester will definitely be busy, to say the least!

This weekend I'm planning on going to Six Flags with a group of kids from Williams Christian Fellowship (WCF). There's two bands that I love performing there on Saturday, so we're trying to get a group of people together to get discounted tickets. I'm also hoping that we'll get enough to get a college van (and someone with a van license...) so that I don't have to drive. I must say, my car gets very good gas mileage-- I've filled it up twice so far, and put 600 miles on it. It sure has made life easy, fun, relaxing, sane...you get the picture. It'll also help next month when I have to go to Albany to take the GREs. Talk about scary! I'm working on the general GRE, but I have to take both the general and the psychology one sometime in October. Oh, and I have to figure out what schools I'm applying to, get recommendation letters, fill out applications (much more involved than the undergraduate process, let me tell you!)...I'm going crazy just thinking of all the stuff I've got to get done before December! I hate having a long list of things to do. Actually I think the most enjoyable feeling in the world is having a list of things to do and being able to cross things out. The actual action of crossing an item off the list makes me smile. Does that make me weird? Possibly.

Speaking of weird, I still haven't even seen the two guys I share a bathroom with! We had house snacks, and they were both missing. The few times I've stopped by their room to introduce myself they weren't there. I don't know about you, but I think it's odd to share a bathroom with people you haven't met. Granted, it's a single-person bathroom, but still. There's only three of us using it. At least they wake up much later than I do so we don't have bathroom-wars. And I must say, for guys, they're very...not-dirty. The bathroom is okay as long as the window's open to air out the moldy smell. There are two towel racks, and I put a hook in for my towel while I'm actually in the shower (otherwise I keep it in my room), and yet these guys insist on balling up their wet towels on the same rack. But at least they keep the seat down and don't track in too much dirt.

Alright, I believe that is just about everything that's been going on in my life for the past two weeks. I have a meeting in North Adams tomorrow morning at 10:15, which means I've got to leave here super-early to get my car from Vermont (I swear this parking lot is half-way to Canada), and I have readings to do about infants' perceptions of addition and subtraction for class tomorrow (quite interesting-- at 2 and a half months, infants can "count" up to three), so I'd better get started. I'm determined to get some real-time GRE practice in tonight too. Tomorrow's going to be a crazy, hyped-up day. I'll try to update this at least once a week, and I'll probably include some exerpts from my internship journal, just in case you're interested in what I'm doing. Okay, procrastinating time is officially over!