Thinking about you and wanting to share some thoughts:
Yea! You did it. You got into a super fine school and have arrived there.You have gone from a nice middle class school in Manchester-by-the-Sea (yes, it really is hyphenated) with a homogeneous white student body to a truly international urban school. Big transition, I am sure. You must be so excited to meet peers from everywhere on the planet, some astonishingly rich and some without a cent, some speaking a bunch of languages, some struggling with English. It was my hunger to meet people from all over that motivated me to go away to school. Nothing wrong with the hood but I wanted more.
The real task now is to get and education. This sounds like any convocation speech, but here it is. 'Educate' means to draw forth. I take that to mean to bring up who you are. To do this, I think you need to get a little more of that "fuck you" attitude I spoke with you about this past summer. You will get a lot more out of college if you take courses that challenge you, try things that are outside you safe zone, take classes in which you do not agree with the teacher, stop thinking about grades. (You are not going to fail, in fact, take it from me, it is a challenge to fail a college course. The schools don't want bad statistics. Go to class and turn in the work on time and you already have a 'C'.)
What the current getting into college prepares you for is following and conforming. That really has little to do with education. Some of the most productive classes I ever took were those in which I strongly disagreed with the ideas I was being fed. I read twice as much in order to be able to defend myself. I often learned (ugh) that sometimes a professor actually knew more than I and I had something to learn.
I sort of liken that to the blessings of growing up Catholic (or any strong religion). I had something to rebel against when I started thinking for myself, which propelled me to studies of many religions and history and social trends and politics. You get my drift.
So, lighten up, jump in and have fun. If you are taking creative writing - be creative. Push away your programming about what the teacher will like. That's not being creative, that being a robot. This is your education.
If you are going to drop a class or flunk a class, do it for a good reason like it meets too early on Monday morning, not because it challenges you. I had a math class once where I flunked every test and quiz but I kept going because I needed the credit. Right before the final, a friend was explaining it to me and the lights went on. I got a 'A' on the final. The prof called me into his office to ascertain whether I had someone else take the test for me and when he realized that I did, he gave me an "A' for the whole course. All he wanted was for me to learn.
One time, I was taking a course that included "The Illiad". It was not that interesting to me at the time, and I had dragged my feet. The final came and the question for the three hour final was "What is the theme of the Illiad?" People started writing like crazy, filling page after page. I sat there a few minutes and remembered starting to read the book ten times. The first line in the book was "The theme of the Illiad is the wrath of Achilles". I wrote that and handed in my blue book. I got an "A+". The thing is that I went back and read the book and understood it and will never forget it. I got a bit of education.
So, you probably know all of this already because you are a sensitive, smart girl. Just saying I am thinking of you and thinking about what it is all about. Education.
p.s. I regret not studying Physics because I love it now and was afraid of it in school and it is a difficult self- education subject.
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