Classes have started again, and I’m enjoying myself. Broomball is probably my favorite class, though it has left me in a lot of pain. Speech won’t be as bad as I feared and though it is pushing me, I think my class on techniques for teaching math will be quite interesting.

Military History of the U.S. will be interesting, it’s with my favorite SS department member and I think I’ll become pretty good friends with one of the SS majors in there. Social Problems will probably prove to be entertaining, I’ve heard the professor loves to offend everyone equally.

The rest of my classes aren’t really worth talking about I suppose.

CAEL should be an interesting semester. We’re going to visit area high schools and attempt to recruit some new Partners. In addition to that, we’re going to be working on completely rewriting the training manual and putting together 2 other manuals, one for the Senior Partners and one on editing the manual. Luckily, I’m only helping with those and not in charge of them.

All in all, it looks like it should be a good semester. And for those of you who constantly ask, there’s no girlfriend yet, but I have a couple interests that probably won’t pan out.

My final grades for the semester came back, I didn’t do too badly, though I’m sure I could have done better had I put more effort into it. Oh well, lessons learned, profs I’ll never have to take again.

I passed all three of my PE classes:

Both Orientation to the Social Sci and Themes in Western Civilization with one of my favorite professors at Tech came back as As. So did CyberLaw.

History of Michigan and Historiography were both Bs, but I shouldn’t have that prof again, which I’m happy about. American Foreign Policy was a B too, though this was mainly procrastination and a lack of interst on my part. I’ve discovered that I’m far more interested in domestic politics than international. While I do enjoy the broad overviews of international politics, the details just don’t seem to engage me. It seemed as if everytime I’d work on a discussion of international relations, I’d bring the focus back to the domestic details. Oh well, perhaps International Law over the summer will go well.

In the spring I’m scheduled for some fairly interesting classes, hopefully I can get my head into school a bit more:

My third fall semester at MTU is now over. I don’t have any of my grades yet, but they should be coming in soon and I’m fairly confident. Most of my friends have left town, but I’m going to be staying for work.

I doubt I’ll get to many customers calling, but I’m going to be putting some work into our intranet site and add a few features. Since it is written in PHP and uses a MySQL backend I’ll be learning a bit about that as well. One of my roommates has kindly loaned me a couple of O’Reilly books (SQL pocket reference, SQL in a Nutshell and Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL) which will come in handy.

It looks like I’ll be leaving Houghton on the 23rd and driving back up on the afternoon of the 31st, straight from my cousin’s wedding reception (perhaps I’ll take the time to change clothes). I should be back by midnight though and I hear rumour of a New Year’s party at my house if anyone is interested (it will probably be BYOB and we have a couple of couches that are comfortable enough to sleep on).

Well, my first exam is down, and I think it went pretty well. I believe I should be getting an A in that class, which excites me because it is a 4000 level course, my first.

Today will consist of yet more studying, this time for Themes in Western Civilization and my CyberLaw course. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some research for my policy paper in too. I think I’ve decided to go with a paper on how trade with China has been normalizing their government.

This is just a little something I’d like to leave you with, it was a friend’s away message:

‘Twas the night before exams and all through the dorm
Everyone was studying (and not looking at p0rn)
Their clothes for the next day draped over their chairs
Not necesarily clean (but who the f**k cares?)
Those ill-prepared were giving up the fight
Due to the fact it was starting to get light
The 11th hour slowly drew near…
“Let’s get it over with so we can all go get beer!!!”

Well, I got my letter accepting me into the Education Program at Tech yesterday. One more step before graduation down.