The first week back to classes. I have class tomorrow morning (Thurs) and have my GP meeting and a workshop on Friday (that'll be a looooong day), but I'm through hump day.
I found out today (as did the rest of my classmates) the GP defense schedule. My group is presenting second out of ALL the groups! We present at 9:45am-10:25am on Friday, February 4th. All presentations (and Q&A) are 40 minutes long with a 5 minute switch in between. We'll get the logistics of the presentation within the next week (exactly how long our presentations can be, what's expected, etc), but that means 4 weeks from Friday I will be presenting our GP...STRESS! However, I am glad I'm presenting at the defense and not the final presentation. I will feel loads better knowing my speaking role will be finished. :) I feel like we have tons more work to do in between now and then, though. I am glad I'm presenting with my friend. We're taking hold of the presentation now so we can get it the way we feel comfortable presenting it. In addition to the defense, we have our final paper due at the end of the quarter and our draft due shortly after our defenses. When a quarter is 10 weeks long (11 weeks with finals week), that's NOT a whole lot of time to get things done when you're also taking normal classes and some of us in our group works. Ugh. Stress!
In other news, I will have a 2-week Spring Break! My one final is a take home final and, for whatever reason, we get it in week 8 instead of week 10 or 11. My other two classes have group papers/presentations the last week or two of classes and, of course, GP has nothing in finals week. So...Two week spring break!! Yes!
As for my actual classes, they're okay...I'm not enamored of all the group papers, but I'll live. I'm taking conservation planning (ESM 270) and it's the same prof I had last quarter for environmental modeling. The class is Mon and Wed from 2:30pm to 3:45pm. She has a marine background so the class will have some relevancy for me. If Frank Davis had taught it this year, it would have been land based and been a little less relevant for me. Now that it's marine related...Perfect! We'll see how this goes, though. She's a nice lady, but not a fantastic professor. This class has a group paper/presentation and she wants it scientific paper publishing quality. So...that's a little intimidating, but I have a good friend in the class with me so that'll be nice to work with her.
My other class is environmental institutions (ESM 248) and it's Tues/Thurs from 10-11:15am (a little bit of a rough time, I admit it). I was not (and am not) excited about the class, but it's a requirement for my specialization. It'll be interesting, I think, since we're talking about institutions and how they can be applied to environmental issues and the problems with the common ones of today (private property, central governments, etc). On the downside, it's just not a class I'd normally be drawn too so that has its downsides. The professor is interesting, though. I'm still deciding whether he's going to be an unorganized professor or simply one that has a mind that runs in a million directions and will be okay. He talks quickly and randomly remembers different things in the middle of what he's saying and runs off on that thought instead. Sometimes he simply forgot to go BACK to the original thought and we'd have to remind him. On the upside, he's a laugh-er. He does not have an issue with laughing at himself or anything. At the end of class he wanted us to write our names on a piece of paper and write an interesting story he could associate our names to (to help him learn our names since he's bad at remembering names). He specified stories could not be about illness or injuries (since they lack the personal touch when you write "I broke my arm") and if it was about traveling, it had to be something different. It couldn't just be "I went to England." He read all the stories out loud (he told us this early) and we laughed for about the last 20 minutes of class at the stories. It was actually quite fun and we learned something new about our fellow students too. BTW, there are only 10-12 of us in the class. So we're a SMALL group. We also have a group paper in this class and he's going to have us "judged" by another Bren prof during our presentation. He's also stressing writing in this class. So we're writing two memos, 1 op-ed piece (he wants it be like an op-ed piece you'd see in a newspaper or magazine), 1 brief, and our final paper will be a white paper. I've never written an op-ed before. It should be interesting.
My other class is an advance course so it's once a week and it's about Coastal Zone Law (Tues from 1-2:15pm). It's right up my alley since the prof who's teaching it has a JD, but is now a prof at MSI (Marine Science Institute). So it sounds like we'll be learning more about the actual laws in California. I've already learned something, actually. California's jurisdiction is out to 3 nautical miles and our Economic Exclusive Zone (EEZ - fed gov) is from 3-200 nautical miles. Did you know that our territorial seas is only to 12 nautical miles and anything beyond 12 nautical miles is technically open seas? Who'd of thunk. I always thought open seas was past the EEZ since, well, within the EEZ the US (and other countries after the US declared this) has declared claim over all living and nonliving resources. When I normally hear "open seas", I think of pirates, uncharted waters (those don't really exist anymore), and dangerous areas that are unruled by any country. I kind of feel like my fantasy about the "open seas" is a little dashed now by legal terms. :P It's all quite confusing, though. For example, most countries have a 24 nautical mile contiguous zone, but since the US never ratified those treaties, we only have a 12 nautical mile contiguous zone. In addition, why do we have a 12 nm territorial sea and a 12 nm contiguous zone? Anyway, there's a lot of weird overlap like that so I'm learning about that! We also watched an interesting video the first day (partly) called "Coastal Clash" that was done by KQED. It was interesting and I'd like to see the rest of it. It was mostly about beach rights/laws and homeowners. You know...People own waterfront property so they want to restrict the beaches from public access (against the law) and homeowners have their homes falling into the ocean so they want to put a seawall in. Anyway, it was interesting and I'm excited about the class.
My last class is another advanced course, but it's an intensive course. Sadly, the class is the week before my GP defense. I also have 2 assignments due the same week as the intensive course. So, it will be long days that one week (Jan 24-28). I will have 3 hours extra of class each day. That class is international law and I don't know anything else about it since it's just the one week. Should be interesting and rather stressful.
My last class, of course, is GP. So I'm taking 16 units this quarter, but really 14 for the ENTIRE quarter since that one advanced class is only 2 units and it's one week (all advanced classes are 2 units).
Well, with that, it's time to go to bed. I got class in 10 hours...Ick.
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