Tuesdays

Tuesdays have always been my favorite weekday.

Today is June 25, 2013.

Today is a Tuesday.

Today I woke up, I went to swim practice, and I swam at a meet.

But today, our phone rang.

“Hello, this is […] from North Carolina School of Science and Math,”

….

“and congratulations.”

—

Of course, this is spectacular news. I started tearing up around my friends at the meet when I found out. From March until now, I had the feeling that when I would be called, it’d be an immediate yes.

But now that I’ve thought about it, I’ve been able to see what I’m going to lose for going to the NCSSM. My school rank, a friend or two left behind(most of mine are going to smath), and many hours of sleep. Right now, I’m not sure it’s the right trade-off for my home school.

Can I really handle it? Will my life really get better by coming here? What is it that I really want?

Thinking this over, I’m not sure. But I’ve got two days to figure this out.

Either way, this is a great success. From the initial denial: having the “nonfinalist” title, I’ve come a long way and made it in. I’ve fought so hard to get where I am to turn back now, right?

Senior Sisters, Course Requests, and Seminars: Part 3

I just updated the “The Bad” page. I want to post more about me, in relation to my home school and this school, because I will admit that I’m a little swept up in the hype. More than a little. But my desire to post is based on wanting to provide a more vivid picture of my experience, but there are 50 posts. That’ll provide a plenty vivid picture. I’m just riled up.

Anyways, Part 3. Seminars. The course catalog describes seminars as follows:

A group of students and a faculty sponsor meet at specified times to
focus on a particular aspect of a discipline outside of the regular
curriculum. Primary responsibility for researching the topic and reporting in
sessions rests with the students, under the guidance of the sponsor.

My impression is that they’re basically student-run classes with the support of a faculty member, likely with varying levels of influence from the faculty member.

I think they’re the coolest things in the world.

The list of seminars was one of the first things posted on the Facebook page for the NCSSM classes of 2014 and 2015. Gradually, students added the seminars that they’re running, and the seminars look awesome. There are 30 posted on the page, and are as follows: iOS Programming, Rocket Science, Journalism, Indian Cultures Seminar, Art History Seminar, Hindi Seminar, Figure Drawing Seminar, Chinese Cultures Seminar, Cooking Across the World Seminar, Drawing Seminar(yes, this is different from Figure Drawing Seminar), Oceanography Seminar, Postmodernism, Into Logic, Classical Architecture, Behavioral Economics, Korean Language Seminar, Korean Culture Seminar, SAT Prep Seminar, Arabic Language/Culture Seminar, Speech and Debate, Polymer Chemistry, Chinese Wushu, Critical Theory, DECA/Marketing, Chemistry Olympiad, Adv. Spanish Lit., Dance Techniques and Choreography, French Cultures, Intro to Genetic Networks, LATEX(LaTeX) Document Formatting.

These are just the seminars, not clubs, though many clubs mirror them. I plan on taking a few, and I’ll probably talk about them later, and they’ll differ from year to year based on what the students and teachers want to offer.

fin

Self-Enrollment

I thought self-enrollment would be crazy, but it wasn’t that bad for me. However, students are responsible for scheduling their classes. On Focus, there is an option to view course meeting patterns. This basically tells you when each class is offered (what block and how many times a week). It is relatively simple if you take the time to plan out each trimester. The difficulty comes in when it is time to enter courses into Focus. Here are a few problems people faced (I faced none of them!Yay!):

1. Seniors pick classes 2 days before juniors. Due to this a lot of classes fill up and then are no longer available to the juniors.
2.Every person is given a time as to when they can log into Focus to start entering courses. Time slots are randomly selected. Those who get times later in the day (11 or 12 o’clock) are lucky if they can get their basic classes in. This year there was a shortage of Chemistry and Physics classes. I was lucky and I got 8 AM. I did notice that most of the classes were almost filled to capacity even though the only time slot before mine was 7 AM.
3. At around 8 AM students started posting to Facebook that Focus had crashed. The school was working on this problem and a solution was found.

A few tips about the process:

1. Sometimes students are willing to trade classes or even sell them. Although, I’m not sure if the sale of classes really happens or the students were joking.
2. When you enter course requests, there is a teacher code for each class. This is helpful if you want to make sure that you have the same teacher all 3 trimesters. If you are really interested in having (or avoiding) a teacher, you can log into your family Focus account and instead of teacher codes there will be teacher names.
3.If some classes are really popular, the school will add additional classes. If a class conflicts with a lot of schedules, the school may move that class to a different block.

All in all, it wasn’t a horrible experience for me. It may have been for SeeTheDawn because he was blessed (note sarcasm) with a late time slot. For those of you that are currently entering courses, good luck!

Senior Sisters, Course Requests, and Seminars: Part 2

So, course requests. They’re more binding than pre-registration, but aren’t actually a signing up for courses. Here’s how I understand it:

Pre-registration is a farce to get you to look at the courses that are offered and get familiarized with the course catalog. And that much shorter, nicer list of courses available to the class of 2015. They aren’t going to copy down your responses from 300+ sheets of paper, and then make you do it again in a much more manageable digital format. Note that this is like 100% speculation.

“The Course Requests entered in this stage of the process will help us to develop a Class Master Schedule that is as responsive as possible to student needs and interests.”, according to the Focus page. Basically, they want to know how many people want to take how many classes so that they know how many classes they need to offer.

Course registration/Self-enrollment is when you actually sign up for courses. It’s official, save any technical errors. This is, again, an educated guess.

Now, the course registration instructions said that we should have 14-17 core courses, but I had trouble choosing between some, since it was all counterdependent… and I ended up with 21.

14<21<17, right? Hey, they didn’t let me in for my math skills.

The problem with doing course requests is that what you take is all interconnected. You don’t care about some stuff, you do care about other stuff, but they can’t hire a bajillion people to understand every possibility and form your schedule for you. Ergo I signed up for a bunch of classes to make sure that I had all my bases covered.

Don’t do that. It’s not chill. Or maybe it is, I don’t know.

That’s honestly about it for course requests. But those were a while ago, course registration is in only a few days; the seniors started today.

Apparently, it was terrible. It appears as though they crashed the site. Several classes filled up with people still wanting to register. Several seniors were posting, hoping to trade courses with one another. An average of over 10 classes per trimester had at least one period full. Juniors don’t get a chance at it until Friday. I’m lucky enough to have the last time slot, which I’ll probably explain Friday while I’m ranting and raving about how the stupid kids messed up my schedule.

Among the seniors, an average of over 6 courses completely filled up. Fortunately, I didn’t want any of those courses. Unfortunately for the seniors, they had a bad time. Let’s see how it turns out for me.