I decided to write a post about the first half of my senior spring, only to look out the window and remember that it snowed yesterday (so much for the spring part of senior spring). Oh, Ohio weather. As campus has become overrun with the usual midterms frenzy and push to spring break, I’ve realized that the first half of this spring slipped away in the blink of an eye, and I’ve been regrettably silent on the blogs lately. There’s a lot of reasons behind this: events in my personal life, graduate school interviews, my typically hectic schedule. But the truth is, I think I’ve been avoiding writing because I have this feeling that I have to make the absolute most out of my last, well, everything, this semester. These are my last blogs, so they have to be perfect. That pressure is so paralyzing that I’ve started and stopped quite a few posts over the last few weeks. It’s been a nasty cycle, but I’m finally here to break it. So, hi again, I’ve missed it here. Here’s what I’ve been up to in the academic realm this semester.
When I registered for courses this semester, I decided to underload since I only needed four credits to graduate. I registered for eight credits (the threshold to remain a full-time student) and this course schedule is by far my favorite one yet. I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to underload--even with this miraculously light course schedule, I've been as busy as ever, mostly due to grad school interviews and the musical I'm co-directing. Eight credits is exactly what I needed.
Back when I was a first-year, my close friend Oli was a junior. I remember them gushing about a class on somatic meditation and breathwork, telling me I absolutely had to take it before I graduate. It’s been on my bucket list all this time, and I’m finally taking it! Let me tell you, it does not disappoint. We meditate, stretch, dance, reflect, and do a lot of rolling around on the floor. We’ve been learning about the mind-body connection, how meditation affects our neural networks, and loving-kindness meditation practices. This class has felt like a balm for the soul all semester. I’ll pass along Oli’s advice: take this course before you graduate. It will help you deepen your understanding of yourself, increase your awareness and presence, and bring so much joy and playfulness into your semester.
My other class is "Elena Ferrante as a Global Phenomenon," with Professor Stiliana Milkova. I took my first course with Professor Milkova last semester, on Italian women’s writing. It was one of my favorite courses I’ve taken at Oberlin, and I fell head over heels for Elena Ferrante’s writing. When I saw she was teaching another course, all on Elena Ferrante, I signed up immediately. It’s been another incredible course, made so much cooler by the fact that Professor Milkova is the expert on Ferrante. She wrote the first book on Ferrante in English, and was at the forefront of the now flourishing field of study surrounding Ferrante’s writing. Most importantly, she cultivates an amazing environment for the co-construction of knowledge. In last week’s discussion, we ended up interpreting a concept of Ferrante's in a light even Professor Milkova had never considered before. We just read The Lost Daughter, which may be my new favorite novel of hers.
I’ve also been continuing in Professor Gardner’s music cognition lab. This year, we’ve been developing a study on human perception of AI-generated music. We’re exploring how preference judgments are impacted once the question is introduced of whether a piece is AI- or human-generated. We now have our initial data, and the paper has been accepted to a neuroscience conference! All in all, this course schedule has been the perfect fit for my last semester.
