Oberlin Blogs

Oberlin is an active, interesting place. For students, it is a great boon and a great tragedy: among all the wonderful opportunities we have, we must confront and accept the fact that we will never be able to explore them all.

In which the tables are turned on my previous ExCo fair experiences: this time, I was sitting on the other side of the chaos.

Luckily, Oberlin gives us the opportunity to be on the other side of the podium, too: I'm teaching an ExCo this spring!

Why to pay attention to M.M. Bakhtin readings (turns out he has quite a following in several classes), and why to take Korean ExCo (for sheer awesomeness).

Pokémon! And ExCos! Specifically, ExCos about Pokémon!

With this Oberlin story (with penguins!) in my possession, I had to share it with everyone. I put out an all-call on Twitter and Facebook whenever I was sitting in the library working and knew that people needed a distraction.

I started out this semester with the idea that I would declare Biology or Engineering as my major and get cracking on the classes I needed to fulfill the major requirements. This was to be my buckling down semester, full of sciences and maths of various shapes and flavors.

If you've heard the song "We Will All Go Together When We Go," by Tom Lehrer, it encapsulates the joyful fatalism of finals. This is why we have gender-bending, gravity-smashing swing dances.

Our final for this ExCo was to make our own picture book, the four of us creating a fabulous story. Picture book enclosed for your reading pleasure!

I love the idea of ExCos--it's part of the reason I came here. I signed up for a bunch of them but only one really worked out with my schedule. (One of my sophomore friends told me that it's funny how first-years try to do everything, but the truth is, there's so much interesting stuff going on, it's impossible not to at least try it.)

Dan stood in front of the bulldozers and blocked the construction for hours before they hauled him away. Why weren't there hundreds of people with him? Thousands?

I went into the first lesson armed with ten years of violin lessons, one year of music theory, and a textbook.