Rachel's Paideia Blog

Midterm Blog

This semester has been hard. I knew it would be a strange transition from London back to Southwestern, but I didn't realize just how difficult it would be. I am constantly longing to be back there and am having trouble concentrating on my studies. I make a joke regularly about how study abroad "ruined me." It's not true, of course, but in some ways it's made "real life" so much tougher to handle.
I won't be able to graduate in May as planned. This is partially due to study abroad. No one told me I was graduating so soon, that it really really mattered exactly what classes I took and how to transfer everything correctly. I failed at doing so. Because I had to do academic advising through email with a huge time difference, I wasn't aware that the classes I am taking this semester were probably not the best choices. So I've been struggling this whole semester. Not to mention the fact that going abroad ate up all of my money...
On a more pleasant note, I've been thinking a lot more about my research/creative work recently. I met with Dr. Cleere who is teaching my Capstone class and we discussed some good ideas for what I can do. The seminar is based in Jane Austen's work, which I haven't actually read much of at all. I thought it would be interesting to do some kind of psychoanalytical interpretation in order to relate it to the topic of our Paideia cohort, understanding human behavior. I don't know specifically what work I am going to focus on, but I plan to present at the Student Works Symposium in the spring. Pretty exciting!
It's interesting to see the connections other members of our cohort are making between their Capstone presentations, our Paideia topic and their other classes. Brady's article on True Blood was particularly interesting to me. I've never seen that show and don't know all that much about it, but I definitely did not think there were any sort of real world social and/or political implications within the storyline. I thought it was the same sort of mindless entertainment I feel most vampire fiction provides us with. I liked that he was able to express all sorts of connections to social issues of race and gender and use it as a sort of lens for our own world. However, I don't know just how much I can subscribe to it. Some of it seems like a bit of a stretch to me. I definitely appreciate that the Paideia program stresses the connections between, well, just about everything, but sometimes I wonder how beneficial that is. Sure, there are absolutely connections...I just don't think they're always as relevant as people want them to be. Maybe the program is pushing a little too hard to make everything fit together in places it's not necessarily meant to fit. Just how relevant are the politics of the vampires of True Blood?

posted by Rachel @ 2:48 PM