What a Winter Wonderland!

One of the things I was most excited about coming to Mines from South Carolina was winter, and Colorado definitely didn’t let me down! The temperature has been dropping since August, and on October 25, we got our first snow. Let me tell you, there’s nothing like seeing campus covered in white. Walking to my 8 am Calculus class may have been a bit chilly for my liking, but it was mostly relaxing and refreshing. The fact that two of my afternoon classes were cancelled was just icing on top of the cake! I ended up spending three hours in bed watching the snow fall past my window, and, of course, that night I dragged my roommate and the girl across the hall outside to enjoy the fresh powder. All in all, it was an excellent snow day!

Halloween was quite an experience on campus. From the minute I left my dorm room I saw students in costumes parading around campus, including anything from an 80’s chick to Peter Pan. Some teachers even gave extra credit to their students with the best costumes! The Slate Café was completely decorated and full of jack-o-lanterns from a carving contest. To celebrate the holiday, some of the girls on my floor went to a corn maze nearby. Afterward we carved pumpkins at a friend’s house and put them outside the doors in our hall for decorations. We still have some of the baked, seasoned pumpkin seeds in our food stash.

Events on campus have been picking up in the last month as well with sporting events, weekly movie showings, and comedians on Friday. Unofficial campus games have been going on as well, like last month’s Humans vs Zombies. For two weeks students with orange bandanas around their arms crept from class to class, hiding from the zombies with their bandanas around their heads. The sporadic nerf-gun wars on the classes throughout the day were absolutely hilarious! There are also lots of additional educational events on campus so we can “enrich our minds” or maybe earn some extra credit in a class. My Nature and Human Values teacher offered her students extra points if we attended the McBride Honors Program’s lecture on Mountaintop Removal Mining. I thought it was going to be terrible, but the film was interesting and watching the speakers argue during the question and answer session was entertaining enough to merit the two hours.

Despite all the fun shenanigans around here, I can’t wait until Thanksgiving break! It’ll be nice to get a few days off from the seemingly endless stream of homework and tests. Speaking of which, school itself isn’t too terrible. The classes require a lot of time and effort, but so far nothing has been absolutely impossible. But I’m not in Epics or Physics yet, so we’ll have to see how I fare with those next semester! I register for Spring2012 on Thursday, and I’m totally scared there won’t be any room in the classes I want. Right now I have Thursdays off, and I desperately wanted that again. Alas, Physics studio is twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m willing to settle with being finished every day at 1 pm, but that may not work out either.

I’ll be sure to keep y’all posted on all the drama of class registration and the epic greatness of Thanksgiving break! As soon as I come back I’ll have to start thinking about the horrors of finals, but then I’ll finally be back home in South Carolina. Still, I’m sure as soon as I get there I’ll be counting the days until I’m back at Golden Tech!