On Being Back to School
On Wednesday last week, I officially I became a member of the NYU campus for the Fall 2007 school year. I went to the Union Square office and registered for my class and through the registrar’s window, was handed my class schedule and my student ID.
I had trepidations about going back to the classroom environment. Within the perimeter of my small world at headquarters, classrooms were for language classes and software training. Going out into the real world worried me – was I competitive/smart enough? Who would I eat with at lunch at the cafeteria? My friend laughed at me and said I sounded like a 4 year old on her way to nursery school and offered to take my hand and walk me to school. But seriously, I felt so anxious that by Friday evening, I was ready to call up NYU and withdraw my enrollment.
Well, I didn’t retract my enrollment. The night before Day 1, I hovered around my closet for about 3 hours putting together what to wear for what seemed like the event of the century. I organized my syllabus and some notes from the first email from my professor in a binder and stashed that in an academic-looking bag with my spiral notebook and some pens. I figured I’d decide about bringing my laptop after the first class. I also hardly slept.
I took the subway to downtown Manhattan on a crisp Saturday morning when the tail-end of hurricane Noel blew 20 mpi winds into the city. I easily found my classroom and introduced myself to the professor before realizing that I was the first arrival. Good grief.
Slowly, the class filled. Most of the instructions were done by Powerpoint presentations and some notes on the flipcharts. Although she didn’t really strike me a quite an expert in the field, I thought the professor conducted the class well. Homework and quizzes would be uploaded online, she informed us, on the NYU website’s ‘Blackboard’ site. Textbooks are suggestions but online references and some reading materials were handed out after class. Well, it was like being Rip Van Winkle waking up after 100 years and realizing that yep, they do things quite differently now.
At the end of the day, I stepped out of the campus and my friend was waiting for me at the Starbucks around the corner. He asked me how my day went and I smiled. It was good I said, sort of like a case of déjà vu but in a more ‘Jetsons’ kind of way.
Later, readers… I have homework to do.
I had trepidations about going back to the classroom environment. Within the perimeter of my small world at headquarters, classrooms were for language classes and software training. Going out into the real world worried me – was I competitive/smart enough? Who would I eat with at lunch at the cafeteria? My friend laughed at me and said I sounded like a 4 year old on her way to nursery school and offered to take my hand and walk me to school. But seriously, I felt so anxious that by Friday evening, I was ready to call up NYU and withdraw my enrollment.
Well, I didn’t retract my enrollment. The night before Day 1, I hovered around my closet for about 3 hours putting together what to wear for what seemed like the event of the century. I organized my syllabus and some notes from the first email from my professor in a binder and stashed that in an academic-looking bag with my spiral notebook and some pens. I figured I’d decide about bringing my laptop after the first class. I also hardly slept.
I took the subway to downtown Manhattan on a crisp Saturday morning when the tail-end of hurricane Noel blew 20 mpi winds into the city. I easily found my classroom and introduced myself to the professor before realizing that I was the first arrival. Good grief.
Slowly, the class filled. Most of the instructions were done by Powerpoint presentations and some notes on the flipcharts. Although she didn’t really strike me a quite an expert in the field, I thought the professor conducted the class well. Homework and quizzes would be uploaded online, she informed us, on the NYU website’s ‘Blackboard’ site. Textbooks are suggestions but online references and some reading materials were handed out after class. Well, it was like being Rip Van Winkle waking up after 100 years and realizing that yep, they do things quite differently now.
At the end of the day, I stepped out of the campus and my friend was waiting for me at the Starbucks around the corner. He asked me how my day went and I smiled. It was good I said, sort of like a case of déjà vu but in a more ‘Jetsons’ kind of way.
Later, readers… I have homework to do.