i love school, part 4 of 5

high school ended and i began college fall of 2002. i thought about going to an out of state college like cedarville, cornerstone, liberty, or colorado christian. i applied to a few, and procrastinated too much - therefore my family and i decided that weber was the best decision at least for the first year. well i ended up enjoying it, and stayed all 5 1/2 years. yes five.five years technically.

i am a social science composite major with an emphasis in teaching geography. i spent four years completing my generals and major and 1 1/2 years in the education program. there are a few smells/memories i would like to share with you:

college was my first experience on a campus that was "outdoor" or multiple buildings. i loved spring mornings on campus when it was raining or just after the rain. i remember walking from the social science building to building one - it was uphill and most everyone would walk with their head looking at the ground because of the rain but they missed out on the gorgeous mountains covered in mist. it was such a refreshing sight and smell. i love the smell of rain, even when it comes from the west/great salt lake area. the downside to looking at the mountains during the rain was the rain in your face and the earthworms you would step on, there were a lot! either way the rain/misty mornings reminded me so much of God's love, especially right before a class full of evolutionist hippies.

building one is no longer at weber state. it was torn down to build a giant new humanities building. i loved building one, but only because of the time i spent there. the building was terribly old, it smelled like brick and old carpet, the heating in the building was steam powered, and all the pieces of furniture were hand-me-downs from other departments who had received new equipment. building one was half geography, and half foreign language - okay it was 3 rooms for geography and the rest (maybe 5) for foreign language. the first geography class i had in building one (the geog classes were also in the LL building, science building, and SS) involved me walking through the geog office area into a back room with 9 desks surrounded by 5 computers. yep, it was the cartography lab - we had to split the cartography class into three sections to use the computers. okay, anyway, the first class i had in building one was the geography of africa taught by dr. d. it was great and i think it helped me really decide to major in geography - emphasis in global studies/teaching. it was also the smallest classroom i had ever been in. my favorite classroom was the first classroom on the left if you enter from the south end by the union building. it smelled like paper maps - they were stuffed in long, skinny drawers in tall cabinets that took up too much space - we never even used the maps, most professors used overheads or power point. the seven minute maps that we did use came from another room entirely. during the winter months the pipes used to heat the building would hiss and jerk so loudly that professors would have to stop what they were saying and wait for the noise to stop. if you sat by the wall with the vents it was even harder to hear.

alright, college was one of my best school memories. it seems i had to learn everything i knew about studying, writing, and listening in college - which also helped me decide to become a teacher because i felt like i should have been more prepared for what college demanded. i learned how to write papers (25 pages was the longest, and it is bound with my name on it) i know that college was the time in my life where i learned the most. i grew in every area of life and i don't think in anyway did i go backwards. i met pete and got married at 20, we were responsible for the youth group at ovcc, i decided what my "career" would be, i made friends with people solely because we were all interested in the same subjects, and i had the best spiritual year/years of my life at 19 and 22 approx.

i know that college (18-25 ish) was a time of change for everyone, what did you learn to do in college that you feel you should have been ready for before college?

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