Jessi Cole Jackson

The library. The giant, tall, windows are the reading room and my favorite place on campus so far.

If I had been wondering if this was the right place for me, these two sitting in the Children’s Section (which is massive!), reminded me I belong. We had two just like them growing up.

I’m about to start a new week of classes in a few hours, and thought I should make a post about the first week.

Not completely unsurprisingly, it started out a little rough. My only creative class for the semester met on Monday-Tuesday and while interesting, was not what I’d hoped it would be. The class was so large that we were writing very little, and had very, very little time to give feedback to one another.

On Wednesday morning I was at breakfast talking about my disappointment to a new friend and 3rd year student and she asked me which other classes I was interested in. None of the other creatives, which were either also large or focused on picture books or nonfiction (two genres I have little interest in, currently). But I was interested in a second critical class. She told me to sit in on it. It was meeting in 15 minutes.

I said okay.

She took me to meet the professor and the professor took me to class and we talked about feminism and literature for 3 hours and I fell head-over-heels in love with the class. It was exactly what I wanted.

So I switched.

I was sad to leave behind my creative class, as it was something I was really looking forward to and the professor is someone I really, really wanted to work with, but she’ll teach other (hopefully smaller) classes and I have other summers.

In the meantime, I’m in Gender and Girls Fiction and even though it may drown my with the amount of work required, I absolutely love it.

My books (minus one) for Gender and Girls Fiction. By the end of 6 weeks, I’ll have read all of these.

Other things I did this week:

* Read 2 novels (and a million articles/book chapters)

* Wrote (and submitted!) a poem

* Sat in on conference meetings, for which I’m the co-chair of the silent auction

* Ate and talked and ate and talked

* Made a billion new friends while eating and talking

* Wrote a teeny 2-page paper

* Babysat two beautiful professor’s daughters

* Talked about adoption and faith and speculative fiction with said professor

* Sat in 2 guest lectures and 6 classes (4 is normal!)

* Slept very little

So many bunnies on campus! I see them munching away on the clover almost every morning.