Research, human rights, and catching up!

A month into my new classes and I’m settling in. Reading has been a bit sporadic but I’m trying to get into a routine. With Tuesday and Thursday classes, your reading time alternates between two and five days, so it’s a bit hard to pace things. Last week, I read nearly thirty pages of a difficult article in one day and it was grueling. Sometimes, the material can be difficult and you can’t take it in all at once. I read another article that was nineteen pages and reading it over three days was a bit better. At least by the time I feel overwhelmed, I already read most of the six or seven pages and still have an idea of what I’m reading about when I resume the next day. Hopefully, that’ll stay the course when I keep to this pattern.

For Senior Seminar, I’ve already collected much of the sources for the long essay and story to come. I’ve got plenty of sources for Godzilla. I might need to get more but my professor said I seem to have enough. Searching through a few college article databases brings up nothing for Gamera and Ultraman, so I want to learn a bit more, I’m going to have to track down documentaries and interviews. A few other sources for Godzilla might do but a common theme has been the various ways to present a monster movie, how they could be metaphors, and that they have attracted such a passionate fanbase because they are characters to root for. That falls neatly in with the story in mind that I have.

At the moment, I’m summarizing sources beginning with the shorts and it’s kind of difficult to know what to quote and what to paraphrase but this’ll supposedly help me go back to certain quotes that caught my interest when it’s time to write the essay. I suppose I’d better base them around my other notes I jotted down for them, since that’s where I wrote what was relevant to me and the professor said we can graft the summaries to our goals. That will be helpful, since there are several long videos and it would be easier if I only summarized them from how they might help my project.

Over to the Human Rights class, we went to an event where three Nobel Laureates had a talk and I was able to give a question. That was certainly informative about activism around the world and my mom who accompanied appeared to have a good time. It was interesting to be in the presence of well-known people who have been in the thick of activism, since they feel as ordinary as everyone else around me. We talked about the event a lot in class. Now, though, we are settling into the routine of reading articles and talking about them after they are presented to a student in class. We are already a week behind because the teacher liked to go over the first article in more detail but she said they would try not to do the same for the other articles.

I’m going to present mine in a few weeks that talks about LGBT and Human Rights, and I wonder how long beforehand do I have to prepare for it. The presentation is supposed to be around five to ten minutes and be a cliffnotes layman’s version of what the article is talking about. I’d probably ask her when I next see her in class. I’m sure I’ll do fine but hopefully I’ll be understandable when I speak since I’m not a loud speaker or much of a speaker at all. There is an essay or two in the future but I’m not going to worry about that until later. For now, I’m pretty content with my two classes.

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That’s all I can think of talking about for now. I feel like I’ve covered everything that I wanted to. When the end of October rolls around, I will have got a bit thicker into my classes and maybe make significant progress on some of my fics. Until then, see you!