"First Week of Classes" Samantha Frost
Saturday, August 28, 2010
posted under
entropy
,
Mellon New Directions Fellowship
,
Samantha Frost
,
University of Illinois
by Unit for Criticism
[This week Kritik is pleased to publish the first in a series of posts by Samantha Frost, associate professor in Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies. As the recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, Sam is now enrolled in undergraduate coursework in biology and neuroscience with the aim of enhancing her research on materialist accounts of perception, judgment, and subjectivity. Last spring and over the summer, she took the pre-requisite courses in organic chemistry, basic physiology, and molecular biology. This semester, she is taking a further 12 credits of courses in biochemistry, cell biology, and neuroscience. Professor Frost’s ruminations on her return to undergraduate-level education in the sciences will also be published in hard copy in future issues of the IPRH Newsletter]
“FIRST WEEK OF CLASSES”
Written by Samantha Frost (Political Science, GWS)
Well, I am almost done negotiating the registration process and have almost finished my first week of classes: a blither of finding classrooms in unfamiliar buildings and cramming myself into these terribly old desk/chair combos in massive lecture halls with hundreds upon hundreds of variously attentive and computing/texting undergraduates. It is going to be a busy semester but possibly not as hard as Spring semester was.
My first freakout: Biochemistry is going to be a killer. It is like organic chemistry, but more so: bigger molecules, more complex interactions. I am using my "Amino Buddy" app on my iphone to try to memorize the amino acids in all their various notations: the match game seems to work the best for me. So I sit on the floor while my kids are at Tae Kwon Do and work through flashcard games in order to be able to recognize by sight the chemical structure and symbols of the amino acids that make up proteins that make up our bodies....