Mass Update!! Get ready for a long read...

My 8AM has been going alright. It's a Organization and Management course. I've missed it a few times. Ms. Alderson, the professor, is really really nice (I'm in the kitchen making chicken biscuits and my roommate is in her room on speaker phone.. bit noisy) and the classwork is usually interesting. I guess I'd rather learn about management in an workplace setting (the guys upstairs are stomping! more noise!) than read about it from a textbook. The class is small, the chair are comfortable, and I usually have coffee, which all help a lot!

Ms. Alderson is also writing a recommendation letter for my CLS application, discussed below...


Japanese is going alright as well. I'm less likely to miss that class because if I know I will (i.e. when I had that horrible sickness I did not want to spread) I have to email her pictures of my completed homework before class time because there are no late grades. (I turned on some music  to drown out the speakerphone). Other than that, Japanese is just okay. I find it a lot harder because it's a lot more complicated grammatically than Chinese. Chinese has a little "picture" for every word. Sometimes they can have three or more different contextual meanings!! But other than memorization, the grammar (语法）is really, really easy. Usually, there aren't even any tenses! You just slap a word on to show completion, or just add "yesterday" (昨天）or something to add time context. Japanese, though... Japanese is crazing.


Chinese is really great! My teacher is super, super sweet! She's from Wuhan, and she has a little son. She's very patient with the class and makes fun powerpoints with interesting pictures to keep us engaged. However, the class can get a bit dull. That's the downside of taking two different Chinese courses-- one in high school and one in college. The material does spill over sometimes. Like now we're learning about weather (天气), but I learned about that in highschool! Raining (下雨), snowing （下雪), windy （有风), etc. So sometime class can get a little boring. (Oh dear, there's a train (火车）now...) But I still really love it. I'm so excited about this scholarship I'm applying for.


A class I'm still not sure how to feel about is Intercultural Communication. On one hand, I love my classmates and my professor, Dr. Hendrix (who is also helping me with my essays!), but the material can sometimes be... A little less pertinent than my other classes. Important, of course, but harder to connect to. Sometimes it just makes me so uncomfortable, honestly. We talk about things like racism, inequality, privilege, interracial relationships, happiness, social class... Sometimes that just makes me feel uncomfortable because it's something I've always been aware of but never been in a college course that shoves it in my faces and makes me acknowledge the inequity in our country... Which can be a doozy! But I still kind of like it. I feel like a better person after this class.


Now to extracurriculars! If you didn't know, I'm treasurer of Honors Student Council (HSC). That means I fill out most of the paperwork, make sure we have money, organize fundraisers, and then make sure our events are going okay, help plan events, work with the club at meetings, etc. Sometimes I feel really overwhelmed doing it all and question if I really want to be there when I could be playing League of Legends. But when I sit down at Honors Hall after class and look around, I figure that if I truly have a desire to be involved, then this is the best place for me!


Speaking of events, HSC has had several events that have been fairly successful. (More music to drown out the noise upstairs. is it basketball? is it wrestling? is someone continuously falling over?) The first being our Spooky Scary Halloween bake sale. We raised about $160 dollars for HSC, which is great! Yeah! Woo! The second was our Super Smash Bros Game Night. That was a little less popular than I had hoped, and setting it up made me SUPER SUPER stressed, but overall it was fun. We raised a little over $100 for St. Jude I think, so yay! Enough to run the hospital for less than a second. :P


But internships! I'm astounded by the amount of opportunities I am finding this year. I'd love an internship at Fed-Ex, but... I recently found out Riot Games has an internship program that is really small. If I got accepted I'd be flown out to work in SANTA MONICA, CA! Woo-wee! It's for the summer of 2015, which is the same as my scholarship, which I have a higher statistical change of getting into. I figure I'd send in an application anyways.... just in case!!! I've already got my cover letter planned... Just gotta work on that ol' empty resume...


The CLS program (Critical Language Scholarship program) is a State Department-funded study abroad experience that spans 7-10 weeks in your target country. It's fully-funded, meaning the only thing my family would pay for is getting me to the airport I'm flying out of!

Ideally, I would be working in China with a large group of other students. I'll be applying for the Intermediate level. I''d get a full year of credits from it, which means the pace will be INSANE! BUT I'M SO EXCITED!!!! WHAT STUDENT DOESN'T WANT TO GET PAID TO STUDY THE THINGS THEY LOVE????? OH MY GOODNESS. THINKING ABOUT IT MAKES ME SO EXCITED. SORRY. MOVING ON!

If I do qualify for the CLS program, I will start planning a study abroad experience for Japan as well, because that is also a language I want to learn. I'm not AS dedicated to Japanese as I am Chinese, so this is something that ideally I would LIKE to happen but doesn't HAVE to happen. But this would be for the Spring of 2016 (gasp! a whole semester away from Memphis! can I do it???). So far I have only considered Summer programs, but it may be better to do it within a semester... It just makes me so nervous! Ahhh!




To close, I have some personal,  if dorky, insight.

College is hard. Very few things about it are easy. You're far from home, with a large workload and a huge amount of pressure to succeed, mostly from myself. Now that I'm thinking about internships, I'm forced to consider job options and what I want to do with my life, which has led to a few existential crises.
 ("Why am I here? What do I want to do with my life? Will I enjoy it or feel tied down?" -me

"Mackenzie please get off the floor." -my friend Rachel, who lends me her blankets to burrito and promptly tells me how silly I'm being and that I'm fine).

So instead of turtle-ing like I did last semester, I'm trying to face these soul-crushing problems head-on! My role model for that is....

Yep. Mackenzie's role model for powering through situations is an anime character. To be fair, I watched this show on AMERICAN TV when I was a kid, so... 

An anime character named Usagi (oo-sa-gee) Tsukino. Her name literally means "rabbit of the moon." Why did I choose such an off-the-wall role model? How do you connect with an animated character so strongly? What???

Well, Usagi Tsukino is the main character of "Sailor Moon," a VERY popular anime that has reached from Japan to all across the world. I started watching when I was a kid, and kind-of kept up with it up until now, a college sophomore. Usagi's secret is that she's actually a super-hero! She fights evil as the heroine Sailor Moon!

She also has a really cool transformation sequence.

Sailor Moon works with other girls, from Sailor Mercury to Sailor Jupiter. Each girl has her own power: Mercury has water, Venus has light and love, Mars has fire, and Jupiter has lightning. You're probably asking why the LIGHTNING isn't my role model. Or FIRE. Sailor Moon can't do ANY of that. She's often portrayed as unsure, weak, and, well....

You can see where this is going, huh?

But Usagi is actually the most important hero. None of the other guardians can work without her. What Usagi does is support and tie everyone together with friendship. Cheesy, right? I always thought so, too, until I started watching the re-released Sailor Moon Crystal. I noticed things I couldn't pick up when I was a kid. Usagi is whiny, lazy, and a lot of other things I can relate to, but deep down, she's strong! She supports everyone and does her best to push forward even when things seem impossible!

I don't know if I can explain it. I guess everyone has their weird role model. I guess it's just nice knowing that a show depicting such a "weak" protagonist can be so successful and popular. It's more realistic, I guess. The show has actually been cited as a feminine icon for having young women battling the -isms of society. So that's cool too.

So that's what's been going on with Mackenzie. Welcome to life at the University of Macken-phis! (Was that a bad pun? Oh well.)