Monthly Archives: September 2016

Nothing Great

So SEA Semester is a bit of an odd off-campus study program (besides the fact that students spend the majority of their time actually sailing a large research vessel around cool parts of the world). It’s divided into two parts. Part One, which is currently where I’m at now, is the Land portion and takes place in Woods Hole, MA.

For me, I’ll be hanging out in Cape Cod for just four weeks before meeting up with the boat in American Samoa. Well actually, “hanging out” is an incredibly deceptive phrase in this case. A more accurate description of how I’m spending my time here is “fervently studying.” Not only do I have to remember how to do school work, but I also have a very tiny window in which to do so. The Land component of SEA Semester is hecka intensive. In the past week, (just three and a half days, really). I’ve started three separate projects and read approximately 1000 different homework assignments. Which doesn’t sound too bad, until I gleefully point out that our classes run from 0900 to 1430 pretty much every day. It kind of feels a bit like mid terms already. Hooray. (But I’m not complaining. I’m not. I promise. I knew it would be intensive…but maybe I didn’t really know know that.)

Besides rapidly recalling all my time management skills and study strategies that I’d set aside over the summer, I’ve spend the week in a really challenging mental and emotional place–transitions are pretty much always hard for me. Any kind of transition. New semester. Going home for the summer. Starting a new job (even when it consists of going back to camp, my favorite place ever, to be a camp counselor). Every time I find myself in a new place, I spend the first week wishing I was somewhere else. Or convincing myself that I’ve made a terrible mistake, like maybe I should have done a different SEA program or just something entirely different like Germany. In fact, actually I shouldn’t have decided to study off campus at all. Is it too late to change my mind?

Which has been…fun. Especially because these moments doubt become particularly hard to navigate in a new place with a bunch of new people I don’t really know. But eventually, I manage to remind myself why I am here. Something a number of our faculty members have said is that nothing great is easyWhich rings full of so much truth. This will not be easy. I knew that last spring, maybe not in the same way I’m slowly coming to know it now, here in Woods Hole, with deadlines fast approaching, the ship almost in sight. But it will be great. And for that, I’m willing to slog through, or maybe even rise to, the challenges of the coming weeks.