I’ve tried to post editorial-like entries that focuses on things that might be relevant to most people instead of a self-absorbed blog entry. I don’t really have time to make everything polished and unfold in a thoughtful way, but I do think there are important conclusions to be drawn from these two experiences I’ve had this weekend: my Civil Engineering paper and presentation on Water Resources for Tonner Canyon and working on the CAPAS website at Pitzer.

For the better part of the week, I’ve gone to sleep at 4am at the earliest. Much of the day is devoted to working on our clinic project and classes, while the early evening hours were for the homework that’s due the next day. That leaves the time from 12 or 1am – 4am to work on the, what turned out to be a 36 page, report for my Civil Engineering class. It was officially titled “Practicability of Adding a Dam in Tonner Canyon to the Water Supply System.” When titles have to be that long you know the content is complicated.

So the background info on this report is that the City of Industry has plans to destroy the little natural canyon between Brea and Diamond Bar called Tonner Canyon by building a dam, and the Hills For Everyone group that’s against this came to us for advice on technical issues related to water resource engineering. It turned out that this project was waaay over our heads…who are we to give advice when we are taking this course for the first time? In short, it was just stupid to try to give advice when we don’t know anything.

Given this, the whole week almost all 9 of us in the class were up till god knows when every morning making full out desperate attempts to do a semi-decent job. Though it was that time of the night when you don’t know if its “late” or “early”, people were still bustin their humps for something that they probably couldn’t do justice for and, by this point, was beginning to be more annoying than interesting.

This friend of mine, Emily, impressed me particularly. While I had taken powernaps so I could work through the night, she had been working since 7 or 8 am, has harder classes and four or so hours of Orchestra ever other day. That’s typical of probably more than half the Mudders though, sacrefice sleep for work and things that interest us.

So on Friday at 2pm, 3 hours before the 36 pager was due, I went down to CAPAS for the Steering Committee Meeting…and surprise surprise, there were like all of four people there, including the center’s coordinator and the Steering Committee Chair who had to be there. It seems like people down there just don’t care about anything other than themselves most of the time. I was really greatful when Yvette offered to help me on the CAPAS Website. It’s sad that we were the two people who’ve done the most work on the site even though there are 30+ other staff members, three or four of which are supposingly getting “paid” to work on the website. Maybe it’s because we’re both Diamond Bar High graduates heh.

While I was down there, the coordinator was totally shocked that I, as well as my classmates, were up ‘till 3 or 4 or 5am everyday of this week. Well its April…the end of it…all classes are over by the end of April. By the time May gets here, it’s the fourth quarter with everything on the line…4 finals and 4 presentations in that first week of May then…graduation. Her first question was “don’t they teach you wellness” at Mudd? Hahaha silly sociology-type folk…so naive. We’re all about 17-22 years old…we’re in the prime of our lives…anyone who needs wellness should just give up on their lives and go work at a fast food restaurant- not the drive thru because that’d require too much work.

What made this wellness question even more amusing is that, after volunteering at CAPAS for three and a half years, I only recently found out that the main reason CAPAS was created at the evaluation of the effectiveness of CAPAS. Guess what it is? The main purpose, above all, is to have a higher graduation rate for Asian Americans at Pitzer because, apparently, they weren’t doing so hot. It seems a bit conterintuitive to me, but why would you promote wellness when students there already do much less than Mudd students? It’s not like they’re working 24-7 like Mudders…instead, a lot of them (I’m not gonna say all of them because I have friends there who work hard too) just mosey around all day…till the same time in the morning like us, but not really doing much other than “hanging out.”

Then CAPAS constantly has events and study breaks that takes more time away from studying…and this is supposed to help students get better gradtes…how? I really enjoy the “relaxed” atmosphere there…it’s nice to go there every once in a while and get away from Mudd, but I don’t think a lot of Pitzer folk have the overdrive mode to shift into…just this “chilling” mode. If things are gonna change down there, I think the whole student body’s motivation level has to change.

If you managed to read all the way down till this paragraph, I think the observation I’m trying to make is, people aren’t necessarily smarter. Yes, there are a lot of Mudders that are geniuses, but there’s even more of us that just work hard. I think students at Pitzer may do just as well if they had the same mentality to duke it out with whatever work they have and then take the next step and push yourself to the limit. It’s that time of our lives when you’ve just got to push and secure a place for yourself in the real world. It’s kind of like Charles Barkley’s advice on how to get the most rebounds…you’ve just got to want it more.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2005 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Non-Stocks, Society & Culture, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.