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Kevin: Back in the swing of things

September 13, 2013

We are finishing our third week of classes here at Linfield and I definitely feel like I am back in the swing of things. This semester has been full of many things both old and new. I am continuing to pursue a double major in Chemistry and Mathematics, so I am taking the required classes for a junior in each of those majors. Prior to the semester even starting I was on a first name basis with the professor in 3 of my 4 classes, so this familiarity has been great! A close relationship with your professor really enhances your education – one of the many things that makes Linfield so powerful.

On the new side of things I am now the Vice President of Linfield’s chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon, which is a national Mathematics Honor Society. We’ll do a number of events and activities throughout the course of the year educating about and promoting math. My favorite event run my Pi Mu Epsilon is always Pi day, which is March 14th. My freshman year they had a raffle to Pie a Professor. Needless to say I bought plenty of raffle tickets and was able to pie my advisor and Chemistry professor, Brian Gilbert, in the middle of lunch at the dining hall. As Vice President I plan on bringing this event back this spring, and of course also make sure that the proceeds go to a good cause.

I have also continued to be a member of the KSLC Sports Broadcast team, but I am now one of the head play-by-play announcers which is a newer role for me. I will be doing the play-by-play for the Linfield football team’s first home game on Saturday September 21st vs. California Lutheran University. It should be a good game, so I definitely encourage you to tune in! We also broadcast men’s and women’s soccer as well as volleyball in the fall, and we will continue to do basketball in the winter and baseball and softball in the spring.

That’s about all I have for today. As you can tell from my last two posts I will be plenty busy this year, but  I wouldn’t have it any other way. Linfield offers a number of high quality opportunities, so I’m going to continue to try to take advantage of as many of them as I can.

Til next time,

Kevin

Hello blogging world!

September 10, 2013

The virtual world is now at my fingertips, and here I get the opportunity to blog about Linfield College! My name is Dana, and I am a sophomore here at Linfield College.  I arrived in McMinnville from a town called McKinleyville.  I must have an affinity towards towns that start with an “Mc” in the beginning! McKinleyville is on the Northern Californian coast, where sun rarely shines so September in McMinnville, Oregon is always a little temperature shock, as this week is supposed to get up in the high 90s! Who knew Oregon could be warmer than California?

I came to Linfield for exactly what I am doing now: challenging myself.  I challenge myself in the classroom, because I live to learn.  Chemistry is difficult, most people would agree, but I also am fascinated in the process.  I want to be challenged with my academics and find that through Chemistry courses.  I challenge myself while I train with the women’s cross country team this fall.  This last weekend both the men and women took first at our first home meet!  I spent the first two weeks of August in full time training in order to become a resident adviser for Linfield.  With 16 credits, running cross country, being an RA, and now a Student Ambassador, free time is rare, yet I would not want it any other way.  I am spending my time doing what I love, challenging myself and forming a new and exciting life full of various experiences.

I hope this blog finds you in good health, and I plan to entertain you with my life events throughout the school year.

Stay tuned!

Best,

Dana

Austin: My Summer Job

September 10, 2013

Team Fly- Summer 2013 Colleen excited about flies! Micro-dissections Team Fly's "Office"

I can’t believe the school year has started and is going straight ahead, full-speed. This past summer went way too fast, especially because I didn’t leave campus. I was fortunate enough to be hired as a full time research assistant in the Lab I started working in last January. We call ourselves “Team Fly” because we work with Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies); there were three of us working full time this Summer, as well as our adviser, Dr. Catherine Reinke. I cannot begin to explain how many things I learned this summer; I learned everything from basic lab techniques, to highly innovative, and new techniques, to the basics of working in a research lab, to how to officially compile data, analyze it, and prepare it for publication. I was like a sponge, taking in everything I possibly could and then practicing it. One of the highlights for me was learning how to isolate and sequence a gene; something that I find fascinating. I started on this specific project in late June, and after many trials and errors, between my adviser, my coworkers, and myself, we came up with a new strategy on how to go about sequencing. We finally made the correct concentration, and were able to send it off for sequencing (clear to New Jersey!), and I will never forget the morning I woke up to the results; it was like I was a little kid on Christmas morning. Most of all, I loved actually being a scientist for a few months. All through high school and introductory lab courses seemed to be like a cookbook of experiments, with every approach and detail already written. However, doing research is much different; you have a lot more control and are able to explore and attempt new things you would never think of in a class. I am so grateful for the opportunity to research, and especially appreciate the benefit of getting paid to learn! I am going full-speed in the semester, and can’t wait to see where it takes me.

Until next time,

-Austin

Kyra: Shakespeare, Senior year and Being Generally Sentimental

September 10, 2013

It’s the first semester of my senior year at Linfield. It almost seems surreal–I can hardly believe that four years ago, I was an incoming freshman, so excited and nervous for the year to start. In some ways, the feeling remains the same. I’m both excited and nervous for the year to unfold. Classes, work, and friends will soon pick up and I’ll be caught in a whirlwind of keeping myself busy while trying to keep myself sane. They say that senior year is supposed to be the most fun, yet the most stressful (I’ve yet to figure out who “they” are, but we’ll just call it the general rumor and consensus). All of my friends are graduating with me this year–we’re all trying to do as much as we can with each other while we’re all in one place and before we scatter across the country. We’re working on weekly friend dinners and study groups. If we get the balance just right, I think it will prove to be a great semester.

I’m transitioning into the fall from a summer of research. I spent my days, and quite a few of my evenings, this summer working on a project focused on Shakespeare and Gender. A fellow student (Kate McMullan ’13) and our Professor, Dr. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner researched the role of women in Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” and his contemporary/successor John Fletcher’s “The Woman’s Prize, or the Tamer Tamed”. We did our own personal research into the plays and assisted the Portland Shakespeare Project’s production of these plays as dramaturgs. My work focused primarily on “The Tamer Tamed”, so I attended the majority of rehearsals for the production and assisted the director/cast with the text, answering or researching any questions they might have about plot, context, pronunciation or the meaning of any unfamiliar phrases. It being a Renaissance play, there was quite a bit of unfamiliar language, so I had my work cut out for me. However, I had an absolutely amazing time working as a researcher and as a dramaturg. I was able to split my time between the McMinnville campus and Portland so I could straddle my own research and my position as a dramaturg. At the end of the summer, DPP, Kate and I had the pleasure of accompanying the Alumni Shakespeare trip to Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival! We were able to see five different productions, including a modern rockabilly adaption of “Taming of the Shrew”, which Kate and I were then given the opportunity to teach the alumni about.

I’ll be able to continue this research throughout this semester through various presentations, and I’m hoping to use the Gender Studies research I’ve accumulated to my senior thesis. I’ll also be working on an honors thesis in the Spring, in which I’m hoping to continue the Shakespeare and Gender theme. In addition, I’ll be DPP’s teaching assistant for his Shakespeare: Tragedies and Tragicomedies. I’m really looking forward to the ways this will help me throughout the rest of my time here at Linfield–especially in all the experience this position has given me. I plan on going to graduate school for Literature, so working on a research project like this gives me excellent experience in the field, studying areas in my interest. Plus, getting paid to do just the thing you love is amazing. I wouldn’t have had any other job this summer.

Working on research throughout the summer has kept my mind fresh and active, so I think that bodes well for all of my classes this term. My senior thesis is centered around Literary Theory and Charles Dickens’ last completed work, “Our Mutual Friend”. We’re working on sending all of our papers to an undergraduate literary conference at the end of the course, so class has gotten to a very quick and intense start. It’ll be a lot of work to juggle, but definitely worth it. I’m also working on finishing up my second minor–Creative Writing. I finished my first minor–Visual Culture–last semester, and I just need two more Creative Writing classes to complete this one. Luckily, I love everything I’m studying so the work isn’t tedious or tiresome. I’m taking Non-Fiction this fall, which is a genre I haven’t really experimented with in the past, so I’m looking forward to testing my writing abilities.

Overall, this semester has already taken me up and swept me along. It will be an interesting experience to see where everything leads, but it’s my senior year and I’m excited to see where this takes me.

 

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The heart of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland

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My Non-Fiction textbooks–the life of a Lit major and Creative Writing minor is a constant flux of reading multiple books.

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“Our Mutual Friend” by Charles Dickens, the theme to my senior seminar in the Literature major and the summation of aspirations for the best descriptions ever, “literary man with a wooden leg”.

 

 

 

Kevin: Starting off Junior year

September 6, 2013

Summer is over and a new school year has begun. It still hasn’t sunk in that I am starting my third year here at Linfield, but I couldn’t be more excited. In my short time here thus far I have fully come to appreciate the power of a small college, and it is paying off in dividends for me now. I previously wrote about my summer research experience at Northwestern University. That wouldn’t be possible without the number of opportunities that I was able to take advantage of in my first two years here. It honestly seems like these opportunities have only increased as time has continued. On top of doing research in the Chemistry Department, I am now a teaching assistant for one of the Organic Chemistry lab sections. I work with Liz Atkinson (the Organic Chemistry professor) and Katie Sours (the Organic Chemistry lab coordinator) to help students conduct and understand their experiments. Becoming a professor is one of the careers I have started to consider since I’ve been here at Linfield because I’ve seen first-hand just how great of an impact a good professor has on their students, and I feel like this opportunity really gives me true insight into what that is like from the teaching side of things. Furthermore, I should have the opportunity to publish the research that I have conducted to this point under Professor Jim Diamond. Writing and publishing your own journal article as the primary author while still and undergraduate is an opportunity many young scientists could never dream of. This is one of the many things that makes Linfield stand out in my mind compared to other schools. The slogan “Power of a Small College” definitely sums this up quite nicely, but I like to take it a step farther. I don’t go to just any small college, I go to Linfield College, so in my mind, the slogan really should be “The Power of Linfield College”. I’ll be honest by saying this wasn’t something I explicitly recognized right away, but it was always something that was there underneath the surface where I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it or explain it perfectly. But with experience comes enlightenment, and I am truly excited to see where else my Linfield experience will take me.

Til next time,

Kevin