иконографияПравославни икониI am taking …um 1 class. …Which is super lame. 
But it means I have time for volunteering. So next week I’m checking out 3 or 4 different opportunities to see what I want to spend my time doing. There is really less than a month left of school, so I can’t do something that needs to be long term.
For the summer I think I’m going to be back at Accu-Link. I contacted them – they didn’t really say yes, but they didn’t say no. They asked how long I’d want to stay this time, but then didn’t respond… but I’m sure it will be fine.
My summer goals are pretty solidified in my head:
- lose weight
- find a thesis topic
Losing weight should be pretty easy at my mom’s during the summer. There is an elliptical trainer that I really like going on, I can cut the grass, I’ll be walking around and they don’t have a lot of crappy food in their house. I mean – they eat really rich food… like cheese and real butter, but they don’t have a lot of things with sugar or salt. …Also, I’ll get yelled at if I buy chips or junk food.
About the thesis – …turns out my whole idea of studying these “ghost cities” of China may not pan out as planned. I don’t really think it’s as big a mystery as people make it out to be. …China needed to increase their GDP by 8% in a year… so each regional government was given the instruction to do so. The easiest way to do it was to build infrastructure. Not only would this falsely inflate the GDP by making it seem like more money was being spent but it would also employ more workers. As for why they stayed empty – investors bought out most of the housing and now are just holding onto it, waiting to sell. So what houses are left are actually really expensive. Also – no one wants to move there because there is currently no economy there. Is this all a problem? I dunno, it’s weird – but I think it’s going to play itself out in a few years. I’d rather work on something that really will help people when I get involved. …So I’ve been doing a shit ton of reading about coal mining in China and the effects on people’s health, the lack of environmental health education, the effects on live stock, farms and water… There are lots of issues with coal, it’s just not a horribly original topic. The ghost cities were original… oh well, such is life.
I still need to talk to my advisor about all this – but I haven’t gotten into York yet, so I’m not going to bother him until I do.
This is the personal statement that I wrote for York. I wrote a slightly different one for U of T but I like it a lot less… I’m probably going to get into both schools but I will definitely choose York over U of T in a heartbeat. The person who would be my advisor is amazing, the faculty is much kinder and smaller so it will be easier to make close connections and the way the program is designed gives me much more freedom to structure my graduate degree into something really good for what I’m doing. …Here’s the statement:
While in China this past summer I saw vast, empty, but beautiful and expensive cities that were being built close to very impoverished and poor areas. It is apparent that the management of planning and investment in China is off track. I want to examine how and why. My intention for graduate work is to apply systems methodology to the kinds of urban planning problems faced by rapidly developing economies like China’s. I would like my work to have a practical effect on the lives of people living today as well as provide an informed contribution to academic research. York University, with its excellent interdisciplinary option, would be an ideal choice to allow me to work towards this goal. The opportunity to work with noted systems thinkers, such as Dr. Martin Bunch, would enable me to explore these issues while applying my strong research and writing skills, demonstrated in my undergraduate work. Dr. Bunch has agreed to supervise me in addition to an agreed upon thesis committee comprised of Dr. Peter Mulvihil as well as Dr. Xueqing Xu from the Chinese Language and Literature department.
My academic career has been varied and full of interesting challenges. My wide range of professional and academic experiences gives me a unique perspective on my areas of interest. Professionally I have mainly been in management and executive positions strengthening my abilities for self-directed organization and understanding of group dynamics including people’s needs when learning to live and work together. Academically, my original focus was on environmental science and ecosystem behaviour, but at the University of Victoria I was exposed to the pressing and serious social problems in environmental studies, and decided to further study these social aspects of my field. During the second half of my degree I thus focused mainly on urban planning and economics in East Asia.
During my years at York, I was introduced to systems theory and soft systems methodology. These were integral elements in piecing together the varied academic themes I explored throughout my undergraduate studies. My diverse background had given me a solid foundation in the biophysical workings of ecosystems, the political background for understanding the need for participatory and informed action, and the economic insights to understand the motivations of stakeholders. I believe these three areas are vital for an informed approach to urban development problems and when accompanied with systems theory allows for a more holistic understanding and approach to global environmental issues in general.
Due to my strong academic past and varied professional life activities I feel prepared to explore the questions that my Chinese experience posed. As I stood staring at the empty Chinese city before me, I wondered: Who planned this city? Are there more like it? What went wrong? All the environmental planning theory I had studied stood concrete in front of me. In that moment I had an emotional as well as an intellectual experience of the material I had written, read and talked about for so many years. The York Masters of Environmental Studies, which I hope to partner with the York Graduate Diploma in Asian studies, is the right program for me because of its interdisciplinary approach, in which I will thrive as a self-directed individual with a strong work ethic and desire for knowledge.
I ordered 4 books from Chapters at the very beginning of the month. I got three of the books (My Stroke of Insight, When a Billion Chinese Jump and Wild Swans) almost immediately but only got Zapatistas by Alex Khasnabish today. I’ve never been so excited to read a book… I read just one chapter of it for my aboriginals class last semester and was totally amazed. The beautiful rhetoric and revolutionary jargon that Marcos and the EZLN is totally captivating and *almost* makes me want to become some sort of rebel standing up for something I believe in.
Unfortunately I ordered all these books at a time when I thought I’d only be taking 1 class and would thus have ample amount of time to sit around and read. Instead I’m taking 3 courses (one that has a strangely heavy reading load…) and have been hit with really bad headaches. I’m used to have headaches a couple times a week, but now it’s every single day. My doctor prescribed for me to go see a RMT…which is fine by me…but has made John continuously point out the fact that I’m too stressed out and high-strung.
My classes are: Environmental Law (oddly – not the one with a huge course load), Chinese-American Diasporic Literature (where my lectures are in Mandarin – which is fine because the slides are in English, but most of the people during discussion speak Mandarin too quickly for John to translate…so I miss most of that) and China: Path to Democracy and Modernization (the one with the extremely heavy reading load).
I already regret not leaving for Korea in a few weeks and doing classes instead… but decided that I will definitely go after grad school. DEFINITELY. As I told John: I don’t care if North Korea invades and takes South Korea over – I’m going to go and teach freaking English. I really just want to go and live in another country for a year. So maybe after grad school I’ll have enough Mandarin to go and live in China for a year doing something in line with my research … we’ll see.
Anyway – when I get around to the book I’ll post about how amazing it is.
This past week I’ve pretty much done as little school work as humanly possible. Mostly because I was reading about and trying to figure out what to do with all my schooling. …Tragically it has ended in a decision to take the LSATs and go to law school. I called my mom looking for her to talk my out of it, but she was 120% supportive. …I told the fiance looking again to be talked out of it…and all he could muster was that he was “so proud” of his future lawyer. So, the two people I look to for advice have said “doooo iiiit!” so I guess I am.
I’ll be like Elle Woods! I’ll even be planning my wedding! Now I just need a little dog…
Happy March everyone. (its Women’s Month, btw…)
You know what I hate a lot? (well, i hate a lot of things…but right now…) When people comment on my site telling me not to do things. Like on one of my paleontology posts someone told me to not use bad language because kids might read it. And other people tell me I should do more editing in my posts and make them more “formal” and other people have tried to tell me that I need to pick one particular topic and start writing on it exclusively.
…Here’s the thing though. …I work at a job where I don’t really get to make decisions. I make suggetions that usually get shot down or ignored. If I disagree too much I get anger spewed at me. My boss is apprarently the exclusive decision maker. Then I go to school. I don’t know how many people are in the current education system, but freedom isn’t really what they like to promote. I worte a wonderful paper on tourism/romanticism and only got a 76% because I didn’t focus enough on the EXACT example given in class……… were we all supposed to write the same essay? And then in another class I wrote a paper disagreeing with the prof and he went to the extent of just telling me my opinions were wrong. …wtf. Then I go home, where I live in someone else’s house. I don’t own it, so I have to abide by their rules…cook for them now and then…and be more or less uncomfortable most of the time.
So. When I write on my blog…i will write about whatever the fuck I want, use whatever language I want, sepll as worng as I sea fit and nto corrcet it if I dunt wnat to and I will not censor myself because your children might stumble across the words “anal” “fucking” “dickhead” or “sex”.
On a happier note – I start new classes today and for some reason think they’ll be better than last semesters. Although that’s rarely the case.
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