A Return to Form, and Thought

Two days into the Fall semester, today begins the third. The past two weeks I have been mostly getting stuff done in preparation for the amount of work that we’ve been told will be hitting us. The summer work will be making its way up here shortly, but it’s not high on the priority list at the moment.

So far there are both similarities and differences between summer and fall:

Similar

• Sometimes it is hard to tell what’s expected out of a given assignment. Even asking questions doesn’t help. I get the feeling that the professors are trying to learn about us by what we do for the first assignments. This might also be a part of breaking us of old habits and preconceived notions about design.
• There still isn’t enough time in the day to do everything I want to do. I knew this wasn’t going to change, and we’ll have some longer projects later, but I can’t wait to spend a few months on the same problem.
• Time management is still the single most important skill to master. It’s strange how I forgot how overwhelming multiple classes can be when compared to a job. Just a different sort of time management.

Different

• It’s weird not having many of our CPID sister program’s students in our required IxD courses. Sidenote: CMU uses acronyms for most everything. I’m so used to seeing all of these people everyday, and I didn’t see a few of them at all on Tuesday.
• The expectations are different. Higher, but also different in that we have new professors and varying subjects.

I think at this point I need to keep my mind open and absorb everything I can without looking backwards too much to what I’ve done or what I think I know. That’s a strange feeling.