Hey guys!

Wow, has it been a minute!

Is it shocking to anyone else how was have already reached one of my last posts as a freshmen? For those of you have that been reading since the beginning, which is insane because I feel like I just posted that "First Impressions" post about Manoa, congrats! Just like myself, we are a mere week away from being absolutely done with freshmen year. 

I'll spare you all the sappy montage of "favorite moments from the past year" and instead opt for telling you how I've been spending my last few days. 

Let's start with classes.

Since having dropped my sociology class (surprised?) I have been left with closing the semester off with, hopefully, good grades in my four other classes. This week in particular, appropriately titled Dead Week, is when my classes officially ended and one final already completed. 

Similar to the fall semester, the final I had first was my Chinese 202 oral. Exactly like the midterm, we were given 13 different questions to answer individually, and then 3 prompts we have to memorize with a partner. On the day of, the partners would then select a card which would have any one of the prompts on it, and from there we would have to almost act out our script. In my case my partner and I drew card #1, which meant we would be discussing the first prompt, which involved arguing about whether or not we prefer traveling as part of a tour group or alone. (This was material from a previous lesson). 

Overall I think the oral went pretty well. It could have been better, naturally, but I did the best I could and for that I'm glad. 

After Chinese I had a good two hour break before going to my last East Asian class and Honors Genetics. 

And so, in the meantime, I decided to go speak to the Political Science department at UH. Lately I've been wondering if I should either change majors or simply minor in Chinese. 

After talking with the Political Science Undergrad Advisor, I have decided to continue with taking a global politics class in the fall. It's not so much government that interests me, but international relations. By the looks of it, the program has quite a few classes on global law and relations, so hopefully this program will be something that clicks.

After the advising I went to my East Asian class and my Genetics class. 

For our last day of instruction in East Asian, we learned more about North Korea (which our knowledge of, go figure, is very limited) and touched on Taiwan. 

In Genetics we finished up presentations on our 10 page papers. After class the professor announced that he would like to speak to each individual person about their papers, and when it was my turn to speak with him I was shocked at what he told me.

In short, he commended me greatly on my "strong voice" in my scientific paper. He made a point to tell me that my paper was one of the only ones he has read that has had such a unique voice (in his words, "You have a voice that is not often found in scientific papers, simply because it doesn't usually work. However, your style of writing made it so that, interestingly enough, your voice fit very well with your paper. While a scientific paper, reading it did not feel like so. I have never read something like this. It's amazing.") and that I should seriously consider a career in writing. We concluded with me telling him I was thankful for the class and hope to take a class in the future on immunology. 

After class I met up with the girls and went out to dinner with one of their moms. The restaurant, called Sabrina's, is a very small Italian restaurant with big prices. I don't think it matters, but if you plan on going its BYOB, and the wine store is up the road near City Mill. 

After dinner we got boba (again, courtesy of Jade's mom) and called it a night. 

Because the next week is Finals Week, we once again had Thursday and Friday off as time to study. Or, if you're like us, go to the beach. 

My next post will be up soon, but I have homework to do so you will have to wait a bit. 

Until next time,

Aislinn