A challenge to myself

I usually don’t write about RL when I blog, but I came to a realization today and figured I’d share it.

I’m an undergraduate student taking my second semester at a community college that’s 45 minutes away from where I live. I’m somewhat in the nontraditional student category, what with the fact that I turn 26 in two days, and since I’m unemployed, I take full-tkime classes.

My first college experience was something of a failure. I was eighteen, fresh out of high school, with no idea what I wanted to do and with a sudden realization that, hey, nobody could *make* me go to class. Naturally, once that point sank in, I quit going, and my GPA plummetted.

Now, of course, I’m older, and have been looking at finishing my B.A. degree as a contest between me and the system. I have a few handicaps–my blindness makes figuring out transportation to school, not to mention getting to my classes, something of a challenge. But last semester I walked away with a 3.75 GPA, and am pretty sure I could have actually gotten an A in the one class I got a B in if I’d studied just that little bit longer.

So now we’re at this semester, and it’s a lot harder than last semester, and I can feel myself getting determined. Some of my professors I know will be a breeze–I can pass an English Composition class in my sleep, and aside from some reading, my Global Women’s Studies class is going to be a lot of fun and fairly easy. Then there’s my World Religion class, which requires some outside field work, but I think I can find something to observe that I’ll enjoy.

And then we come to the bane of my semester, my International Relations class. I read the syllabus. I looked at the requirements for the term paper. A small part of me died inside. And then I made a decision: I’m going to hate this class with a passion I usually reserve for, say, Indian romances featuring fated mates who discover they have secret babies… And so therefore, I am going to get an A if it kills me. It might very well kill me, come to that, but political science interests me not at all, and I would be happy to never take another poli-sci class again.

So there’s my academic challenge to myself… Ace International Relations… We’ll see if I do, or if I am forced to look back here in May and cry because the class has beaten me and made me its bitch.