The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

At noon, I went to the Law School to hear a professor and attorney at Earth Justice speak about environmental litigation and natural resource protection. I went with the best of intentions, but ended up leaving with a free burrito due to an impending homework assignment. I sat down with a classmate in some plush, aubergine-colored Law School couches as we went over our presentation on "Waste Prevention Through Redesign," for a class with Norman Myers. Through some karma-payback, we were soon interrupted by another Law School lunch lecture. We quickly escaped and booked it over to the Nicholas School where we hid ourselves in a computer lab and got to work.

After a couple of hours of burrito- and coffee-induced productivity, we parted ways for class.

I went off to my Intermediate Portuguese class, which I am taking partly because it is useful, but mostly because it is a beautiful language. Between 3pm and 4pm I learned about the different styles of writing in Brazilian journalism throughout the last 40 years. During the Brazilian dictatorship that lasted twenty years (1964 - 1985, if I remember correctly), technocrats got increased stature and words like "economês" --  the economic equivalent of "legal-ese" --  began appearing in popular press. Who knew?

At 4pm I ran out of class to a meeting with conservation researcher Clinton Jenkins. We spoke about the work he is doing in Brazil and to brainstorm about internship possibilities for the coming summer, a looming concern/exciting opportunity for all first-years. At 4:40pm I plotzed down into a couch in the Nicholas School student lounge and tried to catch my breath. Friends asked, "What's new?" I deftly avoided the question by turning the question on them.

At 5pm I went to Love Auditorium (the mainstay of Nic School lectures) to hear a talk by the environmental editor of Le Monde. He spoke about the supposedly controversial idea of decreasing our consumption. Committing a faux-pas of some sort, I skedaddled out of there a bit early and ran off to a 5:45pm group project meeting for my "Commercializing Technology Innovations" class at the Pratt School of Engineering. Between 6-8:30pm we had a guest lecturer talk to us about Intellectual Property Management where we learned about Thomas Jefferson's ideas about patents and intellectual property.

At 8:30pm I ran across campus to meet for another group project to analyze King Crab data for a statistics class. At some bleary-eyed, mind-boggling moment near 10pm I got a ride home. I ate some dinner, scarcely qualifying as food, and watched The Daily Show to regain some measure of sanity. Soon thereafter, I went to sleep with a big smile and spinning head.

Despite the fact that no one item was life-changing or exceedingly thought-provoking, a Professional Masters program (pardon the generalization) so far appears to be more about the overall experience than a specific class. The whole of my Monday was certainly more than the sum of any one activity, and as far as Mondays go, not bad.

And that was just the day before November 4th.