It's only Day 1, and I already need a break! by KV

My favorite comic strip back when I was a college freshman was Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County. The characters--a motley crew that included youngsters Milo and Binkley, a wheel-chair-bound Vietnam veteran, a sometimes-dead cat named Bill, a lawyer with questionable ethics, and Opus the Penguin--whiled away their idyllic days by dabbling in politics, love, quantum physics, and Star Trek. Things sometimes (well, frequently) got out of hand, and thus they instituted the "Dandelion Break." Whenever things got overwhelming, they'd just head for the outdoors and reclaim equilibrium by communing with the dandelions.

I'm guessing that you folks are already feeling like you could use a Dandelion Break. You've been here at Converse for almost a week, and you've already been pulled sixteen ways from Sunday. You've made so many lists in your head that you're starting to feel like a pack of post-it notes, and you've been presented with so many possibilities that you figure you'll need to stay at Converse for at least a decade to get it all done. Well, welcome to Student Success Seminar! We're your Mass Dandelion Break.

We'll be spending this semester helping you reclaim that equilibrium. We'll talk about how to manage your time, finances, communication, and stress level so that you can concentrate on the most important aspects of college--learning more about yourself and the stuff that's not yourself so that you can get your exterior and interior lives working together a bit better. This is a "class" where all questions are permitted and where openness and acceptance are valued.

As a part of one of the main focuses of this class--the art of communication--we'll all be keeping blogs throughout the semester. Jason and I will post topics on our own blogs as the semester progresses--you'll be blogging about once every two weeks, give or take. Posts are due by Friday nights at 11:00 (pre-weekend zaniness/forgetfulness). Each entry should be at least 200 words and must be in grammatically correct Standard English. Do remember that blogs, like everything on the internet, are accessible by anyone, and that it's entirely possible that future employers, dates, and realtors will Google your name at some point.

And so, friends, here is our first Blog topic, due this Friday, September 3, by 11:00 pm:

Please expound on these four questions:

1. Why did you decide to come to college? (After all, it's not exactly free...)

2. Why did you decide specifically to come to Converse? (Again with the "not free"...)

3. Why did you decide to study music in college at Converse? (I'm sensing a theme here...)

4. If you had to give up either cereal or sandwiches for the rest of your life, which would it be?

(Ah, free from that $$ theme at last.)

Enjoy!