Breakfast with Amber

February 2020: I Almost Got to Go to Japan

To be honest, I don't remember much of February, either. It was the spring semester, and life was going. Now that FYE was over, I could finally take five classes of my choosing.

For my English major, I took British lit from 1800 to the present. It was taught by Dr. Tontiplaphol, the chair for the English department. She was really sweet and a great teacher, and she always seemed surprised that I arrived to her class so early, but that's because I had Literary Methods with Dr. Rando right next door before her class. Honestly, Lit Methods was kind of boring. It was just a class on different types of literary analysis, and in April, I had to write a reflective essay where I almost wrote, "I really wish we had a unit that didn't conclude with 'we live in a society,'" and the stuff that I did write was equally scathing. Dr. Rando gave me a C. He just doesn't understand.

The spring semester of my freshman year is also when I decided to get both of my science requirements out of the way. For social sciences, I chose Intro to Psych. It was probably the only class I took that was in a big lecture hall with 45 students. This particular lecture hall had the nickname "The Treehouse" because it was on the top floor of CSI and had a wood engraving of some branches on the wall between the entrances. It was taught by Dr. White, who was old enough to be my grandpa, but he was a cool grandpa. He must have been one of the top professors at Trinity because a quote of his was written on one of the flags hanging around campus. I don't remember it word for word, but it goes something like: "The phrase that combines determination and a sense of humor: come on!" Looking back, that's definitely something he'd say. He'd always try to make us laugh. He'd often include memes in his presentations. Sure, they were usually a few years outdated, but it's the thought that counts.

If Dr. White was old enough to be my grandpa, Dr. Ziegler was old enough to be my...actually, I don't know which relative he's supposed to be old enough to be, but he was definitely younger than any of my other professors. He also asked us to call him Brady, but I never could because that wasn't how I was taught to refer to my teachers. He taught Earth's Environmental Systems, the natural science course I chose, which definitely excited my geoscientist father. We learned about things such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and climate change. There was a field trip to Edwards Aquifer scheduled that never happened because of reasons and a project where we collected dust off the street and analyzed it for contaminants which had to be finished virtually because of reasons, but we were still in San Antonio to loiter in the arrivals section of the airport to collect samples.

Finally, there was Entrepreneurship for Creatives, an entrepreneurship class recommended to me by and taught by the lovely Dr. Pohler. This class had exactly four people. On the first day, that is. Then one of them dropped, and we had three. Her class taught me a lot of marketing strategies that I still use today. If you've visited my website, checked out my social media pages, or watched my trailers, you can thank Dr. Pohler for that.

Outside of classes, though, I was applying to study abroad in Japan. This wasn't something that started in February, either. I mentioned it last month when Mom was trying to get me to eat more rice. I remember being interested in the program as far back as November, but I didn't actually start filling out the application until January. The program was a six-week summer program where a select group of students would fly to a town in Japan called Nishinomiya, which is a short train ride from four different cities. I don't remember all of them, only Kobe and Nara. We'd attend Kwansei Gakuin University, a partner university of Trinity's and each stay with a host family.

To my little weeaboo self, that just seemed like a dream come true, so I applied as soon as I could. I answered all of the application questions honestly. (Maybe a little too honestly because when asked to prove that I wouldn't cause any disciplinary problems while abroad, I answered, "I can barely speak up during a group discussion. You shouldn't really expect me to act out whatever questionable ideas pop into my head." That's it. That's the answer.) Finally, on January 29, I submitted the application, and on February 4, I attended the information session. Soon after, I received an e-mail detailing the second and final stage of the application process: an interview with the professors in charge of the program. One of them was Dr. Nishikawa, whom I'm pretty sure was with the entrepreneurship department and maybe also international studies. I just know him from the Japan program. There was another professor there, but I can't remember their name or picture their face. I think it was a woman, though.