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Dear Welcome Week Azalea

Dear Welcome-Week Azalea,

I hope that you enjoyed your Wednesday night out on the Aldrich Park lawn, watching Toy Story 4 with hundreds of other students. That was a good movie.

I hope you enjoyed your Tuesday afternoon having random drinks being thrown at you from directions unknown to you while you were sandwiched between hundreds of sweaty bodies as you were jumping and cheering to the loud bass thumping from the stage during the Aldrich Park After Dark concert.

I hope you enjoyed walking up and down Aldrich Park, signing up for all those clubs during the Anteater Involvement Fair because “clubs are a great way to meet new people who share similar interests”. They’re also a great way to gain leadership skills and network with other people, and you may even make memories.

I hope you enjoyed spending your free hour playing in the Esports Arena during their kickoff event, because opportunities like that are rare. It must’ve been fun having so many people packed into the room that day, crowded around the TVs playing Super Smash Brothers while you were busting your butt on the computer to beat the bots during your practice match on Team Fortress 2.

I hope you enjoyed yourself while you were working up a sweat with those dance classes during Late Night at the Arc. Such a shame you passed up a good opportunity to win a free t-shirt, but then again those lines were pretty long. It must’ve been fun sweating through your clothes while you were trying so hard to belly-dance, but at least you had fun.

I hope you had fun participating in all those activities during Welcome Week, because after Week One hits and instruction begins, the fun runs out and the routine kicks in. Deadlines start to come in thick and fast, professors start to assign more work, and motivation starts to drop. Long lines form at The Hill as people rush to buy and rent their textbooks. LARC enrollment windows start to open up, and before you know it, your first midterm slaps you in the face.

By the end of your fall quarter, you will find yourself sitting in a study lounge or library, staring at your computer screen, typing away at an assignment that you know will be due very soon. Papers will be strewn all over your desk as you do your best to cram and study for your upcoming finals. You know that these grades matter because it determines whether or not you will need to repeat the course and waste even more precious FAFSA money.

You will be cursing yourself internally as you cannot access WebReg yet again due to clogged and overfilled servers full of students who are trying as hard to register for classes as you are.

However, you will be spending so much time with your friends, hall mates, club mates, classmates, and teammates. You will remember the conversations that you had, the dumb stuff that you used to do, the events that you used to hold, the study sessions that you went to, and the struggles that you got through together. College is not all about academics and financial aid; you can also make so many fun memories in college that you will cherish as time goes on! Live your life while you can!

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Rose Pageant, Meme Chalking, and Fam Wars: Extracurricular Involvement at UCI

Overall, my freshman year extracurricular involvement at UCI has been pretty fun. Yesterday, before I went to practice, the Meme Club was chalking memes behind the Social Sciences Lecture Hall (towards the stairs that lead to Aldrich Park). If you want to see the pictures, however, you will have to be part of the Facebook group, since the group is private (you can view their Facebook page here). I recall only going to two meetings because I was so busy, but I may consider attending more often. We have meetings every Monday from 5 pm to 6 pm in Social Sciences Tower, in room 122. They also host many crazy events, such as standing around in Aldrich Park screaming like Goku for over an hour, using an Ouija board to summon “Wildebeest Man” while listening to an entire My Chemical Romance album, or riding the S line forty times.

I also remember spending an entire Saturday preparing for Vietnamese Student Association’s Rose Pageant, because my dance team Level V Origins was performing. Being in LVO has really taught me about commitment, patience, and perseverance, because I spent so many nights out in the cold, practicing in front of Steinhaus Hall (or just sitting there while other people were blocking and cleaning their pieces). However, Rose Pageant itself was a day to remember. Everyone was singing old songs at the top of their lungs and then Cheney was playing some sort of mafia game where we all got cards that had different roles and then we faked sleep while the wolves tried to kill all the townspeople, or whatever happened in the game. We ate really good that night, because the banquet food was bomb. I pretty much joined LVO because it was a beginner-friendly dance team, but some of those pieces are very fast-paced and complicated. I have no experience in dancing hip hop… at all. However, being in that fall quarter piece has made so many memories. Jumping off that stage really hurt my feet, and I remember skipping across the pavement to the back of the parking lot out the side door because the sprinklers were on that night and I didn’t want them to wet my feet.

I’m also in the Antleader Mentorship Program, and our Fam Wars is coming up tonight… I am so nervous! However, AMP itself is super fun and has introduced me to so many cool people! In fact, the purpose of it is to be social and connect students to ASUCI in general. Personally, I have connected with more upperclassmen than I have other freshmen through it, but Chill Times for me are my personal favorite. We just sit around in Aldrich Park and discuss what’s going on in our lives, just like we do in Anime Community Club during our Wednesday UTC meetings (at 6:30 pm by the fountain if anyone is interested). However, I also find myself skipping meetings in order to catch up on homework or get some rest, so it is important to get a good balance of both.

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Lessons I have learned during my fall quarter of my freshman year at UCI

Lesson One: Always check RateMyProfessors when signing up for classes!

I have done research on professors that I currently have for classes, professors that people have raved about, and professors that people have complained about and wished that they would’ve never taken their classes to begin with. The website ratemyprofessors.com is very accurate when it comes to describing what it will be like to take a professor’s class. In fact, everything that I have experienced so far in my classes was exactly stated by other students on the website.

Lesson Two: If you live in Arroyo Vista or any of the ACC apartments (VDCN, VDC, CDS, PDS, PV), stick with FlexDine Dollars.

Dining hall swipes are expensive. That’s an extra $800 that I didn’t have to spend on the 85 block plan that I bought. In fact, I hardly have time to go to the dining hall since I don’t live in Mesa Court nor Middle Earth this year (I live in the Academic Excellence Black Scholars House, a first-year themed house in Arroyo Vista).

Lesson Three: Watch what you eat!

For those who have the dreaded 8 a.m. or even 9 a.m. classes like me, make sure to eat a good breakfast before you come to class. If you have a hard time doing this, make sure to sign up for later classes next quarter. Trust me, even if I sit at the front of the lecture hall during Arasasingham’s 9 a.m. lectures, if I don’t eat a good breakfast, I have a hard time staying focused. I feel very tired and bored, just like I did in high school in the mornings. Also, give yourself time for your meals to digest before you study or go to class, or try to avoid eating too fast. Otherwise, you will get very tired during your next class, like me during my Thrive@UCI classes.

Lesson Four: Stop sleeping on LARC tutorials and peer tutor worksheets!

I cannot thank LARC tutorial leader Jerry Zhang enough for making the concepts covered in Arasasingham’s lectures easier to understand. I also cannot thank Thais Bouchereau and Adisa Ajamu enough for sponsoring these tutorials. Although LARC tutorials are $110 per session, if you don’t want to pay, or don’t have a sponsor, you can ask your professors or TA’s if peer tutoring is offered for your general education classes. The peer tutors usually offer free worksheets for you to print out and use so that you can study for midterms and finals easier– I printed out all of them for Bio 93! Here are some peer tutors for general chemistry and biology.

Lesson Five: Know where and how to study

The upper floors of Langson Library and the Courtyard Study Lounge are some of my go-to spots for studying because I focus better in quiet environments. Gateway Study Center has touchscreen monitors, but the people there can get pretty chatty, so I would bring headphones and prepare to blast some chillhop or classical or whatever music gets your focus going.

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Midterm season is upon us

I remember Wednesday night’s review session last week for my Bio 93 midterm… never have I seen so many freshmen packed into one lecture hall. I kid you not, every single seat was filled up. Some students were even willing to sit on the carpeting. I remember pushing my way through the herd of students as I tried to find a seat towards the front. Minutes after I sat down, I saw that the students just kept on coming. The seats quickly began to fill up. Within less than five minutes, about ninety percent of the seats were taken.

Me and my friend (who came shortly after me) sat towards the front of the lecture hall as we waited for the peer tutors to begin their review session. I nervously turned my iClicker remote in my hands as I began contemplating my life choices, constantly asking myself whether or not I studied hard enough, trying to figure out what I did wrong.

Then the review session started. I took out my binder full of printed-out lecture slides and began making notes in the margins. I think I’m prepared for the midterm, I thought to myself as I frantically pushed multiple answers in for the iClicker portions of the review session, watching the numbers on the clock go up with each agonizing second that passed.

Fast forward to two days later, and I am sitting in the Biological Sciences Lecture Hall with my scantron, Dixon #2 pencil, and test booklet sitting on my desk. I frantically flip through pages back and forth in the test booklet, trying to find questions that I know I will be able to answer. Realizing that half of the content on the exam is material that I completely forgot about, I stare at the clock on the projection screen, rethinking my life choices, internally cursing myself for not studying more. My mind snaps back to reality as I hear someone flipping their desk down to the side of their chair across the room. Then another. And another. Pretty soon about twenty students are walking towards the front of the class to hand in their papers, and I realize that I am wasting my time daydreaming. With less than five minutes left on the clock, I quickly bubble in the answers that I think are right and hastily walk down the steps to the front of the hall to turn it in to the TA’s.

Moral of the story is, please remember to put school first, and learn to discipline yourself while studying! My mistake was that I procrastinated too much and I was very lazy with my studying, and I often tended to neglect my mental health. This is a big no-no! Learning to study without distractions is key to effective studying, because staying focused allows you to get more work done. And for the love of God, find a LARC sponsor ASAP before enrollment opens, because those sessions fill up FAST!

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Still Hanging In There

I never understood the stress and mental breakdowns that my friends (who were attending colleges that ran by the semester system) were experiencing– that is, until an entire month later. Except our situation is way worse.

Hello all, my name is Azalea Lilliana Walker, one of the U/U ZotBlog writers for the 2019-2020 school year! This will be my second blog that I will be working on, aside from my ePortfolio for my Writing 37 class. I personally love reflective writing– it’s one of my favorite hobbies. It helps me to relieve stress and just share my stories with other people, and being a ZotBlog editor can even help me put my Writing 37 skills to work.

I attended Dr. Maya Angelou Community High School in South Los Angeles, a.k.a “South Central”. You know, the area south of Downtown LA, past the Fashion District, with its abundance in corner stores and liquor shops, elote carts with the chicharron bags hanging from the top of them, and graffiti tagging the sidewalks and murals here and there. Yes, it’s a low-income area, yes, me and my friends (both male and female) do feel unsafe walking around the neighborhood sometimes, and yes, it’s very dirty and it sometimes stinks– the sanitation department does all they can to keep it clean, but people just keep shamelessly throwing trash in the street.

Regarding my experience at UCI, welcome week here was really fun. I loved the Toy Story 4 screening, because I know that my boyfriend and his family got a chance to go and see it during the summer when it came out, but I didn’t get the chance to see it until now– and I’m very glad I did. Aldrich Park After Dark, however, was crazy… I remember leaving early (around 7:30 P.M.) because I got bored, then about an hour and a half afterwards, I’m receiving texts from our house’s GroupMe chat about all the crazy stuff going on– people getting hurt, people fainting, etc.

Fast forward to now, and I’m almost at the end of week 2, with a midterm coming up next week. I’m way behind on textbook readings and understand nothing about half of the content that is being covered in Biology 93. I’m also struggling with some emotional baggage and learning to let go of the past. So far, I have been joining clubs to make friends, and I’m on the Level V Origins dance team, but I’m wondering whether or not I am in too much extracurricular activities. However, one thing that I am grateful for is the fact that I have people at the Black Scholars House in Arroyo Vista that I can reach out to when I need it most. Having a strong support network is crucial for my mental wellness. Personally, I know it’s scary to make new friends at UCI, but there are people out there that care.