Another Stanford Year Down

This past year out in Palo Alto was another great one. It was both fun and stressful, but all in all very rewarding. Here's a summary of the year.

Highlights:

• Making great new friends (esp. ME & GG)
• Getting to know old friends better
• Learning more about myself
• Finishing (and Passing) the HumBio Core!
• Teaching a class on 'Disability and Sports'
• Sleeping outside on Roble field (w/ME) and not getting any sleep because I was terrified of sprinklers and rapists...in that order
• Having great conversations outside my window with BE late at night
• Studying in the library (this was the first year I actually studied in the library and it's awesome!)
• Having the goal to visit every library on Stanford Campus (8ish down, 16 more to go) http://www-sul.stanford.edu/libraries_collections/maps_directions/SULAIRmap10-11.pdf
• "Study" sessions in Braun with LS and BE
• Partying at Xanadu with JP, LS, ML, etc. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m1UWSD-FaA)
• Seeing Lake Lagunita (slash Lagunita Puddle)
• Improving my GPA...just by a wee bit
• Seeing Andrew Luck...'s Legs (haha, that's a joke...kinda)
• But really I saw Andrew Luck
• Finishing my pre-req's for the classes that I actually want to take for next year
• Taking 2 classses that were at the same time and passing both

Lowlights:

• Taking 2 classes at the same time and wishing to be like Hermione
• Having 2 Finals at the same time on the same day
• Living on the opposite side of campus than the majority of my friends
• Lagunita Dining....might as well add Stern to that too
• Having the year end
• Realizing I only have one more year of college and trying to figure out where to go after I graduate
• Knowing that a lot of friends will be leaving next year because they graduated or are going on missions or changing wards

Swim swim swim

Hello Friends,

This Saturday I am participating in a swim-a-thon for an organization called 'Swim with Mike' which gives scholarship money to disabled athletes. I was a fortunate recipient this past year and will be swimming to help fund raise and raise awareness about this program.

If you would be willing to sponsor me I would be very grateful. No donation is too small. You can sponsor me by lap or just an overall sum. If I drown, I'm pretty sure you can get a refund.

Here's how you can sponsor me:

Donations can be made online at this link http://www.swimwithmike.org/giving.html If you do choose to sponsor me online, simply hit the button "sponsor a participant or recipient," and then select my name from the pull down menu where it says "select a swimmer." The rest of the steps allow you to provide the requisite billing and payment information. If you prefer, checks can be made out to the "Physically Challenged Athletes Scholarship Fund” and sent directly to me at: PO Box.

Thanks!

~Lena

Love that Dirty Water...even in the Bay Area.

Last week the Red Sox came in to town to play the A's. Luckily someone in the ward had tickets but couldn't make it and therefore offered them to me and a nameless Yankees fan. It was fun going to another ball park, especially since I'm so close to two right now. The student life is hard.

Some highlights:

• Buying $5 hot dogs
• Having the usher who took the above picture say I look 13-years old
• Watching JB lead the "Boston Sucks" chants on the bleachers...(and then expecting a ride back to PA with me....boy was she wrong)
• JB photo-bombing the person in front of us by giving them bunny ears
• Having the 8th inning last longer than the rest of the game up to that point
• Arriving at the entrance with 2 printouts of the same ticket (I guess only one of us gets to go to the game...and that person is the one in the wheelchair)
• Freezing and having JB be stubborn enough not to share her blanket with a Red Sox fan
• JB wearing her Yankees shirt, but hiding it under that pink sweater (I'd be embarrassed if I was a Yankees fan too)
• Watching the Red Sox win!!!! (the day after)

Late night Laundry night

So after going to office hours for an hour and a half, and going to a meeting for an ASB (alternative spring break) trip, and working the rest of the night on a Computer Science project that's due tomorrow, I realized I haven't done my laundry. And I need to do my laundry if I am to take a shower tomorrow morning because I'm pretty sure it defeats to point of showering if I dry myself off with a dirty towel and dirty bathrobe.

So after being irritated that it's 11:15 PM and I want to go to bed (which by the way is pretty early for Stanford students, scandal I know)...and after wheeling down the large hallway with the faint aroma of pot to the elevator and down to the laundry room with a big bag of laundry and detergent on my lap...I was trying to figure out what I would do with the next hour and half that I have until my laundry is done. Because you can't just leave your laundry in the free shared dorm room washers and dryers. If you do, you risk theft and even worse, the chance that someone with handle your intimates and put them on a dirty table so that someone else can use your washer that you were just using. Yes, this really happens. Ironically, sometimes I have to be the sketchy one to handle someone else's intimates in order to use a dryer I can reach. So, I must watch my clothes hour by hour and arrive to retrieve my clean clothes right when the meter hits 0 mins. But, yes, I was trying to figure out what I would do whilst I waited. I could do homework and study, but who does that the week before finals? I could watch TV shows on Hulu (a very good backup option). Or I could blog.

So here we are. I'm trying something a bit new. I have recently been inspired by a friend who is very good and funny at blogging and I'm taking a page of advice from her style format. (Oh snaps, I totally just edited the html in this blog to add a link to my friends blog. Yeah CS 105!) She's much better at rambling on about the thoughts in her head than I am, but I'm trying.

This week as been an interesting one. I went to a meeting about a student initiated course I'm teaching in the spring called 'Sport and Disability'. I'm very excited about it. I'm co-teaching it with someone and we are talking about adaptive sports and some of the dilemmas that arise with disabled sports. At the end of the course, students get to learn and play wheelchair basketball. Did I mention this is open to everyone? Yes, very exciting.

The other fun thing that happened this week was that I sheared a screw on my wheelchair. Again. Originally I sheared one that was on my backrest but I got it fixed a week ago thanks to my Mechanical Engineering friend, but this time I sheared a screw on my front caster wheels. Did you know that you actually need those? Luckily the screw didn't fall out when I was wheeling, but it was close. I had to sit on a bench to figure out what the problem was. Yes that is my wheel in my hand with the broken screw in the other. Luckily a nice stranger offered to take my picture. Haha. Just kidding, I was with a friend when this happened. Holding on to her backpack while she biked probably wasn't the best idea at the time....

Something Different

Somehow, I can't relate to the weather patterns of the rest of the country. Especially New England.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=palo+alto+weather

2010!

Oh yeah....that blog thing....

So I finished my first year at Stanford about a month ago. It was a fantastic finish to a wonderful school year. I will admit that it didn't start out amazing. I took Geology classes and hated it, but now after doing some more searching for classes and majors, I finally landed on one that I'm confident will stick and will also give me better options for my future. This new major is called Human Biology. It is a pretty unique major and I had never heard of it until I went out to Stanford. It is a BA as opposed to a BS, and it looks at humans both from a biological and social science perspective. It is also a very flexible major where you can choose a lot of your own classes within the major and choose what your concentration within the major is. There are just a few core classes that you take, which I started last quarter. One was The Human Organism which was basically an intro to physiology and anatomy. The other core class was Health and Environmental Policy Analysis. I absolutely loved all the classes I tool this past quarter and am excited to start the other classes that I need to take next year. I'm still planning on concentrating in Health Policy but after looking in to the Public Policy and Human Biology major I thought that Human Biology would be a better fit for what I want to do. Since it is interdisciplinary, it will be better for me when going to PA school.

This past quarter, I also took a required writing class where the topic was 'Women in Sports' which was awesome. But as part of the requirement I had to write a research paper and then present it in front of the class. I did my research on Title IX and how is represents disabled athletes...or doesn't in this case. My teacher was really motivated by my research and I made a lot of cool contacts and connections; long story short, I'm going to try and start some type of adaptive program next year. Stanford has student initiated courses where students can design and teach classes to other Stanford students and they can get university credit for it. I'm thinking of creating one of those classes, like an 'Intro to Adaptive Sports' class where other students can come play adaptive sports with me. It may be my own selfishness of not wanting to leave campus for hours at a time to play sports with other people in Berkeley or San Jose because balancing school work and recreation time is very hard at Stanford. So hopefully my plan will work out next year.

This Summer I haven't been doing too much. I had a nice TV series marathon of "Bones" and now I kind of want to be a forensic anthropologist. Not really, but maybe it can be my secret identity/profession at night. I'm also planning on going to Finland this summer with some friends. One of my good friends that I met at the Rehab hospital is from Finland and is going back there this Summer to visit and she invited me to come as well. She'll be there for a month but I will be there for a couple of weeks starting at the end of July. I figured that there will be no other time that I will have my own personal tour guide of Finland as well as a place to stay. It should be fun. It will be my first time in Europe with a wheelchair which will be an adventure in itself. But I'm very very excited.

That's it for now!

Hope you enjoy your Summer!!!!

Halftime

I just finished my 5th week here in school, and 6th week living at Stanford. Things are pretty crazy here. There were 23 transfers this year out of about 1500 applicants and I can see why the competition is so high. My fellow transfers have amazing stories and ambishions that sometimes I feel like I need to push myself further in life. They all come from all walks of life all over the country and all over the world.

The first week of school was a bit intimidating, I think partly because it was the transition from summer to school and also because of the new environment and situation that I am putting myself through. But now I'm half way done with this quarter and I can't wait for it to end! haha. I'm currently taking 13 units. 2 geology classes: and intro and the other called earth materials. Earth materials is by far the hardest class I have...or maybe the most intense class I have. We have class 3 days a week and 3-hour labs twice a week, so the time commitment is huge. It is an interesting class because we learn about....material...in the earth...like mostly minerals which make up rocks, and how they are formed. And then we look at them in lab and have quizzes on whether we can identify them or not. We've even started to look at tiny thin sections of rocks and look at the minerals in polarized light, which looks really cool, but now I'm starting to wonder what's the point of looking at rocks underneath a microscope. It's very interesting but somedays I'm so tired. This week was also a pretty good week because I realized that I can't look at rocks in thin section anymore....unless for a test...and therefore I need to change my major. Yay! The other class I'm taking is an intro seminar in Medicine. It's called "Dillemmas in Current Medical Practice" and it is by far my favorite class. Maybe because it's only once a week and as long as I show up and do my work I'll pass the class...but also because the things we talk about and very fun. We started out talking about the current healthcare debate and gaining insight to how healthcare is run in the US compared to other countries in the world. This class has started getting me interested in the healthcare debate and also looking into Public Policy as a new option for a major, and concentrating on health and health policy. It's still an idea right now, but I feel like I'd rather spend time talking about healthcare than rocks. I will also take new suggestions of things to major in as well. Maybe I will make it into a contest and whoever guesses or suggests right, then they will recieve a special prize.

Besides actual academic work, the rest of school is good too. THe campus is fairly flat and so wheeling everywhere on campus is not a problem. No hill scares me here at Stanford. I've also noticed that I'm the only manual-push chair on campus. The other people in wheelchairs have power chairs. I feel left out sometimes, so the other day I held on to another girl's power chair and hitched a ride to the union for lunch.

I also e-mailed the Women's Basketball coach out here, asking if I could do anything the help out with the team this season because Stanford is ranked at least in the top 10 for national rankings. So now...I help keep the clock at practices. I've only been doing it for about a week, but it feels so nice to be back in the basketball environment. And all the coaches are happy for my help, which is nice. I got some free bball gear from the nike sponser and apparently some nice perks at the end of the season are that the managers (and I'm hoping the clock keeper) gets to go to the Final Four tournament for free with the team. I also think that this is a good opportunity to network and make connections with the coaches for one of the best women's bball programs in the nation. All the girls on the team are also very nice. They are all so freakishly tall and it's funny to watch them practice together because then they look proportionally sized and normal looking compared to when you're standing right next to them. But the first game is next week and I'm excited to watch them play this season. They even play the Utah Utes during the week of Thanksgiving. When I told the coaches I transfered from there they all perked up and said that Stanford plays them and that I'll be cheering for Stanford this year. I probably will....mainly because they are better than the Utes, but I hope that Utah still gives them a good game.

Tomorrow I'm going kayaking in near San Fran bay. It should be interesting because I've never been sea kayaking. Luckily I have a friend who lives a little north of San Fran and we are tandem kayaking in a charity race. It's about 3 miles total and will be a fun treat.

The weather out here in Palo Alto is amazing. I love it.

Come visit!