Why Should I Order My Textbooks in Advance?

    I am a few weeks into my first semester, and I have already observed some of my less than optimal preparation strategies. After spending much of last weekend engaged in 80 pages of calculus exercises in preparation for a quiz on limits and continuity, I realized that I could have avoided that cram session by getting the textbook in advance. In addition to this, I am still waiting for two of my books to arrive. So, a piece of advice that I can give to a first time college student is:
  

Order your textbooks a few weeks before the semester starts.

    If you know that you are definitely going to take a certain class, you can save a lot of money and time by finding a used copy of the textbook online through sites like Amazon, Abebooks.com, and ecampus. My school issued me a gmail address, along with the professors' email addresses, shortly after I had registered for classes (and months before the semester was to begin). This is the time to send a message to your professor, ask them which textbook will be needed for the course, and whether an earlier edition of that book is acceptable. 

  

    New textbooks are expensive! Fortunately, there should be a ton of used textbooks available. The quality of these textbooks can be questionable, however. One student, in my Elementary German class, rented a workbook which has already been filled in. Every single page has someone else's answers! Keep in mind that you aren't the only one looking for cheap textbooks. The sooner that you start searching for these textbooks, the more options you'll have as far as quality. You can sort the used textbooks on Amazon by cost. By doing so, you may see a few that are within the same price range yet are listed as 'ACCEPTABLE', 'GOOD', 'VERY GOOD', etc. In my limited experience, these are fairly accurate descriptions. You want to try to get a 'VERY GOOD' copy to make it easier for you to get maximum value when you want to sell the book later. 

  

    Ordering books online will save you a lot of money in comparison to the campus bookstore. The downside is that you may have to wait weeks for a book to arrive. You can mitigate this wait by spending a few extra bucks on a used book that ships from a location that is closer in proximity to you. So, if you have a couple options that are close in quality but differing in price, it may be worth it to order the more expensive one if it is a thousand miles closer to you. Ultimately, you can avoid much of this stress by ordering that textbook a few weeks before the class begins. That is a lesson that I have learned and a strategy that I will be employing for my second semester.

Day Three (End of Week 1!)

    Thursday was awesome. More good weather to make that long walk from the parking lot to campus so much easier to bear.

    I got the day started by reading the last chapters of Melanie Mitchell's Complexity: A Guided Tour. This book, published in 2009, is a compilation of research in complex adaptive systems and the author frequently cited another title that is sitting on my to-read bookshelf ; Gödel, Escher, Bach. It reminded me of the classes that I took through Coursera last Fall, Model Thinking and Introduction to Genetics and Evolution. At first, it seemed a little easier to read than Murray Gell-Mann's book on complexity, The Quark and the Jaguar(1994), but Mitchell got into some details that I just couldn't wrap my head around. She outlines algorithms for the Copycat model. This model seeks to offer an explanation for how humans make analogies and why we are so good at making them. If you think about it, creating a model to explain how we make analogies is just making an analogy about how we make analogies. What they found with their research is that algorithms can be evolved to perform better by seeding the population with random algorithms, breeding the best fit pairs and iterating this process repeatedly until it either converges on an equilibrium or oscillates between states. This area of science, automata/evolution, is of great interest to me.

    Jon Stewart was back on The Daily Show so I had something good to watch during my quick workout. The show was a bit weird with John Oliver at the helm. It was still enjoyable but it was just such a different feel for the show.

    I found a deal from Staples to get a TI-84 Plus for $\$$99.99 (w/ $\$$10 rebate offer) so I put one on reservation and picked it up on my way to school. I am now a person who owns a $\$$100+ calculator. The feelings cannot be explained.

    Foundations class was fun. We arranged the desks into a circle and some shared their "cultural artifact". As a first assignment, we must find something that represents our culture or our background. I have chosen a $\$$5 Borgata chip for mine to help explain how much I've learned from my experiences as a poker player. Despite my apparent preparedness, I couldn't muster up the courage to share mine before time was up. It will have to wait until Tuesday. Also, I found out that I had ordered the wrong book edition and could have saved some money. That sucks.

    There was still a few minutes before German class so I went outside to sit and enjoy the weather a bit. Two girls from my previous class sat down at the same table and we talked about stuff. Look at me socializing like a big boy now! What is it about every social interaction that leaves me thinking "I should have said ..."? I am a much more genial person in my retrospective mind.

    And then came German class. This was great. The professor is awesome and jocular and we all got involved with the day's lesson. We went over the basics of the German alphabet, pronounced the different sounds and communicated our names to each other using just those two tools. It was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to this class.

    When I got home, I had a package of books waiting for me. So I open it up and there it was. The book that I unnecessarily ordered. Along with that was the Quick Access reference book for my English composition class. Leafing through it made me a little more excited than I probably should have been. I can see why the professor was so adamant about carrying such a resource with you throughout your writing life. So I got on Amazon.com, set up a return of the book that I had ordered by mistake and put an order in for the fifth edition which is significantly less expensive than the seventh. I'll be losing about eight bucks due to shipping costs but it's probably worth it. And that was the end of the first week of lectures. Next week should start getting into the nitty gritty.

Second Day

    I promise that I won't be blogging the minutiae of every single day for the next 3 months. Today is quite the occasion though. My first live college math lecture. After about an hour of outlining the course, calculus class kicked off with a pre-calc refresher quiz. Whoa whoa whoa. Hold up. My brain isn't primed for math yet today. Actually, I've been finding it hard to get myself back in that mode after reading so much this summer. I was just getting into a rhythm when we were asked to pause to discuss the answers we've gotten so far. Being outed as a mathematics major puts a lot of pressure on you. All in all it was a good experience and the class is full of smart people in search of math, computer science and business degrees. I'm really looking forward to participating with this group.

    I couldn't help but feel some uncertainty with regards to my own abilities however. It was easy for me to feel overwhelmed by the level of mastery that I'm seeking. It's going to be a lot of hard work to own this material, despite my previous experience.

Yep, that's a bench. I think it likes me.

   Another sunny day here at SCCC. After calc one I went over to the introduction to computer science class where we sat for a long overview of the course along with the syllabus. It looks like I need to get some text books. Say goodbye, money! Tomorrow I will close out the first week with the second meeting of the Foundations class followed by Elementary German. Hey! I should be ready for that one.

First Day of School

    Well here we are. Finally. The first day for this awkward 32 year old's college education. Last week, though you wouldn't know it from my lack of updates,  I attended freshman orientation. It started off with a motivational speech by Jon Vroman with the theme Living College Life in the First Row. He stressed the importance of getting out of your comfort zone and taking responsibility for your education as well as your social life. We were implored to say hi to others, ask them questions and hug somebody. Which felt good and not at all strange for a bit until everything was awkward again afterwards.

    Moving on, today is a beautiful day outside. I kicked off the day with some duolingo practice, a quick workout on the total gym while watching the bonus video for the latest Talking Bad along with a Crash Course history video via Khan Academy and returned a few books to the library. Time was getting short. I started to get worried that I'd miss my opportunity to "live life in the first row". My concerns would all be for naught as I found myself amid the future of humanity while waiting for our English professor to arrive. It's a somewhat strange social situation that I found myself in. Here stood about 20 people whom appeared much younger than I and some of which surely were already familiar with each other from finishing high school together. I am a new fish in a very weird pond. These fish apparently didn't subscribe to the frontest of row sitting philosophy as I was one of the last to enter the room and still had a center seat at the bow of this ship.

    Gestalt. The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. If we step back and look at the forest we may appreciate the trees more. That last sentence is my way of paraphrasing the opening lecture with a little help from a cliché. We were presented the syllabus and an outline of what this composition course is about. I couldn't help but be a little excited* when I saw that we'd be learning how to properly use MLA style citations in our project where we construct a research paper. This is the kind of writing that I'm going to need to get better at if I have any hopes of a successful science research career. We have to write three papers over the next few months. The first being a clear, concrete and rational argument. The second is an analysis of some writing and the third is the research paper (the meat of the course).

    After about an hour of lecture, we were free to leave. I headed to the library to see if James Gleick's Chaos was still there. I had spotted it on the tour given during orientation as well as another book on Hypatia that I'm just going to have to check out later. After inquiring about the reference sources like JSTOR and other academic journals, I checked out the Gleick book and headed outside for a walk. I had some time to kill so I started writing this blog post. Do you know that feeling you get when you spend quite a bit of time writing out a good post only to run into a technical problem that undoes your hard work? Yep, that happened. I was using the Blogger app on my phone and clicked save when the screen flashed off and a tiny amount of feces escaped me. Just a tiny bit. When I went back to the app, my post said that it was stuck on saving and was still malfunctioning when I got back home later on. So I had to do most of this all over again. What was that Hemingway quote that Dr. Ancona mentioned? Ah yes "writing is rewriting".
I actually wrote that quote down on my technologically infallible paper with a pen (no thanks to you, smart computer pocket thingy!)

    On the way to my Foundations class I passed by a couple of conversing girls, one of whom said "I don't have any of my friends in my classes". Funny. I don't seem to have any friends at this entire school. At least not yet. Hopefully that will change. Tomorrow should be interesting. Calc I and Intro to CS here I come!

* - It's possible that I am easily amused.