Google Calendar has become an absolute necessity for keeping track of all the events and activities that contribute to my life at Swarthmore (a fact I am thankful for now, as it is going to help me walk you through what my day looked like on 3/23/23).
Above is a screenshot of my calendar for the week of 3/19/2023. I am only going to talk through events occurring on Thursday 3/23/23, but here is the breakdown of my color coding, for your viewing pleasure:
Dark Blue – MATH 25 (Calculus 2) events
Yellow – LING 40 (Semantics) events
Pink – MATH 27 (Linear Algebra) events
Dark Purple – LING 50 (Syntax) events
Red – anything relating to athletics that is not a team field hockey event
Burgundy/Garnet – field hockey team events (practices, team lifts, etc.)
Green – Resident Assistant events
Gray – work shifts
Light Purple – miscellaneous
For context, I stacked my schedule for the second semester of my sophomore year. As a result, all of my classes occurred on Tuesdays and Thursdays. At Swarthmore, multiple sections are offered for many classes, making schedule customization like this incredibly doable. I chose to schedule my classes the way I did so I could prioritize meetings, work, office hours, etc. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, rather than having to coordinate these with class meeting times. Without further ado, let’s begin a day in my life!
7:00 AM
I am definitely a morning person. For that reason, unless I had an earlier commitment, I woke up at 7:00am to be able to leave my dorm room in Hallowell to go to the Science Center around 7:20am (it is a roughly a 7 minute walk).
7:30 AM
My first class of the day did not start until 8:30 am, so I used this time to schedule-send my RA On-Call email for 8:00pm (more on this later) and attempt my Math 27 problem set which was due the following day. All this was done while drinking a double La Colombe latte from Sci Cafe.
8:30am
My first and possibly favorite class of the day was Math 25 which is also known as Calculus II, though students at Swarthmore tend to refer to math courses by their numbers rather than their actual names. My section was taught by Professor Cheryl Grood who split the hour and fifteen minutes between lecture and group work time, a format that has been consistent for all the math and statistics courses I have taken at Swarthmore.
9:55am
After a 10-minute break between classes, I headed right to Semantics with Professor Maura O’Leary. This was a course cross-listed as linguistics and philosophy focusing on the implied and literal meanings of words and groups of words. It was a mixture of lecture and class or small group discussions.
11:20 AM
My third and final class for the morning was Math 27 or Linear Algebra with Professor Linda Chen. This class was also split between lecture and small group work time.
12:35 PM
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I got lunch up the hill with a friend who also only had the 40-minute break before afternoon classes began. We usually went to either Kohlberg Cafe for chicken caesar salads or Sci Cafe for Chinese food. All dining options on campus are included in our meal plans so we have the flexibility to choose if we want to have a sit down meal in the Dining Center or a faster meal on the academic side of campus!
1:15 PM
We have finally made it to my last class of the day: Syntax with Professor Kirby Conrad. Throughout the course of the semester, my class worked together to develop the rules governing the structure of our prop language. In the process, we learned about the syntactic structure of different dialects of English as well as other languages.
2:45 PM
At 2:45pm I made my way to the Admissions Commons to give the 3:00pm tour to visitors! This past spring, I gave tours on Thursday afternoons and Saturday mornings. It was definitely tiring at times going from four classes to giving a tour, but I loved how it allowed me to take a step back from academics, while sharing my Swarthmore experiences with prospective students and families.
4:30 PM
The Sharples sit begins. A Sharples sit is when one sits in the dining hall for multiple hours either conversing with friends, working on homework, sharing a meal, etc. In the spring semester, this would have occurred in our brand new dining hall, which is named the Dining and Community Commons, but previously it would have occurred in the old dining hall, which was named Sharples and is where the term was coined. Sharples is currently being renovated and will reopen in 2024 as a community common space.
6:30 PM
On 3/23/23, I Sharples sat until roughly 6:30pm, when I went to my dorm building to pick up the RA on-call phone for the night. RAs (Resident Assistants) are Residential Peer Leaders (RPLs), who live in the dorms and act as a resource for residents on their floor and in their residential community. There is an RA on-call every night from 8:00pm to 8:00am, who students can call with any concerns.
7:00 PM
After picking up the RA on-call phone, I went back up to the academic side for a linear algebra pirate session. Teaching assistants (department peer support) in the Math Department are called pirates (π-rates), so this is just a TA session for my linear algebra class! TAs are students who have taken the course in the past and done well in it, and are then a resource for students currently enrolled in the course. My linear algebra class had problem sets due on Friday mornings, so on this occasion, I was likely asking questions relating to that content.
8:00 PM
Pirate sessions last until 10:00pm, but I had to leave at 8:00pm to make the ten-minute walk down to the Lamb-Miller Field House to get ready for field hockey practice. Athletics at Swarthmore are NCAA Division 3, which means out-of-season team commitments are largely limited to a 16-practice season. For field hockey, this meant four weeks of four practices per week during the month of March.
10:15 PM
My day is basically complete. At this point, I would have been walking up to my dorm to get ready for the next day!
This was a rather busy day for me, but it is reflective of my Tuesday and Thursday schedules this past semester. As the screenshot of my Google Calendar shows, other days of my week consisted of more free time, as well as work shifts, professor office hours, meetings, intramural sports, and club events!
