HBU vs. UH Main

This semester has been much more enlightening than the last here at UH. I wasn’t entirely thrilled to leave HBU, but after some disappointments with certain people, the costs, and the implementation of the semester system from the quarter system, I found very few reasons to stay. HBU was a great stop for me, however. Academically, it was and is an awesome place. It is small, the classes are like high-school size, and the professors know your name! This intimate configuration of student to faculty is a blessing to most students anywhere. I once had a class of only 7 students! I couldn’t cheat! Lol. A public university will never beat that! Also, it is easier to make friends at HBU since you see the same people over and over.  Heck, you even see the girl you fell in love with walking around with her new boyfriend. Oh, wait! That is a con! At UH, you meet someone and never see them ever again! I still have not run into that cute girl I met on the second day! There were several things I did not like at HBU. Many times, I felt like it was like a prison. There were a thousand rules you had to follow, like going to convo, OMG, how I hated that. Not only did I hate going, but when I went, most everyone was playing Nintendo DS, surfing the web on their laptops, or just doing homework! I was like, “what’s the point?”

I am glad I moved to UH. It is a totally different and more filled student experience, at least for me. Academically, HBU is still superior, but not as much as people think. Heck, this semester I am taking classes that are very challenging. For example, out of 130 students in my Cell Bio class, 30 failed the first test and 18 got a D! There were only 11 As! We are talking about seniors who are pursuing a bio degree! To make matters worse, the GPA-killing professor boasted that it was going to be the easiest test of the semester!  Moving on, UH is huge… over 36,000 enrolled students, making it the third biggest university in Texas (only UT and A&M are bigger). You get to walk a lot, so you get your exercise! When you compare Moody Library with MD Anderson Library… well, there is no comparison, the library here is like 5-6 stories. UH is a research university, with much more money, so comparing both institutions is not fair. At UH, our Wellness Center is better than the best Bally’s Total Fitness I know! We have Chillis, 2 Chick-fil-A restaurants, Einstein Bros., Starbucks, Kim Son, Subway, Taco Bell, 2 Pizza Huts, Pita Express, and a bunch of other places to eat with friends without leaving campus! There is even a bar on campus to go have a beer after a test! I know HBU is a small Christian university, but as stated earlier, the biggest pros are that the classes are small and the friends you make are high quality (not all, but most). I think both universities are great, but I feel UH is more of a fit for me. Here, you can smoke in the parking lot or with your professor (not that I smoke much), and we have pretty good football team! I don’t have that much more before I finish here, though. My academic career has been so different compared to most students I know. I started at HCC Town & Country, transferred to HBU, and then transferred to UH Main! All for an undergraduate degree! Of course, there will always be an aura of prestige when one graduates from a private university, but I am a fond believer that it is in the student, not the institution. I feel more well-rounded by being at different schools, I can compare. You want to know the worst thing about UH? The parking. I kid you  not, I spend more money in gas looking for a parking spot than driving to school! I spend up to 40 minutes looking for someone to leave so I can take their space. Finding a parking spot in UH is almost the equivalent of an orgasm.

On another note, all universities in America are run like any business, they all want money. They all want you to stay as long as you can to milk you for money. I find it ridiculous that we live in the most powerful country in the world and students have to pay tuition. Look at Germany, Norway, Sweden… they all provide free university education to their people. Why can’t we have that over here? Epic PHAIL

We all have our individual style of learning and memorizing things for exams. Personally, I do not think I have good study habits as I get distracted pretty easily and lose focus. Heck, I even fit the symptoms of attention deficit disorder (ADD), but refuse to believe I have it! When I first started college, I used to read entire chapters, but now I just glance at them and read the summaries. What I do pay attention to is the bolded terms and what is around them. I have a rather weird trait in that if my professors test me with multiple choice exams I “almost” always do well. When I read the A-B-C-D answers, the answer just “jumps” at me. Interestingly, I found that HBU pretty much denied me of this lucky ability, forcing me to memorize and really learn material to construct essays and write short answers. So far, it has been the only place in which the bulk of my tests were not multiple choice. I guess most private universities are like that, it does give you an edge. At first, I found it disconcerting, but later it became normal. As you know, learning material that is interesting is rather easy, the hard part is learning material that you really don’t like. For this, I came up with a rather simple way of learning that, while not fool-proof, you can beat memorizing short stories and poems learning half the amount.

For example, I took an advanced English class with Dr. Louis Markos, a brilliant professor of English at HBU, and for our final we had to memorize like 10 rather long poems. The class covered the romantic and Victorian English poets such as Percy Shelley, Samuel T. Coleridge, John Keats, and later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, etc. If you know me, then you know I love literature. Sadly, however, I found most of the poems in this class boring. When finals came around we had to know all the poems covered since mid-term and recognize the author and name of the poem, I panicked! How could I remember stuff that I really didn’t want to read? I came as to the answer after some brainstorming. Simply, take up the poem’s stanzas and just memorize every other line!

I took Thomas Hardy’s Channel Firing:

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, ‘No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

‘All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

‘That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening….

‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).’

So down we lay again. ‘I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,’
Said one, ‘than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!’

And many a skeleton shook his head.
‘Instead of preaching forty year,’
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
‘I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.’

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

Though I shouldn’t have, I transformed it to this:

That night your great guns, unawares,
And broke the chancel window-squares,

And sat upright. While drearisome
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, ‘No;
Jut as before you went below;

‘All nations striving strong to make
They do no more for Christés sake

‘That this is not the judgment-hour
For if it were they’d have to scour

‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I ever do; for you are men,

So down we lay again. ‘I wonder,
Said one, ‘than when He sent us under

And many a skeleton shook his head.
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,

So, this is how I aced Dr. Markos’ final exam! Instead of memorizing ALL the material, I only memorized half of it! For all intents and purposes, the poem retains its identity and one can easily identify it as Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy! The English professor gave us excerpts of the poems and each excerpt had 4-6 lines, thus, my method allowed for at least 2- 3 lines to fall within the excerpt, more than enough to recognize the poem! Markos seemed impressed that someone wearing a Jack Skellington beanie was able to pull it off! Of course, this technique doesn’t work well with science or math classes, but for some English classes and other humanities… it should work just fine.

I like reading and it is a shame I do not read as much as I used to. I did not start college right after high school, but to make up for it, I did delve into all sorts of books. Growing up, you often hear about the classics, like The Divine Comedy by Dante, The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer, works by Sophocles, The Histories by Herodotus, Shakespeare’s plays, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and so on and so forth. Though some classical works are mildly touched during high school, I truly believe high school students fail to appreciate the greatness of such works. Such classical literature should be saved for college, and even then, it is not for everyone. You have to like it.

I started buying and reading the Greco-Roman classics first. I was not required to. I just did it for pleasure and to “educate” myself. I started with the poet, Homer, and it was a hell of a start. The Iliad is arguably the best book written by man. Even now, it is still my favorite book. The narration of the Trojan War, with all its blood and glory appealed to me and I understood why Hector and Achilles are such famous characters. Having thus read this book, I was inclined to read the exploits of Odysseus after the Trojan War, his quest to reach his wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus, after 20 years of absence, in Homer’s The Odyssey.

Reading both works, I personally preferred the Trojans over the Greeks, and was disappointed that they lost the war. You see, up to that point, wars were fought with honor but the Greeks cheated with the ruse of the Trojan Horse. Thus, I picked up Virgil’s The Aeneid, which narrated what happened to a large group of Trojans led by the hero, Aeneas (second only to Hector from the Trojan ranks). Aeneas had his own “odyssey” and eventually he and his men landed on Italy and seeded what would become Rome and the Roman Empire. Romulus and Remus were descendants from the Trojans who landed there. Virgil is such a terrific writer (he wrote the Aeneid for Augustus Caesar) that, personally, I think he is on the same league as Homer. We will never know if such works were real history or mere fantasy, but evidence points to true history with some fictional exaggeration.

After Virgil, I picked up something a bit more “modern”, Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Why? Well, the protagonist, Dante, is guided by Virgil through all the levels of Inferno (hell), purgatorio (purgatory), and guided by Dante’s ideal lady, Beatrice, in  paradiso (paradise). It was and is a very interesting book. Most people’s perception of heaven and hell are based on this book, NOT the Bible. Such things as devils with tridents and angels with wings are from Dante and also from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the classic and mesmerizing work I picked up soon after. Keep in mind that all these works I have talked about are poems, though not in the traditional modern sense. 

From Dante, I went to the Bible, and read it all. The challenging literature I had read helped in understanding the Bible more. In the process, I discovered that reading such works had helped my writing.The Holy Bible is a great work, as you know. The problem is that everyone interprets it differently, and believes every darn letter. God did not write the Bible, men did, and you can argue that it was men inspired by God and the Holy Spirit but I will tell you that this is just a conjecture, for there is no proof, that is why it is called “faith”. I tried to stay on task and finish most of the Greco-Roman literature, so I read Ovid, Sophocles, Pericles, Euripedes, Cicero, and Plutarch. I then discovered philosophy reading Plato’s The Republic, and then works by Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, Sun Tzu, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas More, Nietzsche, and several others. 

I was mostly done with the classics after Beowulf, Gilgamesh, A Thousand and One Nights, etc.. Reading had become an addiction, and I read different books in different genres throughout the day. My hard drive was filling up and slowing down. From poetry to military history to philosophy and science, I immersed myself into all I could, I did not want to feel entirely without knowledge. The last books to touch were the recent writers like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Burgess, Orwell, Steinbeck, and the other American and English greats. Currently, I focus more on science books. I love the way Ralph Leighton (Richard P. Feynman’s friend and collaborator) wrote, Surely, You are Joking, Mr. Feynman! ; this book should be read by all science aficionados, so pick up your copy today. The co-discoverer of DNA, James Watson, writes very well. Read his novel, DNA: The Secret of Life, and you will ace Bio 1. Delve into Glenn T. Seaborg’s Adventures in the Atomic Age, and you will have an in depth view of the atomic age during the Manhattan Project and beyond. One thing I find fascinating in Seaborg’s novel is that nuclear energy was looked down upon in his day, but if you do some research, it is the cleanest and most abundant form of energy to be tapped and I know we will someday, all over America. He knew this. Finally, The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking is a great overview of physics, no math, just concepts.

Most of what I have learned, I did not learn in college or high school, rather it was due to reading books. By  the time I started college, I had much to talk and write about, I was more spread out. University studies are mostly a review of something I stumbled upon before, with some added detail. It is more important to read, learn, and retain than to just make an A on a test and forget. Has reading made me happy? No. The more I read, the more I know that I do not know, and it is depressing as hell. Knowledge is not happiness, and ignorance is bliss.

I still recommend everyone to read, though…