I finally feel like I can catch my breath. Thank God for the weekend. (It was His idea, don't ya know?). A longish, rambling post about the start of my semester follows in the extended entry. If you don't care, proceed to my post below about media bias.
In retrospect, it may have been unwise to schedule most of my classes for Tuesdays and Thursdays; I'm in classes most of the day from 8 in the morning to 4:15 in the afternoon. Four hour-and-fifteen-minute sessions, plus chapel and lunch. The other days of the week are much easier by comparison, as I've only got two fifty-minute classes (plus chapel and lunch). But it doesn't help when you start off behind due to evening evangelistic services and society rush.
Society rush.... That was a lot of fun. For those of you non-BJU types, a word of explanation. Every student is required to join a society, which is kind of like a fraternity or a sorority, but without the drinking, the drugs, the frat house...... well, it's like a fraternity in that it uses Greek letters in the name. Except my society doesn't; it's called Bryan, after William Jennings Bryan. But it's been around for forever, and it was (although I did not know this when I joined) the society Dr. Bob III, our current University president, joined when he went through BJU, so the name isn't going to change any time soon.
Anyways, the society meets once a week, on Fridays, instead of chapel. There's a cheer, we recite our society verse, Col. 1:18 (because we can't have a BJU function without reciting something whether it's the creed at chapel, the Lord's Prayer at Artist Series, or a verse at society meetings. :-)), announcements, a short devotional message, and a game/skit of some kind. Societies also have one outing per year; one semester it's a "stag" outing, the other semester it's a dating outing. (This semester it's a stag outing, a rousing game of paintball. It's scheduled for next week, and was only announced today (or, more accurately, yesterday), the day after I could change my work schedule for next week. We'll see if I get to go.) It's really just a chance for a group of semi-likeminded guys to get to know one another. Oh, and the intra-mural sports teams are divided up by society.
Now, "Rush" is the term for the evenings of the first couple of days of classes, where the societies try to recruit the new freshman into their ranks. (This conveniently prevents a lot of anti-freshman bias that I'm told is common on other campuses.) Like a lot of other societies, we tried to bribe freshman into our tent with food.
That's how you cook shish-kabobs. You douse them with lighter fluid over an open fire. Yum. We were told that we had the best food of the night. The next night we ordered something like 20 pizzas from Little Caesars. These were consumed in about 15 minutes. The freshman had gotten the hang of this.
Anyways, that long digression all to say, I was unable to complete much homework those two evenings. Then Saturday was induction, which is when we find out which freshman joined us. I would have (actually good) photos of this event, but there was goodly amount of water involved, and I like to keep my camera working.
We're not supposed to engage in any hazing of the freshman; in other words, we have to be willing to go through whatever we put them through. So, we were all pre-soaked before the freshman came out to join us. Our "Spirit Leader," Brent, had them all get on their knees and recite the Bryan Pledge, which I didn't remember reciting as a Freshman. (oops.) After that little formality was taken care of, the freshman joined the upperclassmen in achieving outer wetness, thanks to a collection of buckets hidden behind us. We then joined a variation on capture the flag, the variation being that we were each equipped with a number of "flour-bombs," a handful of flour encased in toilet paper. I'm sure you see where this is going.
Having made a mess of ourselves and several cars in a nearby parking lot (by accident, of course!), we had a snack/meal (pizza and tea lemonade). Then, of course, we had a short devotional message (naturally, BJU = religious institution after all) and sign ups for our soccer team. A fun time was had by all.
So, little homework was done on Saturday. And Sunday I had church stuff. And on it goes.
As far as actual classes go: I think I'm going to like them. None of them look like they're going to be too boring yet. Two of them scare me, because they both involve an end-of-the-year presentation. One of them is my salesmanship class, the other a global culture class called "Practices and Protocols of International Business." The sales class involves several videotaping sessions too. (eek!) But I'll get over it. My "Production and Operations Management" class looks like it will be lots of fun, even though (or because) it's at 8 in the morning, based entirely on the group of people I'm sitting near. My Graphic Communications class (which I'm taking for my minor, Public Relations Journalism) looks like it will be fun, if time-consuming. (I get to play on a Macintosh! It does this really cool thing when you minimize a window.) I'm also taking Elementary Statistics this year with Dr. Guthrie, who is my all-time favorite teacher at BJU. He is absolutely hilarious, and he knowledgeable, so the class is both entertaining and informative, not a combination you get too often.
Lastly, I'm taking Bible Doctrines, which I think is going to be a very helpful class. The premise is that the class will go systematically over the primary tenets of Christianity (as taught by BJU), explaining where they come from in the Bible. Of course, since this is college, we have to use big words to describe everything, preferably with Greek word origins. So, this semester, we'll be going over Bibliology (the doctrine of Scripture), Theology (doctrine of God), Christology (doctrine of Christ), Pneumatology (doctrine of the Holy Spirit), and Angelology (just guess). Next year we learn Anthropology (the doctrine of man), Hamartiology (the doctrine of sin), Soteriology (the doctrine of salvation), Ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church), and Eschatology (the doctrine of "last things.")
Anyways, Bible Doctrines should be useful for helping me figure out exactly what I believe (religiously speaking). Whether or not those beliefs line up with the position of BJU, I will have a chance to hear their arguments and decide if they make sense.
Enough rambling for one night... Hopefully I'll be posting a bit more often now that I'm catching up with my homework. See you later!
Posted by Blog Jones at September 11, 2004 01:55 AM
| Category: BJU Stuff