Journal Monica's Journal: boston and stuff 5
yeah, so i called my dad yesterday. he said "it's been a week and i hadn't heard anything - tell me about your trip!" i know, it's been a lot longer than that since i've posted, but if you really want to know, call or IM me.
in kind of reverse chronological order: this weekend todd and i were sick and spent most of it in bed resting. now the sick has moved all around my body - from coughing to earaches to now my stomach hurts. what's up with a head cold going into your stomach? anyway.
before the weekend, todd's friend nicole was here. that was fun. nicole is awesome. i can't help laughing at her stories because she always starts laughing in the middle of them. plus she miraculously has time to read every movie/book/play/restaurant review, especially those in the New York Times, so she always knows what's good. we took her to foursquare and introduced her to ben popik, but i expected a lot more sparks. her quiche was yummy, too bad i bought "wine product" at the grocery store instead of real wine at the liquor store. (to get more of these events, read todd's blog.)
so before nicole came, we were in boston. Todd and i went there for our fall break. (it was monday and tuesday of columbus day, but we left the thursday before.) we stayed with his friend chris at harvard. good old harvard. it was populated with all these preppy rich people. kind of like new york city, but smarter. the place to hang out on harvard square is the Au Bon Pain (or ABP), a french deli-ish place with chess boards built into the tables outside. there were all kinds of shops and restaurants on harvard square, which looking back on, seem like they would get old pretty quickly. chris and his friends are pretty neat tho. we went to Kendall Square a couple of times, once when i bought dancing shoes at a dollar-a-pound clothing store (which i promptly left in chris's room), and once when we went with some people to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding, missed the first showing, and hung out in a deserted southwestern-themed bar drinking coffee until the next show.
here's something interesting: Apparently the Let's Go travel guide company is run by harvard students, and chris's friend clay last summer went and wrote the guides to Romania and Moldova. have you ever heard of moldova? exactly. he had learned romanian for a girl. apparently they speak romanian in moldova too, but call it moldovan. anyway. so he goes into the tourist office in moldova and tells them that he's a tourist, and they laugh in his face. he's like the first tourist ever in moldova. so anyway.
so the real reason for our trip to boston was not just to chill at harvard and speak moldovan, but also to visit law schools. Specifically, Boston College and Northeastern. i had had these two in my head for several months, but now i can't quite remember why. i seem to remember that both of them are know for public interest, which i want to go into, and are fairly highly ranked among law schools. but now i can't really recall where i heard that, because i can't find any public interest rankings. (if anyone knows of any resources, by the way, that rank or lists law schools that are good in public interest, i'm interested.)
so we go to northeastern first. it's a cold, dark, rainy day, like all of them that we spent in boston. i doubt Bard would ever start a law school, but if they did, Northeastern would be it. from what i can tell, NUSL (Northeastern University School of Law) is as hippie and flaky a school as i ever might want to attend. they don't have letter grades, but rather evaluative essays written by professors. these evaluations can be up to 12 pages long. they're on a quarter system, and you spend every other quarter in an internship somewhere. that's pretty cool. but the quarters are shorter than semesters at other schools, so students in NUSL classes don't get to all the academic content that students at other law schools do. i thought that's kind of weird. but apparently the school is really liberal and activist, and many of the classes are small. that's certainly an advantage. but then i thought: this school is so similar to bard. i do enjoy bard, but i don't know that going to two similar schools is the best thing for my education. or for getting jobs later maybe? i dunno. i also spoke to the bard law professor/advisor, and he said that since lawyers learn most of what they do in their job anyway, and law school is more about how to learn it, then the internships really would teach you more than the classroom does in traditional law programs. so i dunno. seems like a good idea.
right in the boston city, the law school at northeastern is all in one 5-story building, half of which is the library. i dunno about that. not having to go outside to get from one class to another. but we'll see. todd really hated the architecture. a lot of the places to hang out are underground.
so then we went to visit boston college. boston college is in newton, which is a boston suburb. the campus is wooded with lawns and nice, but within walking distance to newton centre (that's what they call the downtown, i dunno) and a subway stop. i thought it was a much better location than the NUSL campus, and there were more windows and sun and outsideness. and of course, being outside of the city, the surroundings weren't as dirty. so our tour guide was apparently a fill-in for the day, and showed us around pretty dispassionately. when i asked her about the public interest programs, she said as a student interested in public interest also, that they're trying to build them up, which to me means that they don't have much of a program. and she couldn't really tell us much specifics, even tho that's her field, except about the student-run activist groups. so she basically said, "yeah, that's my field, but i dont' really know much about it except that the program's pretty weak." i was quite discouraged. then we found some other first-year students hanging around, and asked them why they chose BC. one girl was like, "well, i dunno, i also applied to Emory and Vanderbilt, but i decided to go to BC." gee, yeah, that gives me some good information about the school. none of them were really passionate about BC, about anything unique about BC, or about any reason why they chose BC over anywhere else. so we found them pretty useless and went home. todd pointed out the problem: what if all the students there are useless? i don't want to be hanging around useless people. i have since emailed BC law admissions asking, what's unique about your school? why are you proud of it? and i hope i get a good response. i really really want to like BC.
so alan, the law professor/advisor guy here, said that no matter what school i go to, i'll get a good education and probably a good job. but what i really want is to be stimulated by my fellow students. and i don't really know how to judge schools on that criteria. i don't want to be surrounded by overachievers that are way above me, but i also don't want to be going to school with a bunch of students that are older and already established in life. i guess i want to go to school with people like me, and where are people like me going? and how, if i find a school that's not near here, can i find out anything helpful about it?
so anyway, that's been my week.
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(check out the plot tagline on the imdb page: "Monty was a senior majoring in Government at Harvard, not a law student." That is not an exerpt from the plot outline, as it should be. It's a goof. that's funny.)
anyway. like that movie.