College Search

Boring updates on Karen's academic career and prospects.

I have narrowed my list to three school I will apply to for fall 2009.

The Short List:

• Adams State College, Alamosa, Colorado.
• Central Washington University, Elensburg Washington
• Lindfield College

All three offer majors in music composition, art and creative writing.

Adams State
Last week I got to visit Adams State. While it is all fresh in my mind (sort of, the fifteen hour drive home was not the best thing for keeping impressions fresh.) I want to write down the pros and cons and various things that will be important to my decision.

General Information: Alamosa is a very small town in southern Colorado. Adams State is very small public school. I had it on my list because the art department looked amazing on the web site. The music and english departments were passable also but the art department really stuck out.

Important stuff:

• Music: I was not overly impressed with the music department. There are not a lot of vocal ensembles, which is the drawback of a small school I guess. I have been kind of spoiled by the schola. The vocal faculty was very nice as was the theory teacher. They all showed an interest in me and were very excited and welcoming. Especially the theory professor. He was very excited about his composition program. It sounded pretty intensive because of all the personal attention a small school offers.
• Art: The art department was AMAZING!! They do everything! There is almost no limit to what one can play with. They have plenty of room for everything they do and encourage kids to explore as many different media as possible. Really awesome. The faculty I met were very friendly. I just met the painting teacher and the ceramics teacher. The painting teacher who gave us the tour must have known the names of every student in the building. So that was kind of nice.
• English: I didn't get to see the English department or talk to any one. I have e-mailed the head of the department but have had no reply. They offer a creative writing major and a student built English minor. I think I would be doing the minor.
• Campus Ministry: The Catholic students on campus meet Sunday nights for mass and dinner afterwards. Priests from all over the area take turns saying mass for them. It sounded like a small but happy little group.

Other noteworthy aspects:

• Student life: Adams State is not a party school. It's a dry campus and it sounded like no one minded much. The art department was telling us that they really do spend their weekends working in the studio not in a bar. I heard similar things from other kids. This school plays outside. Our student tour guide asked me what I liked to do. I said I liked the arts. He was looking for what sport I played. Rock climbing and biking and skiing are big it seems. Their recreation hall included a dance floor and a basketball hoop and a climbing wall as well as a ton of exercise equipment. Sports and outdoor activity is king at Adams State.
• Library: Not impressive. I don't think the students like it much there. They were plugging the coffee cart they were planning to put in. No one was excited about it and the only thing our tour guide could tell us was that there were a few laptops that you an check out.
• Campus: A lot of the buildings were really old and dirty. They said some of them were getting replaced and updated.
• Theater: The theater department looked pretty cool. I got the impression that they didn't do musicals very often, which is understandable, but that the drama department was lively and growing.

Over all: It's hard to put an over all impression into words. There was no feeling of "This is where I belong" when I was on campus. It was more like "If this is what it takes to get into that ceramics studio I guess I could adapt."

Marches

I've been listening to the Lord of the Rings sound tracks lately. The music is one thing I don't complain about when it comes to the LotR movies. Howard Shore did a good job. I haven't listened to them in a really long time though. I like Return of the King best. I liked it so much it almost made me want to watch the movie. Almost.
This time I noticed that there are a lot of marches in those sound tracks. I used to think of marches as those happy, grand pieces of music that one hears at parades. None of the Lord of the Rings marches are like that. What a wide variety of moods a march can have. I knew that all along but I've just never really thought about it. I had one stuck in my head and with it went a few little bits of script from the Two Towers.
Theoden saying

"If this is to be our end, I would have us make such an end as to be worthy of remembrance."

Or something like that.
I think the march is actually from The Return of the King (Pelennor Fields I think but I can't find a good recording of the bit I'm thinking of) but it brings those lines to mind because Howard Shore did an amazing job of putting that sentiment into his music. Whoever is marching to that music knows they will probably not come back but they go on with as much honor and spirit as they can muster.
That's why I want to study music composition in college.

The Keys of the Kingdom

A. J. Cronin's The Keys of the Kingdom is a must read for every Christian and probably everyone who knows a Christian. One of my top five favorite books of all time. Right up there with Lord of the Rings. It's all about what really mater in life; our walk with Christ and our relationships with other Christians and with people who believe radically different things. Humility and charity and courage and all sorts of little adventures on the way. I don't know how much to tell you about the story. It traces the life of a Scottish Priest from the death of his parents in his childhood, through his youth and missionary work in China (which is the main part of the book that got made into a great old movie with Gregory Peck!), to his old age. He is an utter failure in the eyes of the world and the more worldly members of the Church but he is a great hero in the kingdom of God. There is a proud German nun, some Protestant missionaries who rock my universe, lots of Chinese villagers of various wonderful characters, and an atheist doctor who doesn't go to hell. This one will be going with me to college, or anywhere else I end up. Go read it! NOW!

Treasure Island

I got a lot of stories in the early 90's. It was the era of the return of the Disney Musical. Little mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King. While those stories are amazing and I love them, I have to admit that some of them were a bit morally bankrupt. Aladdin is a jerk, Ariel is an obnoxious teenager and her father is just what every teen thinks their parents are in their self centered teen age world. As much as we loved them, I'm sure my parents really hoped I didn't take Ariel as my role model. (I did, but mostly the singing on tall rocks part.) I guess the assumption of story writers was that if a character was too virtuous, we couldn't identify with him and grow to love him. Beast was great that way, that was the point of the movie, but I wonder why they didn't give Belle some major flaw. We sure like her a lot despite her virtue. There was also a sense that if the characters didn't have some moral flaw there would be no story cause they would never get into any trouble, or have any fun. It was the age of "Follow your heart" which was often in direct conflict with "Do what's right." In any case, I always got excited when I read or watched a story in which the main characters were somewhat admirable. When they did the right thing even when it was hard and it meant a sacrifice. It's kind of refreshing when you don't want to slap the main character for being such an idiot. You can overcompensate; thus we have characters in a Jules Vern novel. They are so perfect you just have to laugh at them. I'm very fond of them too. Likewise Robert Louis Stevenson. I loved Treasure Island for many reasons (one of them being that it involved pirates) but one of the biggest was that the main characters were fairly admirable. Jim was a good kid. Dr. Livsey is my hero. The Captain is like a rock! While the Squire was kind of a dork he wasn't a bad sort. I hate every movie adaptation for Treasure Island with a passion (except the Muppet version, and I don't know why I forgive them so much) because they always mess it up in one way or other. They make Long John too much of a good guy. Yeah, he was redeemable but they never make him quite as bad as he is in the book. And they never make Jim quite as brave and noble. I think of the old Disney version with the Shirley Temple's male counterpart as Jim. *shudder* I have heard people complain that the book glorifies violence because the climax of the coming of age story is when Jim shoots one of the pirates. In Jim's defense, a real man destroys evil when he cannot redeem it, especially if it's about to destroy him. I like them that way. I love all the adventure in that book too, of course. Jim manages to get into plenty of trouble without off-putting character flaws.

The Girl Son

The Girl Son appealed to my tom boyishness when I was just starting to read. It was about a girl's struggle for freedom as she grows up in 19th century Korea. There are a lot of bits that are important. There was a scene that is very vivid to me in which she is all by herself for the first time and trying to make a bowl of rice. The driving and supporting force in her life has been her mother up to that point but her mother just said goodbye and left her at a boarding school. She is all alone now and has to make her own rice. She tries and fails several times before she manages to make some she can eat.

She is all grown up by the end of the book and she is arrested and put in solitary confinement because she is an advocate of women's education. There is a scene where she is being taken somewhere by a female guard and she reflects that she is more free in her small cell all by herself than the woman who is her captor. That idea intrigued me. The way she described her inner freedom was really beautiful.
It's based on a true story though I didn't ever do much research on the real person. She must have been quite amazing.

I, Jaun De Pareja

Elizabeth Burton De Trevino is a cool writer and I have loved every book of hers that I have read. The first one I read was for a book club when I was about ten. I, Jaun de Pareja was about the slave of a famous painter. The most important part of the story for me was one little scene when the artist is talking about color. I haven't read it since I was ten but this is how I remember it. The artist pointed to a cloak and asked Jaun, or someone, what color it was. Jaun answered that it was blue. The artist disagrees and starts pointing out other colors blended into the blue cloak, in the highlights and shadows. Purple, black, green, red... and suddenly Jaun can see them. He sees color the way the artist does. My mother actually read this out loud to me and I stared at something, I think it was our curtain, and tried to see all the colors the way the character in the book did. I didn't hear the next part of the book at all cause I was too busy looking at all the hidden colors in our curtains.

Meet Addy

I was an American Girl. Addy was my favorite. She's probably responsible for my love of Civil War history. I was a romantic little stoic child. Or at least I was helplessly romantic and tried desperately to be stoic. Addy and her struggle to keep her feeling on the inside when her father and brother were sold to another plantation and when she was terrified on her run North was one of those things that got my little imagination running at ten or twenty time my reading speed. I made up stories about runaway slaves and tragically separated families for the next five or six years...

And it was the history too: the little details of how they lived and what they wore and all that. American Girls was really good at that. There is a long list of historical fiction set in that time that came after Addy and I would probably have missed if I wasn't introduced to the time through the Addy stories. I can't remember many of the names. There was one about a quaker community... Who Comes With Cannons... I think... Across Five Aprils is great... lots of slaves hiding in hay carts and that sort of thing. I would probably not take the Addy books with me to school (though I might bring my mini doll just for old time sake) but those stories were definitely important.