Ups and Downs

I got a letter in my PO Box today advertising for SMU in Taos. If you ask me it looks like a blast, they have mountain biking, classes seem to be outside in the sun, mountains are everywhere to be seen. And best of all, in my opinion, all these things mean fresh mountain air ( http://smu.edu/taos/ ) . There is only one problem. For the most part this experience is for liberal arts major's only. Besides the two perspectives I still have to fulfill, none of their classes are geared towards my major. Is this fair?
In my opinion I can't answer that question. Part of me says no it's not fair, while the other part of me say's it is fair, the cost of implementing more classes there would be too expensive to justify doing so. But I can't say whether it is fair or not, all I know is in the end it isn't unfair. I can be upset that I can't go, but I picked my major and with it comes awesome advantages as well as disadvantages. It's important to realize these things in life, too often I get worked up about the things that get me down. If we remember the things that get us excited, the short comings of life don't seem as bad.
Life can suck at times, grades might be a little to low. Or family issues just aren't that awesome. But I guarantee that those things don't out weight the great things about life. Friends, mentors, mountain air. So why get down on life when there is so much to cheer us up.

Pick-a-Prof

Pick-a-Prof is an interesting website. It allows students to rate their professors. I won’t go into any more detail because I can almost promise everyone reading this has used it. And I would go as far as to say that even our professor has checked it. (Prof. Stephens, if you haven’t I will have you know you have excellent evaluations on Pick-a-Prof. That why I got into your class originally, but more over I know this cause I have been in your class the whole semester and my writing has improved. ) This leads to the next question though. Do the ratings on Pick-a-Prof really mean anything? Besides warning each other over and over again of a teacher and their hard to understand accents, it is my opinion Pick-a-Prof is something to look at for opinions, but for that only. Nothing can be taken as fact. And anything that is read in a review should be read with discursion. A liberal art’s major is more than likely going to give a chemistry teacher a bad review, or physics major might give their wellness teacher a low review. But that doesn’t say anything about the teacher; it only gives the students opinion of the classes’ difficulty to a certain person, not as a whole.
This might be a no brainer for some of you, but I wanted to write about it. I’m not going to say Pick-a-Prof is a bad thing. I use it. But I will say it requires consideration when using it to pick a professor. It’s a great thing to be able to find a teacher whose style fits your learning best. But the website is used to find the “easiest” teacher by some people, and then other people are using it to rate the teachers who taught them the best, and not bases on a grade. The fact is the website is broken. And because of that, in my opinion, the ratings mean nothing more than an artificial opinion of a teacher’s class. If anyone wants to find the teachers who will be best for them, they will need to dig much deeper then the ratings.