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Day’s Verses:

We have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God.

2 Cor. 3:4-5

Pray without ceasing.

1 Thess. 5:17

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The Lord’s word is a light unto my feet and a lamp unto my path (Ps. 119:105)—every move I make is to glorify Him to the best of my ability. As you know, my current “big decision moment” is choosing between staying at Clark University and transferring to Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Only two miles apart, you might say, what’s the big deal? A very big one, thanks very much! After two years you become attached to your school, despite the fact the school isn’t attached to you. I know Clark, its classrooms and buildings, know that I can succeed with the semester schedule, and know the feel of its student body and some of the professors’ styles. WPI I know the feel of students, to some extent, and have a vague but not working knowledge of the campus; as for class scheduling, I know nothing and that worries me. The seven-week term concerns me because for a person of my mentality (“get it done as early as possible”) I don’t think of a week as a long time. Two weeks is cutting it short, give me three weeks to write a paper minimum. But at WPI three weeks is half a term and you can’t spend half a term on one paper.

Money issues crop up too; namely my essentially burning an $11,000-a-year scholarship Clark has given me with no good merit-based prospects from WPI. I’m average at WPI, but at Clark they snapped up a high-school valedictorian with a score of 30 (was it 30? 31? I forget) on the ACTs in a second. WPI… I fear the intelligence of the students who can put of work until the night before and still get A’s in their classes. But I cannot see any good reason to let my perceptions of people intimidate me—I could well be wrong, and even if I’m not, I think I could hold my own. I did in Architecture, and hopefully I’ll like the classes I take better than that.

So, I’m not a lollygagging-around type of person, and though I feel ambivalent about this choice…a little apprehensive…I still feel what I’ve decided the best one. I need new friends and a change in my schooling because though I do alright in English I don’t love it enough to relish the prospect of analyzing old literature’s symbols for the next two years. To that end, I’ve decided to transfer to WPI.

With this change Ian will (hopefully) stop associating me with “pot-smoking liberal hippies” that populate Clark in his imagination. Also I won’t have to listen to an hour of jazz on the shuttle every day—an excellent reason in and of itself!

– KF –