Weather@Trinity

The weather in San Antonio is probably the most eccentric and wildly far flung of all the campuses I had applied to. In the summer, the temperatures end up well over a hundred degrees more often than not, and then they plummet to the sub fifties wirthout any warning starting late October or early November. This is of course accompanied by the most abrupt shortening of the day that I have ever experienced (seriously, one day, the sun doesn't set until about 7.30pm, and the next, it's dark before 5.45pm? I mean, even accounting for daylight saving time, it's just plain flat out baffling).

So obviously, we are talking about a very wide range of temperatures here, going from freezing cold (literally- but I'll get to that in a minute) to sweltering hot, with a lot of humidity and rain throwin in for good measure. The rather rapid fluctuations are highly exciting (albeit a bit taxing on the body), and it is generally advisable to keep one's winter clothing unpacked even in mid September.

Of course, though, San Antonio lies in the lower latitudes, and isn't elevated enough, so the one thing it couldn't experience would be snow. Lots of snow. That made me sad last year, when I got here. I love snow, and I would have loved a campus that was snowed in every winter. But I resigned myself to not getting snow, and decided to settle on the torrential rain we get here. Until it snowed.

Snow! In San Antonio! Who'd have thought?
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Last February, it decided to snow in San Antonio for the first time in over a hundred years. It was less than a quarter inch, but it was definitely snow, and it had everyone rush out of their dorms at 3am, playing in the snow, making snow angels, and more (it also won me a bet I had with my roommate, but again, I deviate).

So, weather in San Antonio... we're talking about temperatures that make the city seem like the inside of a furnace to, literally, snow. We are talking about so much rain that the stairways all over campus literally become roaring waterfalls. We are talking about an absolute lack of transition from sweaty hot to shivering cold. We're talking about the length of the day, which changes so bafflingly that it's best to not even think about it. The weather here is like an adventure in itself, and it adds so much more to the day. Did it cause issues with my health? Yes it did, but I can live with that, as long as I can be in a city which has snowfall one February, and then has a massive drought declared just three months later.

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Living@Trinity

One thing I've never touched upon in my previous blog posts has been the residential dorms here at Trinity. Trinity mandates that every student must of encessity live on campus for at least three years out of four, because it is believed that a residential experience is a necessity for any college experience. After two and a half semesters spent here, I can see their point, and I fail to see, honestly, why any student would want to opt out of this experience once their mandated three years are up (most seniors elect to live off campus, from what I understand).

Everything about the residential experience at trinity, from the people here to the buildings, from the rooms we're given to the way custodial service is managed, from the community experience to the food- okay, well maybe not the food- everything is great. I'm not one for the 'community experience,' and when people start talking about wanting to belong to something or be a part of something greater than themselves, I start looking for the next exit, but the residential experience at Trinity, which places healthy interaction among students at its center, really does make me feel great. The community experience adds to the residential experience at Trinity so much.

The last two images I ever took of my room in Calvert, just before leaving it for the summer. I honestly miss that room a lot. There are simply so many memories attached to it.
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And then there are the rooms themselves. The dorms at Trinity are great,l there's no way around it (although I must admit, Winn and Witt, two freshmen dorms, were not quite to my taste). In my freshman year, I was assigned a room in Calvert, which as luck would have it, was the 'newest' dorm on campus, having been renovated early last year. My room became my second home without me even realizing it, such that when I had to leave for home this summer, and when I realized that I would never be seeing my room again, that it would no longer be MY room, that I was genuinely sad. My room was my home, and although I love my new one too (seriously, it's huge), I do miss my old one a lot.

The residential experience at Trinity cannot be explained. One has to experience it oneself for it to be believed. It made sure I was never homesick, both by physically providing me with an excellent home, and, by putting the community experience first and foremost, ensuring I would make so many great friends that I would never be at a loss for company.

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(c)2011 All Rights Reserved

Classes@Trinity

I like studying. I don't want to come off as one of those 'teacher's pets/know it alls,' but the fact is, I simply like studying. I don't particularly like classroom teaching, though, just so I am clear. On the contrary, I like self study a lot, I find it to be the best way of learning. This is because a self study session can usually be tailored to meet one's needs, and one can move at one's own pace (which in my case, is usually faster than everybody else), and the teaching method can be highly flexible to suit one's own needs. Or at least, this is what my opinion on studying was. Twelve years in a large school in India, with class sizes varying from 35-49 students, had taught me that I learned best when I studied alone. And I yearned to learn.

I was looking forward to classes at Trinity, mostly because I couldn't wait to see how the classroom environment differed here in the US. Also, I had been assured that the average class size here was small, so that each individual student would get a lot more attention from the instructor. However, on the whole, I was not anticipating any particular change in my learning methods.

The last two semesters have proven me largely wrong on that front. As my classes at Trinity started, I realized what a difference a small class size could make. No, I did not have professors exclusively catering to my needs and demands (nor did I expect them to, that would have been selfish). However, almost every class I was in was structured as a discussion oriented environment, with every lecture being structured as an open two way interaction, either between the professor and the student(s), or between two (or more) students. Reading the textbook and answering questions from it was no longer the be all and end all of classroom learning- in most classes, I was expected to do the readings and then discuss my impressions on said reading. Where the class went depended entirely on our impressions of the reading.

The notebook is no longer the centerpiece of classroom teaching. At least, not here at Trinity.

There were discussion oriented classes in my school too, but almost never to this extent. This free form, free flowing, malleable and flexible classroom structure was intellectually stimulating, and it really engaged me like almost nothing else in the classroom had. I no longer wanted to miss classes, and I genuinely began looking forward to them. I was even excited about my homework and assignments.

Well, okay, no, I wouldn't go that far. I still hate doing homework, But the rest of it is all true! Put simply, I have newfound respect for classroom teaching, and it is all because of the excellent teaching methods that Trinity;s professors employ in the classroom.

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pencil by capl@washjeff.edu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

People@Trinity

I'm a shy person by nature. Although I have this almost pathological need to be around someone at all times, I usually find it very hard to walk up to someone I don't know and to then strike up a conversation with them. It's just something that makes me clammy. Before I came to Trinity, I promised myself that this was one thing I would strive to change once I landed in San Antonio- that no longer would I be afraid to approach strangers and talk to them, no longer would the idea of being around people make me uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, that is a promise easier made than fulfilled. It was an incredibly difficult task, having to dredge up the courage to talk to absolute strangers, although I suppose that at some level, the knowledge that they were absolute strangers helped me.

In any case, I went ahead and spent my Orientation weeks (both, the International Student Orientation and the New Student Orientation) chatting up to as many people as I could. The more people I talked to, the easier I got, and I realized that not only were people genuinely interested in what I had to say, but that perhaps I had nothing to be ashamed of, and therefore, nothing to be afraid of when talking to everyone else. I ended up making a lot of friends this way- too many friends, I would say, as I realized to my horror when I sat down to make my Christmas gift shopping list.

I made some genuinely good friends at Trinity. I think I was lucky in ending up with some of the best people on campus.

And the more I talked to people in the United States in general (as I visited places other than the Trinity campus, and outside of San Antonio as well), the more I realized that while people here are generally polite, the people at Trinity are especially nice and extremely friendly. As my homesickness continued to get worse, I made a set of some very dear close friends, who sort of became like my surrogate family here. And this was because I had had the courage to talk to them to begin with, and because they in turn were very friendly, very nice people. And so, even occasions here that would otherwise have meant nothing to me, like Thanksgiving, the Fall retreat, the Parents weekend, Easter, and more, all became memorable, simply because they were all so keen on making me a part of their lives. 

Maybe elsewhere in the world, people aren't all that great, you know? Maybe they're actually all out to further their own interests, and they don't care how many toes they have to step on to do that. But that's not how they are here at Trinity- here at Trinity, people are great. And the plethora of great friends that I have made, friends that will be with me for a lifetime, is ample evidence of that fact.

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Food@Trinity

Let me start by making it very clear that I have a very narrow spectrum of foods that I actually find acceptable for my consumption. My tastes are highly finicky, and even back home in India, there were very few things I actually ate. The problem arises from my rather baffling preferences- I'm a vegetarian who dislikes vegetables (when they're raw), I only eat specific things when they have been prepared in a specific way, and I simply don't even bother with most of the things.


So yes, I knew beforehand that I would have some problems with my diet here- after all, the United States cuisine is all meat based, with very few purely vegetarian samplings. So I was kind of prepared to be more flexible with my dietary preferences than usual. And initially, when I got here, things seemed to be going well- I'd have fries, veggie burgers, cheese pizzas and grilled cheese sandwiches on campus, and be rather satisfied with what I had (I usually stayed away from Mabee, but when I did go there, it was for the pasta line or for the occasional omelette).


Unfortunately, my diet lacked ANY kind of nutrition, so I was forced to restructure it after some very serious health issues that I ran into in my second semester here- soon, it had expanded to include rice with beans, salads (with dressing- about the only way I could have those vegetables was to consume them with copious amounts of ranch, mayonnaise and mustard), eggs, and more. I didn't like the food, but it was certainly edible, and it was giving me a balanced nutritional input.

I fell in love with Chipotle and their food. Not only did they have a great Vegetarian menu, but it was all also delicious.

The thing is, I know I wasn't being picky. I'd go off campus and eat the same things there, and I'd love what I ate. It was just the preparation of this stuff on campus that really put me off. However, I was okay with it after a while, and my intake went steadily down, so I actually lost a lot of my excess flab, and struck a great equilibrium. I didn't like what I ate, but eating itself wasn't as important to me anymore.


Looks like the higher ups at Trinity don't really want me to eat though- starting my sophomore year, they totally messed Coates up, so I wouldn't have enough money in my meal plan to spend on food from there, and they also changed the timings there... and they also completely changed Mabee so that the few things that I had liked there, weren't sold there anymore.


I'm sure I'll reach some sort of an equilibrium again. I've started eating chicken (only occasionally) after all, and I actually quite like some of the new stuff that Mabee has to offer. But on the whole, on the dietary front, things have been rough for me here. Not only did I have to deal with acclimatizing to an all new cuisine, but I also had to deal with my own obtuse dietary preferences, frequently changing them again and again, and had to deal with the famed horrible preparation that all campus food is inevitably supposed to have.


The long and short of it? Campus food is awful, no matter which part of the world you're in. It's an indisputable truth, an axiom. If the ancient Greeks had started with that, rather than fiddling around with astronomy and trigonometry, I'm sure we would have had flying cars around by now.

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Chipotle Burrito Bowl by Mr T in DC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.