End of Week 6

In the quarter system, we talk about our life in weeks. A full quarter consists of 9 1/2 weeks of classes, followed by a two day reading period and then a finals week. This week ends the 6th week of classes.

Since we are all history majors and seniors, our life pretty much looks like lots of time researching, reading and writing. We have to turn in a 40-50 page original history paper (our BA thesis) at the beginning of Spring quarter (the beginning of April). We each have a faculty advisor who is supposed to help us with the process, as well as a special seminar devoted to learning how to write good history and talking about our individual projects. These past couple weeks have consisted of discerning what secondary and primary sources we might use in our papers, as well as annotating those sources. Annotating them basically consists of reading the sources, which can look like skimming the source or reading academic reviews of it, and then summarizing what the source presents and why we think it will be useful to our project. The next hurdle we have in the process is to write a "problem paper", which I think is supposed to articulate the problem that we think our paper will set out to answer. That paper is still a few weeks off, so I'm still fuzzy on what it's supposed to be.

In addition to these last few weeks being full of annotation, they've been full of the common cold. When you live in household, it seems pretty hard to avoid passing bugs on to one another. I'm the last victim, so hopefully in the next few days we'll be done with it and on to the land of no colds! Please pray for us--all of our work and health. May the Lord be glorified in everything we do!