I was really excited about the possibility of having fluoridated water in Portland (be proud of my enthusiasm for public health!), but apparently it was not meant to be...

Hahahaha... The only one in Texas is in Ft. Worth. I suppose I could make a trip up there, but I don't really want to...

But you sound like a preteen if One Direction was coming to town!

No problem!!! Although I'm still mad at my electrochem test because I thought it would be really easy and then I took it and it was really hard, and then I got an 88% on it, so I guess it just trolled me or something...

It kind of makes sense...

Lots and lots of food...

I have! The spicy ones are actually a bit too spicy for me, which is weird since I normally like my food to be rather spicy...

NO!!!!!!!!! I'm swriting this answer as I'm laying in bed, not getting up...

My "CS" class last semester was a blood bath. I thought I would be good in a logic class because I'm a logical person, but boy was I wrong... I think I'm just not good at formal proofs... Also, I've always achieved less success than I think I am capable of in math classes, mostly due to stupid mistakes...

I'm really good at political things... I can predict elections or Supreme Court cases with an impressive accuracy rate and things like that. Of course, there are no jobs there, and I got accepted into a science honors program that was way too good to turn down, so I ended up doing chemistry, which I'm less good at but I still enjoy immensely...

Hey, you stole mine! But ya, every time my sister talks about her new favorite actor, I have no idea who she's talking about... The other thing is certain sports. I have football down quite well, and baseball and basketball somewhat, but everything else, I spend a lot of time not knowing what's going on...

Not as a sole field of study, but as a supplement, absolutely. I'm actually currently considering adding linguistics as a second major even though I have every intention of becoming a chemist.

Shit... I had a lot written and then I accidentally closed the page. But these teachers are too important to leave to a "Well, I wrote a lot and it was really great, but oh well." So I'll try to write it out again.

I cannot just talk about one teacher, because I was incredibly fortunate to have had such a great team of teachers working for me for my whole life. Sadly, I couldn't talk about all of the teachers who changed my life for the better because there are so many and it would just be too much, but here are some of the more inspiring ones.

The first one who immediately comes to mind is Koepping. I had him for more credits than anyone else in high school (this is not counting my orchestra teacher, who I had every semester of high school, but it was always for the same class). Koepping was, in the purest sense, a civics teacher. I had him for US History and Government, AP Gov, and beginning and advanced Constitutional law. One of the things that made him so great was that he was just the biggest Constitution nerd. He is not a lawyer, and he makes that fact very clear, but he is just super smart, but he's also a really cool and relatable guy, and his class was just super fun to go to because his lectures were so engaging. And it's not like we had a lot of class discussions or anything. We went in and he gave us a lecture about something, and then we left. Yet somehow, everyone loved his class, and he was probably, I dare say, the best teacher I ever had.

Another really great teacher was Ms. Paxson. She taught AP US, and she was another one of those people who is really smart and really engaging. We did do a lot of class discussions in her class, and that made the class a lot of fun, and by the end of the year we were all good friends even though it was a big class first thing in the morning. And we learned a lot too. Also, she was the faculty advisor for the Young Democrats club, which I spent two years as president of and an additional year on the board of, and so I got to know Ms. Paxson very well through that in kind of a unique way that not a lot of people were able to.

Looking further back, Mr. Nakamura was my third and fourth grade teacher, and you all know that I'm not an emotional person, but this one is actually kind of hard for me to write without getting a bit emotional. He was one of those people whose life completely revolved around his job. So, of course, his job was being a third and fourth grade teacher. And his life really did revolve around that. So he spent all day at school with his students, and after school, he went to all of his students' sports games and orchestra concerts and what have you. He really made every effort to be a part of every one of his students' lives, and I would say that he was pretty successful. Unfortunately he passed away a little over a year ago, and so there was a big memorial service in the gym at the high school, and first of all, the gym was packed, which is no small feat, and although it was a sad thing, anyone who went there could easily see that he had changed the lives of almost everyone in that room, and there were probably hundreds of other people whose lives he changed who were unable to make it.

The last school teacher who I feel the need to talk about is Ms. Van Pelt who was my orchestra teacher, and she's important because I started playing the cello in fourth grade, and I joined the big school orchestra in fifth grade, which she was the director of. She directs that orchestra as well as two junior high orchestras and two high school orchestras. She is an amazing woman, and also being that I played in her orchestras every year between fifth and twelfth grades meant that I got to know her really well. Although I was never particularly good at cello, I was never one of those orchestra geeks, and I certainly never had any aspirations of pursuing music as a career, orchestra was like a big family, and she was like our mom. Our tiny lesbian mom.

The last two teachers who I would like to point out were actually Jew school teachers. One was one who I had for several classes and is really just someone who I saw as a role model and an inspiration for many years, and that's Jonathan Emanuel. Not only is he a super cool and nice dude, but he was a truly driven individual, and he really pushed a lot of young people to take leadership positions to make a difference in their communities, and I think he was pretty successful. He did get a job in California the year before I graduated, which was too bad, but he's doing bigger and better things, and he's somebody who has made a really big impact on my life.

Finally, I have to mention my Rabbi, who I had senior seminar with in Jew school. Most people think of rabbis as old men who speak Yiddish, but Rabbi Brad was a young guy with little kids and a lot of really cool insights into things. Although I didn't necessarily see eye to eye with him on a lot of subjects that we would talk about, he openly encouraged that, and he really was the only person who was able to help me find my Jewish identity through my card, atheist rationalist shell. Although that seems like something I wouldn't value, that was something that I had been struggling with for years, and Rabbi Brad was really able to help me see that.


As I said, there are many, many, many more teachers who have changed my life, but I couldn't begin to list all of them. These are the ones who I probably will remember the most strongly through life, but nearly all of my teachers have been excellent, and I don't know where I would be without them.

I think that they're fine in small doses. I will also say, though, that they absolutely need to be taken into consideration giving equal or more weight to GPA, extracurriculars, essays, research or work experience, the school attended, and a whole bunch of other things.

I am a chemistry major, and I'm considering adding linguistics as a second major.

I used to be a damn good test taker. The way I'd like to think it happened was that my brain just matured much faster than most people's, so they made tests super easy for younger people, and it was way below my level, but my level has finally caught up to me.

In high school, I pretty much didn't study for tests. They just happened, and I took them, and I did reasonably well on them. Unfortunately, I also did that much of my first semester of college, and that didn't really work out. At all. It was reflected in my grades, and perhaps even moreso, it was reflected in my stress level. It was terrible, and I realized that not studying was a really bad idea, but at the same time, I didn't really know how to study, so that was a bit of a problem. So I ultimately started experimenting with different study skills, because I had to, otherwise I would be in a really bad situation. So ultimately I figured out what worked well for me and what was something that other people might have success in that do not work for me. One thing that just does not work for me is reading the textbook. I get distracted, I skip whole sections, and I really get almost no information out of it. But for most of first semester, I thought that that was the only way to study because that's what everyone else does. When I realized all of the different study methods that were available, and especially when I realized that I could be successful without studying from the book, that was a very liberating experience for me, and I am proud to say that my GPA increased a full 1.1277 points in just one semester. That's something to be proud of.

Much like what Dee said, I find just about everyone who I talk to on here to be rather intelligent in their own way, but a lot of those people I came to find out that they were intelligent after talking to them. However, there are three people (although at the time I thought it was four) who I can think of off the top of my head who I started talking to precisely because I had read their answers and found them to be intelligent people, and those are @TheCatLives, @AdmDreadnought (and @theNerdySpammer), and @Freshmoves91 (and @Debatess, and his several other accounts).

DON'T TELL ME HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE, YOU CANCER WHORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My strengths are that I grasp concepts very easily. I'm very good at visualizing scenarios, whether it has to do with ions in solution or people voting in an election. I'm also pretty good at memorizing things in general, although I often bore of that. In non-science fields, I'm very good at forming opinions and being able to back them up.

My weaknesses are that I am not so good at knowing when to use certain equations, and when I do, I make a lot of stupid mistakes. I always say that I can do calculus but not algebra. In non-science fields, I'm quite terrible at being open-minded and seeing other people's opinions. Once I decide I disagree with someone, they're officially wrong in my head.

Let's go to somewhere warm!

Why yes! Funny you mention it; I'm actually also stranded in Dallas right now! What a coincidence! And the hotel is straight out of 1967!

QOTD?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

This is so wonderful!