Things professors say

So I'm pretty well settled into my second semester. I've gone through a few rounds of recalibrating my expectations of how challenging or easy this semester is going to be, and I think I've settled at "moderate." I'm making more time for cooking and socializing, with good results. I think my two themes for this semester will be "time management" and "summer." Time management because so many courses + commitments even if some of them are relatively lightweight; "summer" because it will take some effort to arrange something rewarding to do.

Courses and quotes:

• UP 504 Quantitative Planning Methods II (statistics with free/open source software), with Prof. Bieri. When describing higher-order matrices: "0 means you're definitively lacking in the third dimension." Also, if you plucked a value out of thin air, you used your "moist digit indicator."
• UP 505 Fundamentals of Planning Practice, with Prof. Etienne. In grading my memo where I'd used the word "I:" "You're great but irrelevant. Don't mention yourself unless you have to." So yeah...strong opinions, which I'm taking with equal parts wry amusement and earnest self-improvement.
• UP 520 Urban Land Use Planning (field trips!), with planner Jeff Kahan. Fastest talker and fastest walker I've seen in a while, and a lot of fun.
• UP 572 Transportation and Land Use Planning, with Prof. Levine. Favorite phrases include "transportation's original sins" [such as forgetting that people usually care more about the places they can get to, not the distance that they travel] and "Alice in Wonderland" [EPA's smog-fighting logic].
• NRE (Natural Resources and Environment) 677 Reasonable Person Model. No quotes, but if there were one, it might be "go take a hike. Seriously, time outdoors has been shown to increase directed attention!"

Less quotably, the Graham Institute awarded me and thirty-nine other professional master's students across the University a Dow Sustainability Fellowship. So for the next couple months I'll be forming a group and choosing a project for us to work on. More on that, and plans for summer, as they materialize.