Back to School, Again

After several days of full-blown denial, it seems I can no longer avoid the fact that Spring semester is upon us (mostly because classes actually started yesterday).

The holidays are over, it's finally freezing outside, and several hundred pounds of textbooks arrived at my door over the weekend.

Side note: The book pictured in the upper left of this photo (Food and the Nutrition Care Process - looks like a page turner!) arrived in a large box from Amazon. My thought process: "Surely there have to be two or three books in here. I'm glad Amazon is finally consolidating my orders to save on packaging materials!" [Opens package] "Oh no. It can't be. One 1,300 page book?!" [The End].

For those of you who are interested, I thought I'd share a little bit about what this semester is going to look like for me! Refresher of last semester here, in case you're super interested. My program is a little unique because I'm taking the DPD requirements and the Masters requirements simultaneously, and as you can see, it's a recipe for a riotous good time.

[In all seriousness, nutrition is awesome, I love my classes, professors and fellow students, and I am genuinely excited about the release of the new 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines. I just put up this front of "woe is me, classes are starting and my books are heavy" to maintain my street cred.]

So here is the down-low on my 17 credit Spring 2016 Semester:

5 classes at Winthrop University:

- Nutrition and Metabolism (probably the class I'm most nervous about)

- Medical Terminology (a 1 credit online course)

- Principles of Clinical Nutrition 

- Seminar in Food and Nutrition (essentially a journal club - our first topic = the new Dietary Guidelines!)

- Global Service Learning (including a 9 day service trip to Rocha, Nicaragua - it's not even on a map, don't bother checking - that I'll be sure to give you more details on in the coming weeks!)

1 class at Northern Virginia Community College (MY LAST ONE):

- Human Anatomy & Physiology II 

As you can see, it's likely to be *quite* the semester. But I have a new planner, so essentially I'm unstoppable.

Anyone else starting classes this week? Excited? Nervous? Feeling intelligent?