Strangechord

Homework: Reading, writing and procrastinating. Reading Weber, Mead, and Simmel for Soc. Foundations class. Feeling a bit slacker-ish as far as my independent study (tomorrow I’ll be posting tons of notes from an orientation meeting for Village Free School). Last week: M83, Ulrich Schnauss, and Talkdemonic show at Holocene. Schnauss’ music takes my breath away and his live improvisations put the room in a trance.

At Portland State, every senior is required to take a capstone, which is a six-credit class (as compared to the usual four-credit) that links the students with a community partner and revolves around service learning. This spring, my final term, I’m taking a really exciting capstone called Community Place-Making with City Repair with about 15 other students from many different discpline backgrounds. City Repair is a local organization whose mission is “transforming urban space into community place”.

Every year, the final week of May is City Repair’s Village Building Convergence (VBC), a nine-day bonanza of community place-making projects. Each day of the VBC, neighborhood volunteers as well as experts from around the world in permaculture, natural building, and urban planning collaborate to transform ~20 different metro sites. (One of the sites is Portland State University.) Each night, everyone comes together in once central place for a giant, celebratory block party. As a capstone student, I’m focusing on a particular site and will be documenting its process over the next four weeks.

I can’t quite believe I have only five weeks left until I have my Bachelor’s. It’s finally sinking in, and at the same time, it’s occurring to me very arbitrary that after this random set of classes I’ve taken for seven years, that I’ll be awarded an official sociology credential. I mean, yes, I’ve learned a ton about sociology over the years, but the timing feels odd. Why now? Why after these classes? *sigh* It’s hard to explain. I’m not saying I’m not deserving. I think I’m trying to make a larger point of how arbitrary the whole conferring of academic degrees seems right now to me.

Unlike most of my closest senior Sociology major peers, I will not be going straight into grad school in the Fall. I want to take at least a year to get my toe wet with my Bachelor’s. I don’t want to fall into that trap of going on to grad school because I don’t know what else to do with myself. If I find that to do work that lights me up and makes a difference requires my Master’s, I’ll consider grad school (and then probably not Sociology, probably something like this program). At this point, though, I gotta say, I don’t believe I will go on to grad school. I am really excited to teach myself and learn what I want to learn within community, not within the university. And honestly, I don’t know how relevant a higher degree is going to be over the next 20 years, but that’s a topic for another post.

This summer, three main projects interest me: 1) Read and study up on peak oil. I recently joined a group called Oregon Oil Awareness that meets once a month and I’ll be helping to put together an overhead “peak oil 101″ slide presentation to take into public arenas. 2) Volunter with Village Free School - a model in action that I find so inspiring. 3) Start to learn about herbs and their healing properties. I realize this project is one that could go on for a lifetime, not just one summer. And perhaps it will!