feeding my mind

So I've been spending a lot of my time trying to get through somewhat of an existential crisis I have been battling - which has also included a prevailing tendency to overeat nowadays, a dent in my disciplined routines, and an altogether too-worried mind - and somewhere in between I decided to make an effort to do things that I have always been passionate about. One of these things just happens to be studying and learning.

Other than my Bahasa Indonesia class, I also have enrolled into classes on edX and Coursera. These portals were introduced to me by a mentee of mine and they have been a complete treasure trove for me. Run by some of the most prestigious universities, the lectures have been truly amazing so far, and I was surprised how many courses I eventually enrolled in.

Here's the running list:

Current

EDX:7.00x Intro to Biology (5 Mar) *

EDX:14.73x Challenges of Global Poverty (12 Feb)

CSA:  Property & Liability: An Introduction to Law & Economics (18 Mar)

Upcoming

EDX: Stat 2.2 Introduction to Stats (12 Apr)

CSA: Introduction to Ops Mgmt (29 Apr)

CSA: Generating the Wealth of Nations (29 Apr)

CSA: Smart Growth for Private Business (29 Apr)

CSA: Inspiring Leadership through EI (1 May)

EDX:PH278x Human Health & Global Env Change (15 May) *

CSA: English Common Law: Structure & Principles (June) 

EDX:UT.3.01x Age of Globalization (1 Sep)

CSA: New Models of Business in Society (2 Sep)

EDX: UT 4.01x Impact of Drug Development (16 Sep) *

CSA: Law & The Entrepreneur (TBC)

CSA: The Science of Gastronomy (TBC) *
CSA: An Introduction to the US Food System: Perspectives from Public Health (TBC)

* Courses that I may have to reconsider depending on the workload.

And on my iTunesU, I've been watching a Game Theory course run by Yale University (which is really really interesting).

Right now, I'm trying to juggling the two courses of The Challenges to Global Poverty, as well as Introduction to Biology. It's a pity I enrolled in both the classes late as I only recently discovered their existence. Especially for the biology class, though it's immensely interesting, I doubt I'd be able to stay in it for long considering I enrolled so late and have so much of the class to catch up on....not to mention the four modules I have starting this April. Sigh, there's just so little time i have for so many things I want to do... even though the thought of understanding biology all the way into the cells, DNA, water, and carbon molecules, and learning biological vocabulary like "prokaryotic" and "eukaryotic" cells, is immensely curious to me, I doubt I will have time to consume and digest it all.

I guess studying and learning has always been something that I have thrived on - well, as long as it doesn't have much to do with numbers. Other than the math phobia that has appeared at times during the Global Poverty & Game Theory classes - which creates major jitters in me (see: possible onset of hyperventilation) whenever a graph, chart, boxes, decimals, fractions, and other weird squiggly lines are drawn or presented - lessons have been otherwise wonderful to sit through.

The Global Poverty class has especially been something that I have been enjoying thus far. Discussing on issues of health, family, insurance, risk, education, and even entrepreneurship, somehow I've been brought back to a time a couple of years back, when I was in a little place called Secunderabad in Andhra Pradesh in India, when I wrote a research paper and developed a model for rural entrepreneurship which I truly believed would help make a huge difference to people living in poverty or in a poverty trap - a model which I do hope to be able to materialize one day. 

In fact, a couple of days ago, I shared the model with a friend of mine and was just praying that she would be the right one to join me on this journey... which looks like a few rounds of talking to partners and investors, going down to rural villages to survey infrastructure, and heading to the urban areas for pitches... I'm most certain it would be an amazing experience!

The upcoming classes have been a mix of personal interests, some graduate school testing stuff (to once again try out whether I have the tenacity for such a thing...like... statistics *shiver* *sad face*, as well as some business and industry equipping modules. It's probably not going to be easy to juggle studying or "studying" with work, but it's been great so far.

All this, along with thoughts of doing a Masters, as well as the language classes I'm taking up... I wonder where all this is going to be leading up to.