Coming All Together

As I read my classmate’s blog posts last week in the early morning of registration day I realized that we are all going though similar dilemmas and facing the same challenges. As a group we are all taking a slightly different approach to the whole “no paper” thing. I really like how we all chose a different aspect of paperless but are still encountering the same problems. While Carmina has to remember to bring a towel to the bathroom, Monica isn’t using sticky notes anymore and Elizabeth isn’t printing out all her readings, I am trying to not use any paper, for what I can control in college.

Monica, Elizabeth and I are relying on our electronic devices more since this challenge began and I have to say there are ups and downs to being on my computer so much. Like Elizabeth I’ve been doing all the readings on my electronic device which has become easier since I realized I can electronically highlight PDFs. I’ve always like highlighting as a read so I can pick out later on what I thought was important and also so I can easily see how much of the reading I had done/have left to do. I also for a couple of my classes copy the powerpoint images into my notes themselves which helps me study in the end, but retrieving the images requires using the internet. As most college kids know, Buzzfeed is one of the most distracting sites there is, and my friends love to send more different articles. At the bottom there are related articles, and of course I have to read those too. So after buzzfeed, some Facebook and twitter, and half an hour later, I sometimes forget what my original purpose was to opening the internet in the first place. Point being, my computer has brought out my inner procrastinator, which is not necessarily the best thing for this time of year. The internet isn’t all that bad though. When I don’t know the definition of a word in my readings or need help remembering that strange dinosaur name we talked about in Geology, I can just Google it. It’s been extremely helpful having everyone thing in one place where I can’t loose any of it. It has helped me stay more organized and I had the things right in front of me that I needed to finish.

Having other people also changing their behaviors to become more sustainable helped me continue my habit. When you’re doing something all alone it might not feel like you’re making that much of a difference, but all of us doing our own little thing can. As a class we saved paper, plastic and energy which to me is a wicked cool thing for college students to be doing. Even though this challenge is coming to an end, we all came together for this experiment and I know that some if not most of us will continue our sustainable behavior after this class. We all have friends and it might just be that one of our sustainable changes may rub off of them too, who knows.