My first week of classes officially ended around noon today, and if this post has a time stamp, you will see that it is past 1:30 am. Everyone in the dorm is still up watching movies, or playing ping pong and Super Smash Bros. All in all, this week went very well. All of my teachers seem very nice and although a couple of them manage to go off on crazy tangents not related to the curriculum, I’m looking forward to the rest of the year. Probably the biggest thing that happened to me this week was getting hired by Horizons, the school newspaper, as a graphic designer. I’m excited for the opportunity and already completed a couple projects the past few days.
My favorite class is definitely Intro to Engineering (a.k.a. the Lego class). That is literally what the class is about…building Lego robots, programming them on the computer and making them follow lines, carry balls into a hole, or in my case, creating a battle bot 🙂 Later in the semester we’ll be building motorized blimps that will have to race across a building. I’m one of three or so mechanical engineers in the class (everyone else is studying aerospace engineering with the exception of a couple electrical engineers), which is ironic since it’s essentially a robotics class and the minority group in the class will be majoring in a robotics field.
Last Sunday was our AFROTC orientation, which took almost all day after all the events we had. The class seems like fun, but very demanding. Cadets are only required to participate 5 hours per week: 2 hours of physical fitness, 1 hour of classroom studies, and 1 hour of “leadership laboratory” which consists of drill and ceremonies. There is a small catch however; in order to become the model cadet that the unit is looking forward, much more is required. I plan on joining the color guard team, which meets for 2 hours 4 days per week. I’ll just have to see how heavy the homework load is to make sure I can balance everything, but with my schedule spaced out the way it is I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work out.
Everyone here in the dorm is pretty cool and we all get along. It is true that up until yesterday there were people living among our group of 20 that we hadn’t seen, but I think I’ve met everyone now…I certainly hope so at least. Tonight, we did something called Ice Blocking. Our RA, TJ, went and bought blocks of ice and we went to a large hill by the soccer field and slid down on the ice. It’s a ton of fun and I’m almost certain we’ll be doing the same thing next weekend. The second highlight of my day was the long awaited arrival of Mac OSX Snow Leopard. It was released today and although it doesn’t have too many new features, my machine is much faster now. One of the other guys in my dorm is a die-hard Microsoft fan, and I’m 100% Apple, so we get in a few laughs beating on each other’s system.
I put off taking pictures of my room long enough, so here they are:
