Today was a very sunny day, and so Dr. Inan decided to hold class out on the steps of Franz, facing the quad. He is my new favorite professor.
Unfortunately, at web-friendly resolutions, the whiteboard is illegible, so I present it separately. I found myself wondering during class, “What would a random person think of this diagram? It makes perfect sense to me.
Being that finals are next week, I probably won’t be doing much with the website in the next few days. I have a project due Thursday for my engineering course, but it is simply to turn in corrected versions of three assigments done over the course. They were done on computer, so it should be pretty simple.
Then on Friday, I have a 5-6 page paper about the book we read in English. He mentioned earluer in the year that he would push it out until the time alloted for that class’s final, which is next Monday, but last Monday, he seemed to have changed his mind.
Also on Friday, I have due the last CS program, but it looks like it might be pretty complicated. The paper is due by 5pm, and the CS program is due by midnight, via e-mail.
Then the exams. Monday at 8:00 is english, but the paper is the final for that class. At 10:30, I have the Physics final. 8:00 Tuesday is my Calculus final, and the CS final is at 10:30 Tuesday. At 12:30 Tuesday, I am done with all work for the semester.
Not sure how long I am staying on here–I don’t want to leave too early, so maybe wednesday or thursday. I still have to pack up everything in the room, so I do need some time, and I will probably want to sleep sometime. Of course, if I get packed, I can sleep at home too…
At any rate, I best get to bed so that I can get a good start in the morning. I may post updates as things get completed, if I feel like it.
Until next week,
–Nathan
The other day, I mentioned to Celtic that I was in the process of picking my room and roommate. Earlier this evening, she left me this comment:
wait – you get to choose rooms and stuff? You’re going to know before you even leave for the summer? Huh? How does that work? Is it one of those schools where every single student lives in residence the whole entire time they’re a student there?
This sounds so incredibly odd to me.
If the process is confusing to her, it is undoubtedly confusing to others, too, so I will attempt to explain it here.
The process begins a few weeks ago, when everyone decides where they will be rooming next year. If you will be off campus, then you are done with the process. Those who wish to room in the row housing (townhouse style) submit their applications just before spring break, and choose rooms the week they get back. You choose the group you would like to room with, and each group gets a point total, based on the number of credits passed, the number of transfer, AP, and IB credits, and the number of semesters previously lived in the row housing or on campus. There is a big selection night, and the group with the highest total picks first, until all the rooms are filled. Anyone who didn’t fit, or anyone left over (if a group of 7 winds up with a room for 6) can go for singles there, and anyone left over at the end has about 2 days to fill out an application for the traditional halls (dorms). Again, points re awarded, 50 for coming back to the same hall the first year, and 25 for each additional year you come back, as well as 10 points for each semester lived in University owned housing, one point per credit passed, and per IB or AP credit, and half a point per transfer credit. It is heavily weighted to people who are returning to the same hall, and to upperclassmen living on campus. Tomorrow night is selection night. They go down the list of people in order of points, (which has been posted, along with a map of rooms that are available), and when your name is called, you and your roommate(s) choose a room. It is done by highest individual point total, not group total.
If you are going to be a Junior or above, you have the option to “squat”, which means that if you can find enough roommates to fill your room, you can keep it out of the general pool.
This leads to quite a bit of figuring how high you (or your roommate) are on the list, and who is going for triples, and who wants to room in which wing, and so on. Cean, my roommate, probably had quite a few AP credits, as he has 10 more points than I do. He is ranked 19, and the list starts at 6, (due to people wanting singles and squatters), and counting out triple contenders, we are ranked 8 or so. We have our eyes on a few rooms in particular in B wing, and would certainly like to be in 2B/C. It is rumored that Jake will be in that wing next year. He is my RA now, and I really like him. In honesty, though, it’s not that I dislike the other RA’s, just that I don’t know them very well.
So by this time tomorrow, I will know which room I am in next year, and will have signed a contract and meal plan. I think we have a good shot at one of the better rooms, but if everyone else is looking at one of the same rooms, then we’ll have to go somewhere else. Cean wants to go to another event that night, and has signed a letter to let me choose our room for the two of us. We’ve come to the conclusion that we’ll room somewhere in 2B/C, and that any room is okay with him. I’ll try and get one of the ones in B wing, because they are the modular rooms, and if that fails, one of the larger ones in C wing, where the desks are built in. This means that if you want to loft/bunk the beds, you need to build the loft yourself, which means that re-arranging the room later in the year is out.
On the off chance that someone is really interested in the process, the Office of Res. Life has a website devoted to explaining the details.
I started a post today in CS lab, while I was waiting for the professor to get a chance to verify that my code worked correctly, but about that time, she finally got there, and I only wrote a sentence or so. It turns out that the lab instructions were written for an older version of the program, and part of the lab involved selecting an option that was no longer on the “Tools” menu. She was trying to figure it out, but ended up giving up. She had done it successfully on the computer her office, but she must have had a different version. I eventually did figure it out, with a bit of experimenting, and some help from Google, but it didn’t matter anymore. Oh well, I showed her that I’m capable of figuring things out, I guess. You know, half of the computer stuff I learn is from Google. I don’t know what I would do without it.
Being a Catholic school, we get a 4 day weekend for Easter, which is next Sunday. Classes end at 4pm Thursday, and don’t resume until Tuesday. I’m going home for the weekend, but were I not, I’ve had 2 other invitations to Easter dinner, one specifically to me, and one blanket invitation. But I want to go home, and we’re having some company over there. Not that I have to go home, but that’s always nice, at least for a few days. I can see why some people are so anxious to get back, though.
I’d better get back to work, so that’s all for now.
–Nathan
Not sure what I want to post, but here I am in the computer lab, starting a post.
I have about an hour until my next class, Calculus. I finished last classes homework last night, although it’s not due til Tuesday–I’m trying to avoid having the pile up of work that always seemed to happen in High school.
I sent a lengthy e-mail home Tuesday, here are some excerpts from that.
Well, things aren’t going too badly here. Got through a day’s worth of classes without any major trouble, except almost going to the wrong building–got it figured out when EN 201 wasn’t a classroom, and the schedule actually said SCI 201.
Homework looks to be light this week, at least in Physics and Intro Engineering. Math may be the same way–turns out that the integrated part is that the two teachers are working together, and will teach the math concept and the related physics concept at the same time. The same students are in both classes.
A major part of Intro to Eng. is the design project, and the related paperwork–we get to create a device to pick up whiffle balls. Don’t know too much, but it should become clearer in the next week–we find out our groups on Wed, and get our first real look at the playing area used on Fri.
Getting along with Nik fairly well so far, he got his half of the room more organized Sun, with another spree this afternoon. Not too muck junk on my side, yet. He bought a TV, an will soon hook up his X-box, so volume may increase–there’s study rooms in the basement, and this computer lab, which, for the most part, is vacant. There’s five computers, all brand new (as the Tech guy was saying) and four up and running. The printer doesn’t work yet.
…time seems to be flying by here. I can hardly believe that I’ve only slept here three nights–Nik and I had a long conversation about that last night, and we couldn’t decide how many nights we’d been here, and when we’d gone to bed, and so on. There was a hall meeting last night, about the Bishop, the statue, and another tonight about general stuff. Meetings tend to be later here, and then everything starts about 15 minutes late. The Comedy Sportz show, which I went to last night,
started late, which caused it to run late, and they noticed that all of a sudden, lots of people started to leave. I don’t know if they figured out that it was because of the meeting, or not. The show wasn’t as good as last time I saw them, a lot slower paced, and generally not quite as engaging–I WAS in the top row of the main seats in the Chiles Center, though–last time I was near the middle of Buckley Center Auditorium, (AKA BC Aud)…
And the message continued.
I’ve been meaning to update my website, now that I’m in college, but haven’t gotten around to it–let it be known that an update is intended. I didn’t realize how dificult it is to not have your own computer. I do have a network storage drive, but preferences, favorites, programs, etc are not there when I log on. It’s also just plain inconvenient to wander down tho the basement to check my e-mail, or see what the assignment is in one of my classes.
For the most part, everything here is high-tech. Professors expect you to check your UP e-mail daily, because they may send out changes to the assignment, reminders about assignments, changes in class meetings, etc. So far, I haven’t gotten anything important, except the notification of a room change.
As I mentioned in the e-mail home, my Calculus class and my physics class are integrated. That means that they are taught in the same room. However, the registrar hasn’t quite figured out that fact that they are integrated, and so assigned the Calc class to a different room. So the whole class was waiting outside Franz 018, while the teachers were in SCI 201. They noticed something was wrong, and then checked the schedule. So a few minutes after class was to start, a peer helper–the name for a student who’s taken the course before, and is helping out, rather like a lab assistant–showed up and led the parade of Calc students back to the correct room. The class could be fun–we’ll be using Mathematica, a math program, to do a lot of data analysis, and graphing type stuff–there’s a computer on every lab bench.
Amazing how distracted one can get online–I just checked Brionna’s blog, and folowed the link to her cousin Miranda‘s collection of blogs and LiveJournals. Interesting mix of young teen thoughts there. Then I went back to Brionna’s blog to comment there.
Now it’s time for lunch, and calc.
–Nathan