Move in day was amazing - I drove in down Palm Drive and there were tons of screaming students there with "Welcome Frosh" signs and balloons etc. When I got to my dorm and was walking up towards the check in area, a voice came on over a stereo system they had set up and screamed "Evan Dragic, welcome to Stanfooooord! Woooooooo!" which was pretty awesome. Everyone gets there name shouted out by the staff when they first show up. I have a large double in Adams house in FroSoCo (for Freshman Sophomore College), a dorm at the far southwest of campus, and it is on a corner so I get two windows right by my bed. My roommate, Noah is from the D.C. area and a prospective physics major. He's a pretty cool guy and I think we'll get along well. He also has an uncanny resemblance to Frodo/Elijah Wood, so I've made a poster for our room declaring it FroDoCo (if you can string "o" sounds together, you can make a stanford acronym). I have a video of the dorm I took posted here. Sorry the quality is bad...my camera was low on batteries so it had a few issues.
Convocation was pretty sweet, though rather traditional. The Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education (who was one of the main speakers there) is also the Dean of FroSoCo, and he hangs out with us a lot. We have barbeques at his house (right across the street) every Friday, and he has a massive, 800+ DVD library you can borrow from.
That night, we had a house meeting which concluded when the Band (and the rest of campus) showed up and we went on Band Run. That basically consists of running through the streets of Stanford in the dark screaming and following/waving your dorm's flag (they all have huge banners), and trying to steal other flags while the band goes crazy playing music. You wind up in the Quad for a huge spectacle of music, dancing and fire which lasts past midnight, and then you get to run back. That was pretty awesome. (The administration people who spoke to us the next day would make lots of comments about how "They don't know how to have fun like that in Cambridge," so the gauntlet has been thrown!)
I got to take the Oral Spanish placement test at 8 am the next day (hooray!), but I somehow tested into the middle of second year Spanish, so I am done with my language requirement. I might end up those courses taking it in winter and spring though, because you need to be through second year Spanish in order to do any Spanish related study abroad. The rest of that day was a bunch of Orientation Stuff until the Three Books discussion in Memorial Auditorium. That was awesome because one of the authors, Lynda Berry was basically a sixty year old ex-hippie who was simply hilarious, and Junot Diaz was also a character. He got them to bring wine out onto the stage for the panel and got huge applause everytime he let fly with some colorful language. But after that, I basically crashed.
The next day I was still super tired, so I mostly avoided intro session stuff. I had to meet with my advisor (who is very nice), so I picked out my classes. I'm taking a (mandatory) Intro to the Humanities course, Technological Visions of Utopia, Introduction to Linguistics, a (mandatory) Program in Writing and Rhetoric course, though I got into the Rhetoric of Film class I wanted, and a seminar called Can Machines Know? Can Machines Feel?, where I get to explore A.I. and computational theory. No math or science means my books were only 180 bucks before I do my returns :).
Friday was full or more orientation stuff, and I got to take a tour of our Library, which is awesome! Plus I got to go to a soccer game, but we lost 1-0 in the final minutes :(. After that, NSO week finished up with NS GLOW, a huge dance party outside with someone's tuition in glowsticks (read: a whole damn lot of glowsticks) - that was sweet.
The next day, Saturday, was truly amazing. I went to the public service open house and signed up for about 20 groups, so I get to narrow that down to the 2 or so I will probably do, and then they had a big traditions/cheers lesson where I got to see the Stanford Axe (a real axe-head trophy traded back and forth between the winner of the Stanford/Cal game). The best part, however, was definitely the football game. The dorm went all out with face and body painting, and we had enough guys paint their chests to spell out "GO STANFORD!!" As you can see from the pictures even Jimmy got into the act. At the game, us painted guys got to sit in the front row corner right by the endzone and even got up on the jumbotron at one point, and Stanford beat San Jose State. Pure awesomeness.
My Exclamation Point Awesomeness.
Studly.
The next day I was awoken by all the dorm staff pounding on the walls outside me room. Told only to dress warmly and not talk, all the freshman had to line up in the front of the dorm, grab the shoulders of the person in front of us, and close our eyes. Then we got to march through the cold morning screaming out things we were afraid of or yelling that we shared fears others had voiced. Eventually I got back to sleep and slept until noonish. Then almost everybody has been sick with coughs and colds (especially the idiots who went shirtless to the football game), but I am pulling through with tea and honey from the dorm's dining hall (best on campus!).
Then today was the first day of classes, and that is pretty much all I've got for now...hopefully you guys are still having good times :).
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