Hey!

Wow! I can’t believe that the time has already come to post on the PC Admissions Blog here! It seems like I have all these things I’ve been trying to keep track of to tell you, and I must have a dozen post-its tacked on up my desk here (and I never used post-its before college), so please excuse the length of this post.

Now, where to begin?

Well, Orientation was great. My Orientation Leaders were excellent, and the few days really helped to soothe some of the worries I had (for example, I had no idea how the whole scheduling thing worked, but when I left Orientation, I was completely confident about how daily life here would be).

Then it came time to move in. Since I am in PC’s Army ROTC, I was one of the lucky ones who was able to move in early (the other early arrivals were either athletes or people in the Urban Action program--which I heard from friends was a blast!) I arrived on Wednesday, 29 August 2007. Thursday and Friday were ROTC’s Welcoming Days (which were really great because, when I started classes, I was able to recognize a lot of faces). I had Saturday to myself, to settle in a little bit more, and the rest of the freshmen moved in Sunday, 2 September 2007.

I’m going to be honest. I don’t know how people like my roommate, who came from Chicago, moved all of their things in one trip! I am completely guilty of driving back and forth to my house for last minute items :)

That Monday was Labor Day, the day of the trip to Newport (while the upperclassmen moved in), and we couldn’t have asked for better weather! It was absolutely beautiful by the bay, and the Irish Festival was also in town, so Newport had even more to offer that weekend!

Classes started Tuesday, and my very first college class was at 8:30 AM; it was Politics 101 with Dr. Cammarano, who jumped right into getting to know everyone. All of my classes, like Politics, are small and personable—exactly what I’d hoped they’d be.

My largest class, of course, is the Development of Western Civilization, and I don’t even feel overwhelmed by that! Had I felt that the class was too large, I still have seminar every Friday. There, the class is broken down into smaller groups so that we can discuss more deeply whatever material we’re on that week.

My other classes are Military Science and Spanish 104. I’d had some worries that I might literally be lost in translation in Spanish, but the language placement exams have served me well—the class is perfect for my level! It’s spoken completely in Spanish, and I’m not exaggerating when I say I feel like I’ve gotten more Spanish out of these few weeks than out of the last few years of high school Spanish class. The “complete immersion� thing makes such a difference!

All right. I need to start looking at my essay assignment for Civ class, so I’m going to stop here, for now. In the next entry, I’ll definitely be discussing the roommate and food scene, so you can look forward to that by Monday, at the latest!