Orientation and First Day of Classes

So yesterday was the orientation for both the general engineering students (morning) and the Civil and Environmental Engineering students (afternoon). I decided to go to both. There turned out to be a lot of international students, maybe half of those who came to the morning one. I don't know the exact numbers though. Anyway, there was BBQ scheduled from 12-4pm at Stewart park which is about two miles from campus. I decided to go because I still had time before my next orientation starts. By the time I got there with someone I met (we walked there), there were quite a lot of people there already and the line were quite long. We had to wait an hour before we got our food! When we were in line, we talked to the people standing before us who came from S. Africa. They all worked a few years before going back to school. I believe that their company also sponsored them to come here too. We left the park at 2 pm thinking it was enough time for us to catch the bus and go to my orientation at 2:30. Turns out we were wrong. The bus only comes every hour and we had to wait 40 minutes for the next one. Not only that, the bus was late too. I believe it's because it was behind some construction trucks and it was raining. As such, I was only able to catch the last half hour of the orientation.

This morning was the first day of classes. We also get to pick desks in our office. I went early so I could pick a good one near the window which have a pretty good view ^_^ Afterwards, I went to my classes: Intermediate Solid Mechanics and Concrete Structures. The professor for the former was pretty young. As I found out later, he was pretty new to the dept. The second one seemed like it was a lot of work. There is a project where we have to design a building in a group. It's a little bit like 1.036. Some of the differences included being in a lab and building a model and destructing it. After the tour of the site where our project was to be located, the prof told me that i shouldn't look so scared (i didn't realize that i looked scared....)

There was also a picnic today hosted by the CEE department. The food was already cooked so there was hardly any line. I took the bus with a guy who's going to be in my group. When we were there, I saw some people I met yesterday as well as met someone new. Two of these people were undergrads at Cornell. One of them had taken two of the classes I was thinking of taking. Turns out the concrete one is going to be a lot of work, but the other one not so much. As of right now, I have about 6 classes (credit-wise) which is quite a lot considering three of them have projects. At least I have three weeks to decide which one to take and which one to drop ^_^