Frisbee the Friend Maker

My class is located in the Smith-Buonnano Hall which is a 45 second walk from the dining hall. The Macroeconomics professor is very young and muscular. His name is Professor K. Coleman, a grad student, and his Teaching Assistant is John McNeill, an under grad student. Our class started promptly at 9:00AM. Andrew, Kathleen, and I sat together in a row in the center of the heavily air-conditioned classroom. There are approximately thirty students in my class.

Macroeconomics is the study of the big picture of the economy: the ups and downs, inflations and deflations, depressions and revivals. Microeconomics is the study of individual economies and how they work. We started off the three-hour class with some basic definitions. Today, Professor Coleman explained some basic concepts of economics. He told us to enjoy the material that we were going to study in the next couple of weeks and not stress about homework or tests. This course is available so students can understand macroeconomics and what it represents.

Professor Coleman explained many of the course concepts with analogies to fruit, especially apples and strawberries. I know that it is only the first day, but I am not totally solid on distinguishing the differences between the types of individual choice situations (involving resources, opportunity costs, incentives and margin decisions). If I immerse myself in all this vocabulary and take advantage of a lot of practice questions, I’ll be able to get this down. Overall, I enjoy the class and the professor.

My homework tonight is to research movies that are heavily or partially based on economics. Some are “Dr. Strangelove”, “Inside Job”, “A Beautiful Mind”, “An Inconvenient Truth”, and “Freakonomics”. So far I have found “Bourne Identity”, “American Gangster”, “Blood Diamond”, and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. I also need to read through the Appendix of Chapter 2 in my textbook to review basic slope graphing (y=mx+b).

Favorite quote from my professor today: “If you want to be wrong, you can disagree.”

After my class, I took a nice two hour nap in my dorm before I took out my trusty Frisbee and headed over to the main green. I met two girls that are totally cool. Steph and Rachel are from New Jersey. Steph is taking a design class and Rachel is in BioTech with Frank and Erinn. Here's a picture of Steph's homework. It is made out of laser-cut wood pieces.

I explored the campus today my floor mate, Erin. Grace Yuen from our L’Espalier dinner e-mailed me the locations of some digital media classrooms. Erin and I found the Center of Information Technology. We checked out the building and went to the top floor to see the view.

Cohort #1 got together to go to a yoga class, but we found out that it is tomorrow. Rachel and I took some pictures in the yoga room while we were there.

Later, Rachel, Steph, and I tossed around a Nerf football until 11:00PM. Curfew is at 12:30PM. I checked in with Mikalei early and went to my room. After all my floor mates left my and Olivia’s room, we got to work on our laptops.

I love being surrounded by intellectuals here at Brown. Everyone is diverse, but they all are extremely intelligent and interesting. People talk differently here. They are confident and witty. The girls on my floor are all very sociable and good-humored. I am very fortunate to know all of them. I love Brown University. It gets better every day. This independence is so nice and so new. I could get used to this.

My bad joke of the day: “Tomorrow, do you want to go here or go Thayer?”

(Hahaha! Like Thayer Street? “There”? Get it?)

Getting Comfortable at Brown

Woke up to the sun glaring me in the eyes, with my room light still on. It was 5:50 AM. Tiredly, I got up and took a shower. It was too early.

Before I knew it, it was time for breakfast. I met up with Andrew and we made our way to the dining hall. We enjoyed the sausages, eggs, pancakes, and hash browns that they provided us. We met up with Erin, Kathleen, and Erinn in the dining hall and we all ate together.

The first day of class was a normal first day. We had an icebreaker, a lecture, and a test to assess where we were. We were assigned a reading assignment, and the class ended. The three hours breezed by as the teacher, Jody Hall, furiously clicked at her power point--it was almost impossible to take notes.

After class was lunch. Lunch was great, nothing special. Afterward, I returned to my dorm to nap.

I got up from my nap, every bone of my body cracking in the process. I had not had a comfortable sleep, but my body was re-energized. It would be a good afternoon. I met up with Erin and Andrew for dinner along with some new friends we had met. After dinner, we planned to attend a yoga class.

Unfortunately, the class was postponed until tomorrow, so we decided to partake in the "speed friending" game in the quad. A large group of students played various games together.

In the night, Andrew and I explored the campus. I purchased Febreze for my room, which reeked unlike any other dorm. Kathleen wasn't even able to take one step inside because of the horrible stench. I sprayed in every possible corner, and the smell has gone away--for now.

Day 2 at Brown was even better than the first.

Yoga Now or Yoga Later? That is the Question

Today was the first day of our soon to be normal routine at Brown University. We all met at the dining hall around 745 a.m. and all of Brown session one ate together. I really like the family nature and aspect of our group, we are all supportive and helpful of each member. But I do believe that we do not stay solely excluded, because we have all made so many new friends, and even built the basis for a solid relationship. Just this evening as Frank and I headed to get a soda from the vending machine we met three new young ladies: the first from Las Vegas, the second London, and the final one from Moscow. So though we all are very close we never miss an opportunity to meet new, and sometimes different of people.
After breakfast we all headed to our respected classrooms. This was probably the most exciting part of the day, being able to meet all of our fellow classmates and professor. I had the pre conceived notion that my class at Brown would be the same as my class at Cornell last year, but it is completely different. At Cornell there were approximately 80 students in a large lecture room. We would be lectured for three hours none stop, then have about a one and a half hour session with our teacher’s assistant (mostly graduate students). But at Brown there are only about 25 students, the professor is fairly young, and we have small breaks in the three hour lecturing period. Also at Brown the lectures are a lot more interactive giving room for student teacher debates or questions.
Moving from our lecture session which started at 9 and ended at 11:50 we all went to lunch. But then after lunch because I was fairly tired so I took a nap, something I rarely do. After this nap we all met up again in hopes of exploring all of Brown’s extracurricular opportunities. We thought that there was yoga tonight but we were wrong. It turns out that it is tomorrow. So hopefully tomorrow I will be taking my first yoga class ever. This is just one reason that I love Brow, I am able to experience new things every day that I would not have if I was not here. I am thrilled to see what lies ahead of me at this amazing university.

A Day in the Class

The first night at Brown was difficult—it was no Hotel Providence. A light from the building across from my dorm shown through my window and created an eerie silhouette of the window and the desk. While I forgot about the horror of the light, I thought how nice it would be to have lights that resembled stars on the dorm ceiling. I was also distracted from sleep by the noise I assume was the refrigerator, which ceased its noise about an hour after the lights went off. I drifted off to sleep for a few hours only to awake at three hour intervals.

At 6AM I got out of bed and headed off to breakfast. After stumbling across the campus and hoping I remembered the ways to the dining hall, I had a nice breakfast. I did forget my backpack and textbooks that I needed, so I rushed back to my dorm and then to the Bio Medical Center to see my class.

Class wasn’t what I expected. The class introduced everyone by a game where each student chose a slip then guessed who chose that band and whoever wrote the band had to introduce himself. I got to learn that most of the class plays tennis, where everyone lived and the grade level each student is in. Later in the week we will have a quiz testing the names of classmates. Surprisingly the class consisted of mostly rising juniors, whereas Frank and I were one of the few rising seniors of the class. Each student also received a slip of a piece of paper depicting a place to meet up. I got the bamboo garden. Professor Hall expects the teams, composed of three students, to meet at the specific place and take a picture to add to the class yearbook. Besides introductions, each student was given the basic protocol of the laboratory and a syllabus of the class.

The class began with a two hour lecture review of DNA synthesis, an introduction of biotechnology and examples of biotechnology application, such as reversing differentiation of fibroblast. Although the teacher noted at the end of class that she rushed through the material, time could have been taken away from review and added to the information that the lab would cover tomorrow. The speed of the lecture was doable, but she lingered on the less important issues and repeated herself in the powerpoint and explanation.

The test however did not focus on review. It tested my knowledge of DNA sequences, the structure of a nucleotide, which although she had many pictures of the structures, I forgot which part of the molecule the nitrogen base bonded to, concentration reduction and lac operon. Professor Hall did touch on the subject of the lac operon, but she did not include most of the information that was mentioned in the test. When I left the classroom, I felt like I needed to learn what I did not know; I never took a biotechnology class, so I am not expected to know everything; the empty spaces of the free-response question were intimidating.

To begin my assignment to find the bamboo garden, I took Kathleen and some other students that wanted to explore around campus. I did not find the bamboo garden, and I may need to ask my RA if she knows where the garden is located, but I did explore the Science Library and found a museum and a Providence library, which I will visit tomorrow.

I also experienced my first laundry day at Brown. I started to feel anxieties from being away from home and some stress because I realized soon I would have to finish a long summer assignment in two weeks. Time stresses me out. I have three weeks and three load of laundry to do, one is already done and I have not begun yet. I will try to think about the present to keep myself from getting to emotional.

I do have something to look forward to tomorrow; tomorrow Professor Hall will help us conduct our first experiment and explain the fundamentals of biotechnological techniques. There are also so many activities that the RA has planned for students. Soon I will be busy enough to forget my worries and enjoy myself.

School Officially Begins!

Today was the first day of class! Our Introduction to Macroeconomics course began at 9 AM so I woke up to my alarm clock at 7 AM. I slept like a baby last night, and it was fairly easy to wake up because of my excitement our first day of school. There was an abundance of options for breakfast including pancakes, eggs, tater tots, fruit, and muffins. I found myself trying the pancakes and eggs, which were both tasty, and grabbing an apple on the go. I wanted to be early to class and found myself in front of the classroom with twenty minutes to spare. Erin and Andrew had arrived before me, and my other classmates were trickling in. I found out that Emily, the girl sitting next to me, actually resided on the same floor of the same house as me. She is the only person in the class that lives in Marcy Hall. It’s nice to know someone in your class lives just down the hall from you.

Our teacher is Nicholas Coleman, a graduate student in the Ph. D program for economics. We also have a Teaching Assistant, John McNeil, who is also in the process of earning a Ph. D in economics. Mr. Coleman is very welcoming to us and has a great sense of humor. He uses PowerPoint presentations for a visual aid and emails them to us to print out. Today he went over the syllabus and explained the outline of the class. The textbook we are using is Macroeconomics by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Mr. Coleman also suggested fun economics-related books for us to read if we liked. I plan on checking out On the Wealth of Nations and Eat the Rich, both by P.J. O’Rourke.

In the beginning of class, we each introduced ourselves and shared why we took this class. My reason was because I planned to major in economics in college. Many of my classmates are international students, with three European boys, two Koreans, two Colombians, and a handful of Chinese students. I look forward to hearing their different perspectives on American and global economics.

During the course of our three-week class, we will be working in groups on group project presentations. Our assignment today was to brainstorm ideas that we’d like to explore for our project, as well as read about graphs in chapter 2 of our textbook. Today’s lesson covered the first principles of macroeconomics, including opportunity costs, scarce resources, trade-offs, and incentives.

After class, Erinn and I went to explore Brown. I have to say, Brown is very beautiful and larger than I thought. There are a lot of trees and green grass areas, perfect spots for people studying outside.

We also went to wash our clothes because our bags of dirty clothes were starting to fill up. Today is the first day I did my own laundry. Thank goodness I had Erinn to help me because we faced obstacles with the machines not working. But in the end, I had nice, clean clothes to wear and this was a great learning experience. I take pride in having done my own laundry.

We thought there would be a yoga class today, but apparently it’s tomorrow. Instead, the RAs invited many students to gather on the grass in front of my house and played “speed friending”, a friends’ version of speed dating. After speed friending, our large group of maybe sixty gathered in a circle and played train wreck and another interesting game that the RAs introduced. Everyone was laughing and having fun meeting new people.I went back to my room early to start blogging and reading the homework, but I spent time video chatting with my family and later talking to Emily. We branched off to so many different subjects that I lost track of time and jumped to check in with my RA. I was on time at 11:15 PM. Our homework assignment isn’t long, but I want to finish so I can sleep earlier tonight. I look forward to tomorrow!

Brown At Last!

We are at Brown at last! After five nights of staying in Hotel Providence and four days of college tours, we are finally fulfilling our main purpose of this trip. Over this past week, the five of us Brown # 1 cohorts have become really close, and Ms. Larson has become our ILC mom. Today, Andrew, Erin, Erinn, Frank, and I spread our wings and flew out of Mama Larson’s nest and into the real world known as Brown University. I already miss Ms. Larson, but I am also excited meet new people, learn new things, and live independently here.

I was becoming so situated and comfortable with our hotel that packing felt strange. However, I was looking forward to experiencing a dorm. I live in the Marcy House with Erinn while Frank is in our neighboring building and Erin and Andrew are off in another area. The dorms are not quite what I expected, but in a short while, I'll feel right at home. Sharing bathrooms with the many girls in my house will be a new experience and hopefully not a bad one. The people in my house come off as friendly and approachable. It’s always fun meeting new and interesting people for the first time. A conversation naturally builds from introductions and asking questions about where people are from and what class they are taking. I was one of the many people on my floor to get a single room. I’m not sure if I like this or not. I was looking forward to meeting my roommate, but then again, not sharing a room allows me to have personal space.

The day was pretty busy, and I didn’t have much time to explore Brown thoroughly yet. From what I have seen walking around and driving here, Brown is composed of many red brick buildings, which I adore. We had a student orientation once most people checked in. The room was filled with hundreds of students. They laid the ground rules down for us, including the obvious “no alcohol or drugs” and curfews, which our RAs (residential advisors) expanded on. Our school day curfew is 11:30 and our weekend curfew is 12:30 AM, which means that we must check in with our RA by that time or else they will issue a missing student search, something I’m sure no one wants to instigate. My RA is a sophomore at Brown named Elisa who is extremely nice and caring and lives right next door to me. We had two floor meetings with our RA with everyone on my floor assigned to Elisa. We played several fun icebreakers that introduced us to the people we will be living with for the next three weeks. I have a feeling that I’ll have a blast with these wonderful people.I was eager to experience college dining. I didn't know what to expect so I was impressed that the dining hall had such a vast array of food. There was unique dishes that I hadn't tried before but was enthusiastic to taste. It was laid out buffet-style, with freshly served food such as pasta, rice, salad, fruit, and deserts. After dinner, most students attended an ice cream social put on by the school. I had a great time socializing with different people with my mingling partner, Erinn.

Tomorrow is when the real work begins. I actually look forward to starting my Macroeconomics course with Erin and Andrew. Time to get some sleep to reenergize my brain!

My Social Excursion

Despite my assumption that checking into Brown and the dorms would take long, it as short. I got my essentials of Brown—my Brown ID card, a packet of orientation information, including an invaluable map, my schedule and my dorm room and key—in minutes. I got my luggage and had plenty of time to relax and explore some of the campus.

Orientation supplied me with supplemental knowledge of the school and facilities. I tried to take a picture of the speaker while she was talking and got it, but I was called out—I was really embarrassed and understand that there are limits to what I can and cannot take a picture of.

During orientation, the entire group split of into groups led by his Resident Assistant (RA). My RA was an enthusiastic person, whom I met before orientation. We played games, including the evolution game, where there is a competition of rock, paper, scissor and each game won moves the person from an egg, to a chicken, to a dinosaur, to a princess—the final stage—and a rock, paper scissors tournament. I never reached passed egg or reached passed any level of the tournament, but I wasn’t trying, I wanted to explore, which we did.

The tour ended at the dining hall. I always thought that dorm food was disgusting, but the food I saw was regular; there was nothing special about it or repulsive about it. Someone told me that dorm food was horrible because of the repetition of the same foods. I would lose interest in the same foods every day, so I know to vary my diet from the dorm food to refrain from adopting the same attitudes of my peers.

My first amazement of college was how quick students found Frisbees. As soon as Erin threw her Frisbee, two other guys joined the square, then one more. Instead of a game between friends, it became a communal event. I enjoyed seeing how easy it was for other students to get involved in the game. I haven’t had a full day at Brown, but I am already immersed into the driving force of college—mass Frisbee games.

Although I disagree with the social events, such as the ice cream social, that initiate—force—student bonding, I met new students that I hope to meet again and also found a member of my class. I think it should be natural like the Frisbee game; everyone becoming friends in the environment that he shares. Yet this is coming from a very antisocial person that likes to meet people at her own pace. It works better for me, but that is just my experience.

The festivities continued when the RAs called meetings that furthered our dorm floor bonding. I got to know more about my neighbors, but it was not as friendly as walking with the RA around campus.

Classes start tomorrow, where I anticipate meeting students that share my passion in biotechnology. There are more opportunities to meet students, and I will try to make the most of the RAs’ activities.