The OC

This has been the longest week ever. Sunday was actually a great day. The girl who checked me on Saturday to my apartment was actually a member of the singles' ward out here and I had talked to her back when I made my decision to come out here. So on Sunday Marci introduced me to her roommate, Alisa. I went to church with Alisa, Marci had to work. The three of us went to a fireside that night. I love this church! It makes life so much easier to have instant friends available. Both Marci and Alisa are in the MFA Dance program here. Also in a wierd coincidence I ran into Gemma Williams at the fireside. She served her mission in Michigan and was around a lot when I was an undergrad, for those who don't know. :) Long hair, she says she's been spreading your resume around for you.

Monday was an all day orientation. Mostly information I could have found or read for myself. And to make it even better, they told us to be there at 8am even though nothing started until 8:45. Yeah, getting up super early! I did get a list of the things I need to do to get my residency here. That was useful. I met a bunch of the other cognitive science first years. There are 6 of us here from the week I came to interview. It was nice to see familiar faces.

Tuesday and Wednesday were TA training. I've been assigned to teach Computer based Research in Social Sciences. WOOT! What do I know about that you ask? Nothing! Actually it's not so bad. Turns out that the lectures are only once a week, even though they are listed as twice a week. I do however have to TA two labs twice a week for 1.5 hours a piece. That's six hours of labs. And they are from 7-10pm. The upside of this is, since the students are doing the computer work in the labs, I'm not required to hold separate office hours. So it shouldn't be too painful.

Back to the training. This was another case of show up early to wait 45 minutes. Luckily, the whole cognitive science cohort was in the same training class. So I got to meet and get to know all 14 other first years. They are all cool people. The training was exauhsting but all relevant information. And our teacher was talented enough to make it feel like we were always doing something instead of being talked at. I found out that I am a kinesthetic learner, I like to learn by doing. I also gave a mini-presentation, inspired by Jason Evans. If I could upload a power point presentation I would. Let's just say it was the talk of the training. Everyone loved it, especially Jason's portfolio pictures. ;)

Thursday was our first day of class. We only had our stats class. Our professor decided to give us a quiz to see where we all stood. It was a twenty question quiz, and I think I may have answered 3 questions. It's possible I even got one answer right. It had a lot of calculus and symbols that I didn't know. Fortunately after conferencing my cohort, I am not the only one lacking in calculus knowledge. This is going to take a lot of work.

Friday I had lunch with Jocelyn, who was in Costa Mesa for a conference. All of you should schedule conferences for here. Thus ensued some shopping and eating and then airport locating. Thank you, Garmin.

In other news from the week, I did manage to get to IKEA. It only took about 20 minutes, because I refused to get on the highway. IKEA, by the way, is so much more overwhelming when one actually wants to purchase something. I also located Sam's Club yesterday, for the acquisition of huge bags of chocolate chips. I think I might need a lot of comfort food this year, if I'm going to be doing mathematics. Also for those who have been asking, there is a reason for the UCI mascot being an anteater. Apparently all UC schools (except one, I can't remember which) have a bear as their mascot. So the anteater is actually an ant bear. Another interesting fact the noise that an anteater makes is "zot", so that is what people do at sporting events. This ends my extra long post for the week!

ZOT! ZOT!