Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Calm Day In a Roaring City

Every single day so far I've been I've met a variety of different people. Today in class, we had a new student from Southern California, his name was Rowland. He's actually the first person I've met that is from California so I was really excited about that! Aside from him, I m a lot of other students from Portugal, Turkey, Spain, and Korea. I might have not been as social the past two days, but at least I can proudly say that I've had a nice experience meeting a ton of different people.

This morning I planned to run with Aurea and exercise before the start of class, but when I woke up I was so tired that I just decided to go over my reading instead to make sure I'm ready for our discussion seminar. I still met up with her for breakfast though, and we just both walked together to class after we were done eating. However, we ran into a little bit of trouble. Not literally, so I guess a better word for this would be "inconvenience."

Like I've said in my previous blog post, the path to our first session in Schermerhorn is through an extension hallway on the sixth floor. Unlike yesterday, we did not have problems finding the room since we remembered how to get there, but the door to the extension hallway was locked! Keep in mind that it was five minutes before class started and I am not someone who shows up late anywhere.
I started panicking and I asked the janitor how I can get to my classroom, hoping she would open the door for me and allow me to enter. Unfortunately, she instead told us to go on the 9th floor and take the exclusive elevator to the extension hallway. It sounded quite bizarre to go from the 6th floor, to the 9th, then take an elevator back to the 6th, but that was the only way to get to class. With no other choice, Aurea and I rushed ourselves towards the elevator planning to do exactly what the janitor had advised us. By now, we only had 3 or 4 minutes left until class started.

I looked at the numbering on the side of the elevator to make sure it was going up first, and to my surprise my heart just dropped. The elevator first went down...
It went to the 4th floor first, i believe, and it actually turned out to be for our professor! I noticed him pressing the 6th floor button so I quickly said, "Hi Professor, we were just on the 6th floor but the extension hall was closed, we must all go through the 9th floor to access our class." By the time I was done explaining, the door to the 6th floor opened and he was already making his way out. I didn't know whether to follow him back onto the 6th floor or not, due to the fact that we were just so sure the door was locked shut! So Aurea and I decided to just proceed to the 9th floor like we were told and felt very accomplished after reaching our room within a minute. Although we had felt like we had arrived sooner than everyone else, we were surprised to open the door and see the professor already in the room! I was jaw-dropped. He asked us, "Why didn't you guys just follow me?" To be honest, I no longer knew what to say...

Regardless, we did not waste time and hurried right to work. We first began reviewing common grammatical errors, and later initiated our discussions about yesterday's readings. I tried to participate as much as I could and contribute, but I also wanted to make sure I heard what others had to say as well. Overall, we had a nice discussion and it seemed like everyone understood the article and the writer's motive. Once everyone had a chance to talk, professor Porwancher called time and told us to back our stuff and get ready to visit the Lehman library for a meeting with one of the librarians. There, the librarian taught us how to use access some of the resources provided to us for our research. I took took notes rapidly to make sure I would not forget and I'm quite proud that I did because they turned out pretty useful!

After the tutorial sessions, Aurea, Demmie, Rowland, Adrianne, Tomi, Joyce, and I went for lunch. There, one of the RA's invited me to a Maroon 5 concert! I am so excited about it because Maroon 5 is one of my favorite bands of all time! I actually wanted to go to their concert before coming to Columbia but it was way too expensive, and way too far. Good thing I didn't go because this one is FREE! Friday will be a very fun day, I'm so excited!

After lunch, Aurea and I worked a little bit on our blog and headed back to the library for our second session. There we did some more research trying to finally decide what we would like to write about for our research paper. I have to have my mind set by tomorrow, but I'm still not 100% sure what topic is best. Once I chose, I will post it here on my blog and share it with readers, but for now I'm not quite sure yet.
The session was two hours, like usual, and we met with Mrs.L to talk about our day. It was a very casual conversation that ended shortly so Lucas would not miss his trip to Central Park. As soon as it finished, we just walked into Jay Hall to eat dinner and then go back to our rooms to finish our school work.  I will be doing laundry later tonight, but I definitely don't have anything planned out aside from deciding on the topic of my research paper. None of my roommates are home right now, but it's only the third day we're here so hopefully I'll start going out more as of tomorrow. Until then, I have lots of work to do because I'm planning on sleeping early to catch up on my sleep! So time to officially get to work and read "The Art of Presidential Leadership: George Washington and the Jay Treaty."

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