So we're 2 days into our math workshop and it's going good. It's a PhD student who is teaching it. She makes it pretty interesting and is a good teacher. I remember now I've never liked intervals and I STILL don't like intervals. I struggle with them (I get the overall concept), but I don't like them! I remember doing them back in 4th grade and making teeth on the little arrow to help with the concept of "greater than" and "less than." You put teeth on the inside of the arrow like a shark mouth opening and the one that "ate" the other number was bigger. Yes, I sometimes still have to refer back to it. LoL That and the bigger side (the opening) was the "greater" number and the pointy small side was the "smaller" number. All sorts of tricks to help me try and remember!
Anyway, it's going good. We're starting limits and derivatives in the next 2 days. It's kind of hard to concentrate in class and those seats we sit in our kind of weird. They're attached and swivel out to one side so you can get in and out, but I never quite sit in a position I really want to. Plus, you're pretty crammed in. It is kind of nice to get into the groove of going back, but it also feels like a false start. I'm trying to treat the class as if it's a real class and not an optional thing. I definitely am ready to start classes and get to know the professors though.
The neat thing (this is for all those animal lovers out there) is the student who is teaching us the calc workshop brings her dog Mattie (female dog) with her. It's a medium size dog, tan, and one of those "scruffy" looking dogs. The dog is really easy going and just sleeps during our entire class. She likes people too. Well...Allison, our instructor, got her as a rescue dog from Hurricane Katrina. There's a local animal shelter/group who went down to New Orleans to help and they brought back 7 dogs and 9 cats. Mattie when brought back was 16 pounds (she's now 32lbs and healthy), had a heart worm, and sores all over her legs. She shouldn't have been a "normal" candidate to be rescued, but they did and now Allison has her and they're best friends and she brings the dog with her everywhere.
Yesterday after the math workshop was computer orientation day. I was the 3rd group and 4 hours between the math workshop and my orientation time so I came back to the apartment (Jane had the first group that started at 1). I called the financial aid office to figure out why my financial aid was missing $87. It turns out it's missing because of transaction fees and some other things for the financial aid. Fantastic. I get money taken out because of fees to get financial aid to pay my fees.
After that I went back to campus for the computer orientation. It was just a basic "here's our username and your password." They also gave us our code to use when we want access into Bren after hours (we got our fingerprint scanned today, which is used to get into the building with the code). They were very strict about our password to log onto the computers, though! They're preset passwords and we don't get to change them and if they find out we ever give our password to someone else, we can get our privileges revoked forever. Other than that, they were really laid back. We can eat in the computer labs, hang out whenever, etc, etc. We also found out we have our @umail.ucsb.edu e-mail addresses from the campus, but we also get a @bren.ucsb.edu e-mail address too. After we graduate, apparently they'll forward all our e-mails to the @bren address to another e-mail address of our choosing. I think it's lifelong.
Today was just math workshop and getting our photo taken and fingerprint scanned. Pretty relaxed, though it did take about 2 hours to get the fingerprint and photo taken. The photo is put up on a password access only website so the professors and us can look at them to learn faces and names. I also found out that our class has 90 students in it. I guess they add 10 students everywhere or something. They probably won't exceed 100, though. Simply because they don't have a room large enough to accommodate more than 100 and then the class is too large to be intimate enough.
Tomorrow is math workshop, Bren 101 (informational, logistics, student handbook session), and the optional tour of the building.
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