Thursday, July 5, 2012

The Complete College Experience

I woke up this morning feeling kind of sick. I'm not sure if it's allergies or a cold, but I woke up with a runny nose, headache, and yes, that's right, new bug bites. After dragging myself out of bed I headed to the quad to meet the Penn Team  and others for breakfast. At breakfast I enjoyed a Belgian waffle and a cup of orange juice. I saw that there was still plenty of time until class so I decided to use this to my advantage. I took my juice and apple with me back to my dorm and this time got ready more thoroughly. At 8:35 I walked out of Lippincott 108-b with my iPod blasting in my ears. I enjoyed people watching as I made my way down to the Rittenhouse laboratories. I was really excited for physics today because I knew we were going to be teleconferencing with a professor from Penn about the Higgs boson particle. At about 10:00 we started a teleconference with Professor Elliot Lipeles from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Lipeles was talking to us all the way from Geneva, Switzerland where he's been working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

Physics class progressed as it normally did, but instead of the usual two labs, we only did one. We also broke for lunch half an hour later than before. We were released from physics at about 2:30 and we all headed back to the quad. Early dismissals may be new for some of my classmates, but seeing as I've been in a college environment for three years now, it's old news. 

We got back to campus and went our separate ways. I made my way back to Lippincott 108-b to recover from the heat. The air conditioning felt nice but caused a series of sneezes for me. The ladies of the Penn Team met up at about 5:30 for dinner. We engaged in conversation over dinner then headed back to our dorms. While a few of the ladies went to the gym, the rest of us retreated to our dorms to do laundry and prepare for tomorrow.

Now comes the fun part.

After putting laundry in the wash, I decided I would utilize the fact that most of the girls were out and get my shower in early. After I was all showered, hair washed, and everything I gathered my stuff and headed to my room. As I went through my bag looking for my keys, I noticed that they weren't there. I searched the bathroom and my bag once again and was disappointed to learn that I'd be making a trip down to the front gate with wet hair and all. I didn't have my Penn card with me so I was worried that they wouldn't let me in. Luckily, I was just asked a few personal questions and given a spare key. I rushed to my room and retrieved my copy of the key.

Today was a fabulous, hot day, just like the others. Tomorrow in physics we will be taking a trip to a historic car museum to observe acceleration, gravity, and other forces. I'm also looking forward to the trip to New York City on Saturday. Despite the series of unfortunate events, today was quite enjoyable.

1 comment:

  1. Alysa,

    You may have been too close to it all to notice but my keen spotted it right away:

    Early in your blog you write about being a veteran collegian and were sued to the schedule vagaries of college life.

    Then later in the blog you write about walking out of your dorm room without your key--a rookie mistake if ever there was one.

    Do you see the irony?

    Of course, you won’t see me throwing this back in your face. It’s just you, me and the people in the 26 other countries who read your blogs--but we won’t tell anyone.

    ReplyDelete