The Difficulties of Finding An Empty Shower

I woke up this morning with one goal–find an empty bathroom and take a shower. The floors and dorms are arranged such that one bathroom with one shower services about eight girls. However, we’re free to wander throughout the connected dorms in search of a free bathroom. After walking through 4 dorms, I found a bathroom that no one had claimed yet and quickly took a shower. When I got back to my room, I grabbed my backpack and headed down to meet with the rest of the Penn Team for breakfast.

The guys shunned our company, but we girls, along with a few new friends, all went to breakfast together at McClelland Hall. Unfortunately, there was only one cash register for the whole café, so the line inched along. We were barely able to get breakfast before it was time to meet up in the quad, and some of the other four-weekers didn’t get a chance to get any food at all.

Our RCs walked us to class for the first time so that we didn’t get lost on Penn’s huge campus. Our class, located in the David Rittenhouse Lab, has 36 students from all over the world. I’m really excited to be working alongside all of these incredible people! Our professor, Bill Berner, is just awesome. In class we’ll cover the basic areas of high school physics, but focus on the more modern aspects of physics because we don’t get a chance to learn about them in high school.

Our mornings will be taken up by lectures and our afternoons will be spent doing labs. This morning, we reviewed kinematics, the study of motion. Our professor focused on relationship between the actual situation and the math and physics explaining what happens, which was great because that’s how our high school physics teacher liked to teach. In the afternoon, we studied optics, light, and lenses. This was completely new material, but it seemed fairly straightforward and my group easily completed our labs.

Tonight our RCs took us on a tour of the Home Area, the area of Philadelphia that we’re allowed to wander in. We located the movie theatre, the fitness center, and other important buildings. After the tour we were left to our own devices, until quad time at 11 PM. We all went to Ivette’s room to blog, and met her very accommodating roommate who doesn’t mind us congregating in her room every night. I should go check in right now, but I will keep everyone posted about class and weekly activities.