Today was the first day of class! I slept quite soundly last night and didn't need many covers as my room maintained a perfectly warm climate. At 7:30 AM I woke up and tried to quickly get shower and get dressed for breakfast. By 8:00 AM I was outside of my dorm with Mariko, Ivette, Clara, Alysa, and some new friends we've made. We headed to McClellan Hall for breakfast, but it was so packed that it took us almost 40 minutes to get our food! From this morning, I learned that I need to get there right when the building opens, which is at 7:30 AM, in order to have the maximum amount of time possible before class starts.
Immediately after I picked up my breakfast, I met up with everyone else from my class in the quad. Seeing as it was the first day and we students were all a bit confused, our Residential Counslers guided us to our respective classrooms. During the beginning of class our professor, Prof. Lamas, introduced himself, an additional teacher, Michael, and three T.As. In pairs of two, we students broke off into the lobby and did a short icebreaker, in which we were supposed to come up with something the two of us had in common that no one else in our class shared. This was a fun start to the new course and the rest of the class was spent in a discussion-based manner on various political and social topics.
At 12 PM we departed for our two hour lunch break at Houston Market. During that time I ate with Ivette, Cameron, and two other new people we met in class. The food was great and we even had time to go back to our dorms and chill before class started up again.
When 2:00 PM came around, Ivette and I rushed into the building for our afternoon class. We had a little bit of trouble finding the building because it was different from the one we walked to this morning. For this class we go to two different buildings for the morning and afternoon sections from Monday-Thursday, and then on Friday we remain in the same building all day. During the afternoon class we had a long discussion about human equality and global unification, and even explored the ideas of a few different philosophers. I thoroughly enjoyed Prof. Lamas's teaching style as he really encouraged all of us to speak our minds, and he posed really interesting and stimulating questions. By around 4:00 PM, he realized that many of us were very tired so we got out of class forty minutes earlier than usual!
The evening time consisted of a walking tour around the UPenn campus, but we only went as far as our boundaries allowed. There were a lot of trees in this area and I loved it! I had the chance to get to know so many more people from all over the world today. Everyone is so diverse and interesting, I am extremely excited to get to know as many members of this program as I can! I just know that the next four weeks are going to be super fun and stimulating, both intellectually and socially, and I can't wait for the next day to begin!
No comments:
Post a Comment