Bring Your Parents to Work Day

Last night was the night that we had to bring our parents into work and have Don talk at them like he had to us back in March. Good times. Only this time it was for about 2 hours rather than 5. We met up at Pinole Middle School at 5:45 PM to get down to business. It started with Madeleine Kronenberg giving a few words about how excited she and the rest of the school board was for us, which was a bit of a reassurance and inspiration to go out and do the best we can out back east. She then proceeded to tell us that she would try to come out to at least one of the departures, but no promises. Don and she both got a big laugh out of that, so that's always a good sign, right? Right.

Listening to the chaperones speak. :)

Don then gave us a quick little run-down of why we were there, what we we going to do, and then turned the chaperones on us to let them speak. I think all of the chaperones did a very good job in selling the fact that they were trustworthy to all of our parents, which is awesome considering that this program has an obvious and heavy reliance in being able to trust the people we have been left to.

The Vandy Cohort, Parents, and Edward

Then we had to break off and talk about where we were going, what we were going to be doing, and the whole nine. According to Edward Hernandez (one of last year's Vandies), Vanderbilt is different because we have a lot of structure in our program, which my dad described as being similar to boot camp or prison. Then, we found out we would be leaving for Nashville at about 10:30 AM. Our whole group practically screamed in relief. We get to sleep in, praise! Evan did make it out the luckiest in the cohort, as well. Because he's the only boy, he gets his own hotel room. Oh well, that just means he doesn't get to paint nails and tell secrets with us at 2 AM. (Just kidding.)

When moving on to what we were going to visit back there, we knew we couldn't visit everything, but we have a very good list of things that we're going to do. Mostly eating good food and checking out a lot of the sites in and around the general vicinity of the universities we're going to visit.

After we handled that business, Don called us back over to give our parents a run-down on what to pack and what he had to lend us for packing and going back east. I managed to snag the big purple luggage bag, much to my friend Robson's dismay. Great times.

Vanderbilt is so close and I can't wait.