Thursday, July 20, 2017

Back!

Yesterday, I returned to the program! I was really happy to check back in at the Hank Ingram house in the morning, and I could tell all of my friends here at VSA felt the same way. Keshvi, a girl from my class, saw me at the office before I went over to breakfast and made a big deal out of seeing me again, like I was famous. It was pretty funny, and made me feel welcomed back to the VSA.

After dropping all of my stuff off in my room and going over to breakfast, I was able to say hello to everyone again. It was great. Carmen, another girl from my class and one of my closest friends at VSA, was able to help me out a little at trying to understand all that I had missed before class started. 

It turns out that although I missed a few major topics, I'm not too far behind, which was great. I didn't want to suffer through being way far behind everyone else. 
A much better view than the hospital's

That night was admissions night. Admissions night is an event where you get to learn a lot more about college admissions, especially (duh) about Vanderbilt's admissions. We were split up into our classes first, and an admissions officer took each of our groups into separate rooms to give us some info. Our admissions officer was named Kim, and she was very helpful in answering all of the questions we had. It was pretty informative, and I was able to see how an admissions officer thinks. When we had finished in our smaller groups, we headed into the rotunda room (inside the dome on top of the Peabody building) and listened to the head of undergraduate admissions, John, give a short slide show about Vanderbilt. The entire thing was pretty similar to the tour, but on a smaller scale. 

We were also able to meet the admissions officer from our area, provided they were there. My counselor was there, but I wasn't able to talk to him because there was a bit of a crowd where he was. I talked to another guy, but I can't remember his name right now. He was super helpful though, and I asked him a few questions about writing college essays.

When we had finished with admissions night, we headed back to our dorms for our proctor group meeting, which happens every night. There, we give a high/low for our day usually, but because it was Jack's birthday, we celebrated with singing him happy birthday and cupcakes. After that, we had free time until bed.
Admissions night!

The next morning in class, we worked in groups and problem set nine. My group worked on three-pile perfect shuffles (so splitting the deck into three even piles and shuffling them that way). Problem set nine was mostly on repeating binary decimals, and figuring out how they relate to card shuffling. It was pretty fun.

In the afternoon, we worked on some methods for testing if a number is prime. It's super complex, and our class is still trying to figure it out. We haven't given up though! 

After dinner we had another SOFT night, and I went to the book store with a few others (the Barnes and Noble at Vanderbilt) to pick up some souvenirs for family members. It wasn't too exciting, but it's always nice to walk around the campus here.

Being back is great. I'm glad I'm back and able to finish out the program. Unfortunately, we're already more than halfway through! Only a week (about) to go.

2 comments:

  1. Are you sure you're not famous? Because from what I saw, EVERYONE who saw you knew you when you arrived back.

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  2. So glad you are back learning and having fun, Evan!

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