Home Can Be Anywhere

The proctors directing the first house game

Admittedly the first intro day at VSA felt a little tough, the cohort got split up into different floors and houses and I wasn't as happy as I could be. Fortunately, VSA does a good job at introducing everyone to new people almost every day and creating lovely bonds.

The first night consisted of a proctor group meeting, so I got to meet the girls in my proctor group. My proctor Sasha was really sweet with us and has been doing this for a while now. I'm in S-house aka the best house, and everything we do together is pretty exciting.

Monday morning began with having breakfast with my classmates and TA from Special Topics in Mathematics. My TA, Matthew Groves is currently a grad student at Vanderbilt and he was very easy and interesting to talk to. There are a total of 17 people in my class, which is the biggest it has been. We got to know each other at the table and turns out there are other two Californians in the class, which gave us something to talk about. As a class, we then had a quirky conversation about what would we name an element if we discovered one since someone doing research at Vanderbilt recently discovered two! How exciting is that, doesn't quite beat Berkelium though.

On Mondays and Fridays lunch
is on the second floor

The class itself yesterday was mostly getting to know each other. Getting to know people is probably my favorite part, especially when I find Hispanic people to practice my Spanish with. To my surprise, a guy in my class, Jon, is Spanish and Egyptian so I had some fun chatting with him and hearing his accent from Spain.

When we got to work I got to jog my memory with the puzzler. My teacher, Dawson Gray, a super cool guy, gives us math-y/logic puzzles every morning to start us up. They come in a variety of levels since we have both rising juniors and seniors and not everyone has taken Calculus. We mostly did a review of matrices but it was way more interactive than a typical class. Class also always feels so amazing when you’re around people who really want to be there.

Today, though, we got into a slightly more difficult puzzler than yesterday and we also went into more methods of solving matrices and a fun game about their applications. We basically played rock paper scissors in groups but it’s actually far more educational than that.

Mario Kart tournament set up

Another highlight of today was the activities sign up. I didn’t get to be with my friends Kiara and Juliana but I hung out with a bunch of new people at the Mario Kart Tournament, which I was awful at. Then, during free time we continued playing a number of reaction games; they were definitely fun times.

It’s been 2 whole days and it feels so long, yet I know it’s going to go by so fast and I don’t know how to feel about things ending.