week 1: TEXAS

Okay, I'm happier than I was when I wrote my last "post" (if you can even call it that), so now I can expound upon what has happened here.

Here's a summary of the past week:

Characters:
Becky: roommate
Daniel: friend from home
Gracie: friend of Daniel's that I met in Columbia last summer.

I got here last Saturday night around 8 moved my crap in and unpacked. My dorm room has so much storage space, it's ridiculous. Too bad I only brought a suitcase of stuff with me. I think Becky and I wandered around that night to find food since nothing on campus is open.

Sunday: I'm pretty sure I did nothing. I think I finished reading Kite Runner though.

Monday: opening session. Met with my professor to figure out what we're doing.
Tuesday: library to attempt to get semi-relevant books on subject matter. I ran into Daniel in Blocker when headed to the computer lab. A semi-impressive feat considering the size of this campus and the number of people here.

Tuesday through Friday is basically a blur of me trying to figure out what in the world we're supposed to be doing for research. I know we'll be building robots, most likely using FPGAs (Field-programmable gate arrays). The other REU guy working with me seems to be really excited about this. Clearly, he has never had a robot as a class project before...

Thursday night I played racquetball with Daniel and his (now-former) roommate Robert. I had never played racquetball before. It was fun. I'm still sore. The rec center here is ginormous.

Up until Thursday night I was generally in a very pessimistic mood about this whole summer research thing. Mostly because I was bored out of my mind. Every night generally consisted of me reading books or something similar to what I was doing during the day. Not cool. I'm still not really optimistic about the research part of the summer, but perhaps I will survive the summer anyway.

Saturday, our REU group went to dinner and then to see the Omen at the theatre. I definitely saw previews for that movie and thought, "I'll never see that." It wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but I'd never choose to see it if the group hadn't picked it.

Yesterday, I went to church with Daniel and was afterwards introduced to Fritella's (Italian food) and 42 (game with dominos). All in all quite fun. Last night, I went to Houston to go swing dancing with Gracie and another guys from the A&M swing dance club. I'm pretty sure I really like swing dancing now. It's a lot o' fun.

It was kind of interesting at the group dinner on Saturday night someone asked (when no profs were present) how many people were actually working 40 hours a week. Not very many people seemed to be. It seems that people's work loads are entirely dependent on the prof they are working with. And that probably stems from how much those professors work themselves. Interesting thing to keep in mind when looking at advisors for grad school...

Anyhow, that was my week. Now it's back to the grind of figuring out what I'm supposed to be doing here.

*edit*
Just had to mention that I find it amusing that the majority of the people I know who dance fall into one of three categories: a) physics major, b) engineering major, or c) drummer. (or some combination of those). I don't think that's just the case with the people I know either.
Most amusing t-shirts seen last night while dancing: 1 NASA shirt, 1 Matlab/Simulink shirt.

One last thing. Yesterday, I was disappointed to find out that we Sooners are not as original as I thought: http://bigevent.tamu.edu/. I don't know if A&M created the BIG event, but now I know we didn't...