Settling in at Brown

The Brown Bear

We left the Biltmore for the last time around 9:10 AM for Brown. Check-in didn't start until 10 AM but we wanted to make sure that we'd be able to get there, check-in, find our dorms, and get situated without missing a beat. This turned out to be the best course of action as there weren't that many people there yet and getting our rooms and assignments was much easier than it wouldn't been an hour later. Even while waiting in the check-in line we put ourselves out there and talked to some people, making friends almost immediately. I had only been there for about 30 minutes and already it felt like a strong community, to this moment I still don't think that I've met anyone who's disrespectful in any shape or form.

All of us were placed within the Keeney Quadrangle, a newly renovated set of freshman dorms that were much bigger than we had all been expecting. Kevin, Arnold, and Jing were placed in Archibald Hall while I was placed in Everett and Brandon was placed in Everett. We aren't all in the same hall but it's really nice that we're all on the same block. An RA helps me locate my room, which is E368, and has the name of my roommate and myself on it with big cutouts of the number pi. I didn't really understand this at first but each different cluster (group of kids per a single Resident Advisor) has a certain door deck to help show which kids belong to a certain RA. My RA, Joe,  is a rising sophomore at Brown majoring in Astrophysics, which helped to explain why pi was what he decided to do for our door decks. 

The Quad inside the Keeney Quadrangle

Seafood & Pasta

We grabbed a quick lunch at a Greek place called Andrea's, which turned out to be kind of saddening as we all realized that this was the last good meal that we were going to have for awhile and as an entire cohort. We ordered Spanikopita for the appetizer as most people hadn't tried it before. It was great but we moved on to the entrees shortly in which I had a dish called Seafood & Pasta, which, in short, was a ton of different types of seafood ON a pile of Linguini INSIDE a kind of Seafood Broth. I couldn't finish it all and we couldn't take the leftovers because we didn't have any fridges so reluctantly I had to let it go.

Brandon, Me, Arnold, Jing, & Kevin in our Brown gear

Before we had lunch we picked up our Brown swag and now we decided that a picture with all our gear on was necessary. We walked back to the dorms quickly, snapped a couple pics, dropped off our stuff, and then quickly set out for the campus tour that started at 1 PM. We arrived a few minutes that but they hadn't really gone anywhere so we snuck into the side of the tour as quietly as possible. The tour didn't last that long, only about a half an hour, and only really covered the lower half of campus where most of the students were staying and the dining halls so we were left with a lot of time until 4 PM when the orientation was due to take place. We walked up to where we'd be taking our classes tomorrow and then walked all the way back to the dorms to say goodbye to Alana, who would be returning to the Hotel Providence and visiting us only a few times over the next couple weeks. I would just like to extend a special thanks for all you have done for us Alana and for all that you will continue doing over these next 3 weeks, we couldn't have done it without you!

My roommate's side of the dorm room

Time flew by quickly between goodbyes and the orientation. Arnold and I decided to start working on our room descriptions for Don and setting up our rooms. We weren't able to finish either as the Wi-Fi wasn't working correctly when we first arrived as well as the fact that my Ethernet cable got stuck in a faulty port and we still have yet to get it out. Thankfully we were finally able to set up the Wi-Fi and it is much faster than I was led to believe. Arnold, Brandon, and I met outside the Keeney Quadrangle at around 3:45 to start walking to the orientation. Jing and Kevin were supposed to be with us as well but Jing decided to go with her cluster and Kevin just went completely AWOL on us, only to be seen about 2 hours after that at dinner.

The line to get into the Orientation

The orientation took around an hour and was mainly stressing the fact of safety on campus. It's an open campus so they really want us to be as safe as possible so that we can avoid dangerous situations. It lasted about an hour and after we were told to meet with our RAs on the Main Green right out side of Salomon Hall, where the orientation was held. We played a name game to help learn everybody's name in the cluster and after about 45 minutes of constant memorization Joe thought that he had bored us enough and he took us to dinner. We went to the Sharpe Refactory, a newly opened dining hall on campus, which is one out of the two that are readily available to summer students. The choices were fairly similar but actually very good considering that they have to serve about 1,200 students. They represented all the different kinds of necessary food groups so I'm really confused as to why college food gets such a bad rep.

Here's Utku!

After dinner was the Ice Cream Social right behind the Sharpe Refactory, which actually had a much larger turnout then I would've expected, but then again, who doesn't love ice cream? The lines were super long so it took awhile to get the ice cream but I found Arnold, Brandon, and Jing, which was nice as we got to discuss how we each liked our different clusters. There were good and bad things but we all agreed that our cluster shouldn't represent our only group of friends at Brown as we'll get the chance to meet new people everyday. It was here that I also met my roommate, Utku, an international student from Turkey who came to take a Robotics course. His English is surprisingly good and he's very nice, despite the fact that he doesn't really talk much. He just got in this morning at around 1 AM so he went to bed about an hour and a half ago to try and reset his internal clock. I hope it works cause otherwise it's going to be really hard for him to adjust.

We had a brief meeting with our clusters at 9 PM about dorm rules and such, including a recap of the safety advice that we learned earlier. We hung out in one of or cluster member's dorms for a short while and then headed off to our own to finish settling in and try and get a good rest for tomorrow's classes. Fortunately my class goes from 12:45 - 3:35 so I won't have to wake up too early. Breakfast ends at 9 AM though so I think I'm probably going to head off to bed now. Jusqu'a a la prochaine fois!