School Days

I'm sure you're all waiting with breathless anticipation to hear about my first days at school, so here it goes...

Friday I was just happy because I wasn't going to work. I wasn't sure about traffic patterns on the 91 freeway, so I gave myself 2 hours to get there. it took less than an hour. i was happy. this gave me plenty of time to pay for parking (only $4, everything is cheaper at the CSUs) and get the book I needed. After paying $2 over the list price for my book ($48 for a softcover book!!! it was much more palatable paying for used novels), I was good and ready to explore and try to forget how much money I just paid. I didn't get too far before I found a "Daily Titan" and decided to sit down and read. It was very strange. They were still in summer/weekly mode. And they didn't really know if they should report the news or publish very un-amusing supposedly humorous stories about starting school, or un-hilarious guides on how to get your roomate to move out. There was an ad for some bar in costa mesa that has 145 beers on tap or something. I definitely would like to see that place, so the daily titan wasn't a complete waste.
At this point I could have started reading my $48 book, but I decided instead to fill in the dates on my barbie pocket planner after unsucessfully looking for a better planner for the last week. This left most of my attention free to people watch. And the same thing happened to me that happened after revisiting Berkeley after a long absence. The people weren't necessarily hot, but they were young, and plentiful, and that made them hot. Also, there were copious amounts of hot 18 yr old boys who were too pretty to go to a good school. yea inland!

Library 200: Information and Society: can you possibly thing of a more generic title. Class was actually the easiest one I'd been to in years. The professor actually told us his advice was to relax through the semester. I chuckled, but he was serious. yea for laid-back soft spoken librarians.

After a lecture from a librarian who wasn't the professor he gave us a worksheet to do, but the wireless connection wasn't working right and he sent us home early 1:45ish rather than 3. This worksheet is about web searching. we actually have to use search engines, write down our searches and results using advanced and normal modes, as if you've never used a search engine before. We were all sitting there waiting for class to get hard, but it never did.

Saturday and sunday was Library 202: information retrieval. This prof. worried me a bit because she sent a rather angry email to everyone because a lot of people had emailed her to say they couldn't buy the book. But in real life she is very cool. And gave really good lectures. the people in my class worry me a bit, because we had a 5 minute discussion on what sunday at midnight meant. Honestly, she said it plenty of times, very clearly, but people just kept asking follow up questions. Maybe they'll be weeded out at the end of the intro classes and I won't have to deal with them later.

It's really a strange mix of people in my classes, they're each about 40 people, almost half of whom already have 1 masters. there's even a lady who has a phd in biology, and after her kids were born, decided it wasn't for her. About half of the people are 10 yrs or more older than me. Almost everyone is doing the program part time.

I'll find out soon enough how tough the program is. so far there seem to be an awful lot of little assignments, like weekly 2 page summaries of articles. This was the sort of thing I was told you didn't do in grad school. But I'll gladly do short assignments constantly in return for never having to write a thesis.

On Saturday and Sunday Fullerton was practically deserted. The bookstore was open, but nothing else in the student union plaza there. it was very strange. it makes it really hard to buy a cup of coffee that way. They say it's because it's a commuter school, and no one lives around there, but if more things were open, maybe more people would come.

Another strange thing about fullerton is that it has an information desk, tourist brochures and one of those phone things that only calls the sponsors listed above on a lightup board.
The one cool thing is they don't charge you tax at the little restaruants if you show your student id. It's my goal to accumulate not paying $10 worth of tax to make it worth the cost of buying my id.

I'm really bored of my story now, so i'll end it without re-reading and cutting out the boring parts. oh well. just because I post doesn't mean you have to read.