nawl

I have been fed, oriented, and vaccinated. I have a lamp, an office, a computer, an ID card, a cell phone, fresh shiny notebooks, and a sore arm from the tetanus vaccine.

The weather has shifted from perfect blue skies (apparently typical weather in early September--everyone comments "just like 9-11") to a rainy humid mess, so that the campus is filled with rain-drenched Abercrombie-model undergrads. (As far as I can tell, they all look the same: blond, tanned athlete types in teeny shorts with "Princeton" written in a little arch across the behind. Last night at the dining hall it was established that even the older grad students can't quite get over the preppiness. Fortunately most of the grad students look like normal people, that is, somewhere between scrunched-up nerd and former crew team captain.)

Thursday was the first day of classes. I showed up to 1.3. We have six requirements (two each in hardware systems, software systems, and theory) which can be satisfied either by taking courses or an exam in January. Contrast this with math or physics, where coursework is irrelevant and students spend their entire first year cramming for an oral exam. My grand plan, one day into the semester, is to take advanced algorithms (grad class, required for theory kids), programming languages and computer vision (undergrad classes to satisfy software systems), cryptography (undergrad class half-populated by grad students, just for fun), and review for the architecture exam, which despite replacing a fourth-year class here looks to be entirely material from 61c.

The academic calendar here is amazing. Fall instruction starts on September 15 and ends on December 16, and includes a week-long break in early November *in addition to* the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. Exams are in late January after a three-week break and a two-week "reading period", though all of mine will be take-home or projects.

Also, looking at the schedule of CS courses, the only class on Friday is a graduate seminar in scalable systems, no class is offered before 10 am, and no upper-division class is offered before 11 am.

My experiences here thus far have confirmed my suspicions that the biggest differences between private school and public school are not so much in the quality of professors or students (there are smart people everywhere, if you know where to look, and small classes everywhere, if you know where to look), but what can crudely be termed "customer service". A few examples illustrate:

me, at the student health center: "Can I have an appointment?"
appointment lady: "When can you come in? Today? Tomorrow?"
me: *gasp*
(At the graduate school orientation the health center staff very proudly told us about their 14-bed hospital and 24-hour emergency services, all free.)

me, in the office of the CS computing staff: "I'm trying to do a network install of Debian, but DHCP isn't working."
computing staff people, who recognized me from earlier service requests: *type,type* "Well, I don't know what the problem is, but if you just want to install Linux, we have burned CDs of Ubuntu, Knoppix, Fedora..."
me: *gasp*

And then there is life, which is randomly filled with strange new moments which I and most of the other students are thus far not too stressed-out to ignore.

There is, of course, much more of the big stone castle architecture on campus, including this big tower/arch with gargoyles.

There are also more modern buildings, such as the white space-alien arches and fountain which are on my path from dorm to CS building. Note the janitor fishing debris out of the fountain. On the next day a woman was swimming a naked baby in the water.

The engineering library is also new and shiny and full of shiny asymmetries. They took us on a tour after the engineering orientation.

In the evening, the setting sun lights up Cleveland Tower for a few minutes, and the lights come on at the OGC.

And, of course, there are meals in our Hogwarts dining hall, though I've only managed to eat dinner twice this week because of all the free food. Great features of the dining hall include the portraits of all the graduate school deans in their doctoral robes lining the walls, the built-in organ (above where this picture was taken), and the high table at the far end of the room, in addition to the high arched wooden ceilings and the excessive stained glass.

Dinners stretch into hours this early in the semester because people stay around to chat with new arrivals at their table.

On Tuesday I went hustle dancing in Pennsylvania, and on Wednesday I went rock climbing at a gym. I think I'm at the point where if I'm going to continue climbing I need to put out a couple hundred dollars and actually buy equipment.

Coming home from rock climbing in the evening, I heard shouts across the courtyard and wandered into the coffee house to find a rowdy game of Mafia going on. In the next room I found Sharon poring over a copy of Sipser and ended up giving an improptu two-hour class on computability and complexity (because if you want to understand what nondeterminism means in that definition of NP it makes more sense to explain it in terms of finite state automata, and then of course you get into regular languages and for completeness you should mention context-free grammars and pushdown automata, and questions about showing a language is *not* in something bring up the pumping lemmas because those are easy, and so on and so forth).