...since I made a new entry. The past week and a half has been filled with a lot of activity and I never took the time to sit down and put a new entry into my weblog. Since one of my classmates commented to me that he's been trying to follow this joint but got stopped when i didn't have anything new, i knew that I had to make an addition before hitting the bed tonight.
Wow, so much stuff has gone on since I got here that I don't ven know where to begin...I guessit would be best to start off with Math Camp since that's the reason I came to school a week early. At first, I was a little worried about being at Math Camp because of the possibility of there being a stigma attached to doing it, but I can look back and give major thanks to the folks in charge of it for giving me the invitation (I guess that's what calculus grades of B, B-, C+, and C in consecutive college semesters and a really lopsided GMAT score will get you :-)). There were 66 of us in the program and I was fortunate enough to meet just about everyone there...I can't think of anyone who didn't fall in the cool cat category and we all went out quite a bit so I know that these folks know how to have fun. A special shout out goes to my Math Camp study group of Ellen H., Steph B, Emelie E., and Chris T because they were great people to work with and were so on point that I knew we'd be capable of knocking out any problem set that came our way. In terms of the classroom stuff, we reviewed Beginner's and Multivariable Calculus, Stats, Excel, and some other topics that are esacping my mind right now with prof. Paul Pfleiderer, who was one of the best professors that I have had in all of my years of school...this dude was The Truth. The Calculus review was good for me because it helped me wipe away the cobwebs that had developed in the 7 years since I took my last Calc. class at Princeton and the Stats stuff was NECESSARY because I've never had a stats class in my life. Once school starts, people may look at me sideways because I went to Math Camp, but I can smile knowing that spending that early week here helped me be ready for all of the stuff that I'll encounter here as we begin our Core classes at the end of September.
The rest of my classmates who hadn't gotten here early for Math Camp or the International Camp arrived on Thursday and Friday and everyone that I met was friendlier than i would have expected. I knew that Stanford was known for filling its class with personable folks, but I have only met a couple of people who I didn't immediately think I could be a fast friend with. These people are truly good people. They come from a bunch of different races, nationalities, educational and professional backgrounds and the one thing that they have in common is that they all are ready to build strong relationships with their classmates. This school is an exercise in diversity at its finest. I tend to be pretty shy around people I don't know, but that's not even a big deal here because everybody is quick to extend their hand and introduce themselves to each new face that they see. The biggest problem that i'm having is that I've met so many people over the past few days that I'm going to have big problems remembering the names of all of these folks. Thank goodness I got a chance to know all of those folks at math Camp because they'll be ready to reacquaint me with the other folks whose names I will be sure to forget over and over.
Finally, I've got to throw in a comment about my trip to LA this weekend. As a way to relax after Math Camp, I drove down to LA to visit my man Travis who is there clerking for a federal judge. I made my first mistake by hanging out until 2am with a bunch of classmates who had a party that moved from room-to-room through my residential center and then getting up at 5am to hit the road and avoid traffic. By the time I got to LA at 11am, I was almost dead and was basically a zombie all night long. then on Sunday, I'd recovered, but I couldn't really go out for real, for real because I had to get up at the crack of dawn this morning to drive back down here to school. It was good to avoid the traffic with those departure times, but it put a cramp on how much fun I could have.
After having spent time in the Bay area and in LA over the past week and a half, I've got some observations about life in Cali:
1. It gets hot as mugg out in this daggone state. It was blazing in Palo Alto a few days this week and then it went over 100 degrees while i was in LA. I'm not good with the heat, so your boy was sweating like a marathon runner. I might have to order one of those corny fan-hats to keep myself cool around herebecause I would hate to have gotten accepted here and then die of a heat stroke before I get to graduation.
2. It is going to take me a while to get used to West Coast music. They play a different type of hip-hop out here than I'm used to and it's killing me trying to get into it. There are a few certifiable bangers like Federation and E-40's "Hyphy", Snoop's "Drop it like it's hot", and Game's "Westside story", but it seems that everything else is pretty budget. I don't think it's too hard to be a successful West Coast rapper though. All you've got to do is claim allegiance to a certain part of the state, talk about how gangsta you are, and mix in some profanity and gun talk for good measure. I might just mess around and put out an album during my spare time while I'm in school...watch out for my album "Stompin' suckas at Stanford" when it hits the record stores next summer.
3. SF clubs are gangsta! Last thursday night, some of my classmates and I hit a club in SF that was supposed to be an upscale hip hop joint and it ended up being a "3G" spot...gangsta, gully, and grimy. There were people smoking joints out in the open, folks dressed up like they were just kickin' it on the corner, people that had me wondering if they had gang affiliation, and no metal detectors in sight. There were two fights on the dancefloor while I was there (both fights involved women fighting other women) and, in both cases, people just kept on dancing as if nothing had happened once security pulled the fighters away. Even funnier, some girl's hair got burnt on the dancefloor and smelled like burnt plastic...her weave must have been extra cheap. I think I'm too old to kick it at clubs in SF.
That's about it for now. Time for me to catch some Z's. I'll try to be more active in putting up new posts after this one.
Posted by marquis930 at September 7, 2004 09:40 AM