T-Minus 3 days until the end of pre-term and your boy is exhausted. We've been taking two courses (Managing Groups and Teams & Ethics) for no credit, but they've both been assigning a lot of reading. Between that reading and all of the social pre-term activities, I've been getting little sleep at night and I've been dragging in a major way, but that'll exhaustion will soon be replaced by 'for credit' exhaustion when classes start next week...I can't wait. Fortunately, the Ethics class ended today, so all I've got left is one more session in the Managaing Groups and Teams one until the real deal courses start.
As for tonight, I'm about to take of soon to go to a SF Giants game with some of my classmates. I wish Barry Bonds had waited until tonight to hit home run #700, but it should still be cool to hang out with a bunch of my classmates, many of whom I haven't had a chance to interact with much. I've heard that a lot of people are planning on sticking around in SF after the game to hang out, but I've got to come directly back to Palo Alto because I recently remembered that we have an assignment based on the first 4 chapters of our Accounting textbook due on the first day of class and I still haven't finished doing the Acct'g prep that we were assigned over the summer. I'm a little behind, but at least i'm not the only one who is :-)
I just checked into this blog and realized that the entry that I spent 30 minutes on yesteday was somehow deleted from the system. And, even worse, I didn't have it saved anywhere, so I pretty much lost what I'd written. Basically, it was a summary of the first week of pre-term, including an overview of the 'Cardinal Cards' management simulation we did on Weds. and thurs. and the welcome presentation the GSB had for us on Friday. I'm salty as a mofo right now because I'd given pretty in-depth descriptions of all that stuff.
Anyways, I'll put down a few sentences about this past weekend's OA trip to Yosemite to go rockclimbing with some of my classmates. As a way for all of us to get outdoors and get to know each other, Stanford set up a series of Outdoor Adventure trips that varied from weekends of shooting, golf, and gambling to trips for folks to go surfing. The biggest of the trips was a whitewater rafting excursion that interested me, but one of the rules for going on that one was that you had to know how to swim and, as you know from my St Martin entries, I'm not exactly a fish when it comes to messing around in the water. As an alternative, I signed up to go on a rockclimbing trip to Yosemite National park. I'm not a huge fan of heights, but that was a fear that I was determined to conquer.
We left campus on Friday afternoon to start the drive up to the park and I was the driver for one of the 6 SUVs that took all of us to the location. The drive up gave me a chance to get to know 7 of my classmates and, because of traffc, it took us over 6 hours to get there. Once all of us arrived at the cmapground, we proceeded to hang out, talk, and drink together...and just when it was getting nice to schmooze with each other, The Man came and messed it all up. Some park police broke us up saying that we were making too much noise, which was far from cool. The next day, we all loaded up and went over to the climbing site where a set of trainers taught us all of the little things that we'd have to know about climbing, including how to put on the harness, belay and repel, and tie the knots that we'd need to secure ourselves to the ropes. I ended up climbing up two rocks to heights of about 70-80 feet, which may not sound like a lot, but climbing those things were not easy tasks. I never knew that I had so much strength in my fingers and that less than an inch of exposed rock was enough to stand on, but I know that all very well now. It was an exhausting day because of the heat and there were several times that I wanted to give in and just chill, but I knew I couldn't go out like that. That night, we cooked dinner at the camp site and did more meet, greeting, and bonding. Saturday was definitely one of the highlights of my time here at Stanford so far. On Sunday, we got up bright and early and hit the road toward campus.
I was dead tired and my back muscles and hands hurt like crazy when I got back to my room , but I couldn't help but smile because I'd 'conquered' my fear of that rock. I really like climbing and I need to try to find some indoor climbing spots around campus so I can get some practice in. You never know...your boy might just try to take down mt. Everest next ;-)
...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.