Orientation

Orientation was a lot slower than I thought it'd be. I spent most of it with my friend, Erin, who also came from BCC. It started out okay even though I had to wait for Erin because not only was she running late but she also didn't know where we had to go, yet somehow we managed to get her checked in on time. The talks were not really that interesting because I'd already heard most of it before but what was slightly cool was that the officer from UMPD was giving out laundry bags fro people who had questions at the end. Unfortunately, I couldn't think of a good questions to ask until an hour after it was over so I didn't get one. The next part was the tour which was more tedious than informative because everytime we stopped, we were in the open so they pretty much gave the sun permission to cook us alive throughout the tour. The only redeeming part of the tour was that they said something along the lines of somewhere in the tenth floor of the library, we could go for help for finding interships or something along those lines. We ate food afterwards in the Franklin Dinning Commons, and I've actually only ever eaten in the Berkshire Dinning Commons so that was pretty good. Finally (after 35 minutes after it started because the bio group was so big it got split into two sections), it was time for the moment that I was waiting for the most, signing up for classes. They had a small sticky note with the classes they believed we should take and mine had Genetics, Physics II, and Calculus for Life Sicences. I looked at it and thought okay that's not bad and started attempting to sign up with the help of an advisor. This is where most of my hopes were flushed down the drain. First we started with Genetics since it was at the top of the list, the advisor taught me how to look for a class and enroll so we got that out of the way prettty easy. Next we tried enrolling me into the Genetics lab, but when we tried enrolling me it gave us an error saying that it was full (luckily everyone got this error so it was overriden). That marked the first of my torubles when signing up for classes. After that we tried Calculus and this was also full, but the funny thing is that now literally a day later all the sections have at least 3 open spaces. Instead, I ended up taking res econ which is a stats class. We then tried getting me into Physics II, and when we looked it up there was only one section and it was open, however, it was during the same days and in the exact same time slot as Genetics so I was given a choice on which one I wanted to take and I ended up choosing Genetics. Since I couldn't get into 2 of the 3 classes they recommended I tried to get some of my bio electives out of the way. With my luck though, all the classes I had an eye on for sounding interesting like, Histology, Physiology, Cellular and Molecular biology, etc. were either full or deemed too high level. I had to settle for either Ecology or a class on Evolution and I chose Evolution. Finally because I didn't want to only have 12 credits despite that still being full-time, I decided to take Intro to Italian Culture. That sums up my Umass Orientation Day