Hello again everybody! I returned from my orientation late last night, and overall, it was a positive (albeit extremely tiring) experience!
On Sunday, my mom, sister, and I drove out to Chicago. We stopped at the Chicory Cafe in South Bend, Indiana for lunch. It was pretty solid food, but I don't think I'd need to make a tradition out of going there on the way to and from school. I had no idea South Bend was so urban, also! Seeing it from the highway, I always figured it was just the gaggle of Holy Cross colleges surrounded by cornfields, so I was pleasantly surprised. It was a pretty town. We arrived at our hotel around 5:00, so after checking in our first priority was getting dinner. The last time I was in Chicago with my mom, I really wanted to go to Shake Shack. When I did my National Youth Leadership Foundation program at Fordham University last summer, I went to the one in Times Square and fell in love with it! So, we went to Shake Shack and it was everything I'd dreamed it would be, and then some! When I've moved in, I'll have to make the trek there from time to time! After eating, we went to a Neiman Marcus Last Call store, and I got a great handbag for an incredible price! My sister got hereself a Michael Kors bag and some Versace sunglasses. She loves shopping brands, so she was ecstatic to find them all at fairly reasonable prices. After that, we went back to our hotel and tucked in early.
The next morning, we went to Wildberry for breakfast. I had cinnamon roll pancakes, and they were INCREDIBLE! Wildberry specializes in pancakes, although the rest of their menu is pretty fantastic. After that, I was sent on the L towards DePaul! I was over an hour early for check in, so I tried to take care of some business beforehand. I didn't get everything off my list, but I'd managed to get my ID photo taken! After a while, I went to the check in point and got in line to get my room. I met some fun people in line, and they were quite nice! Everybody was pretty nervous about the whole thing and the process of meeting new people and the like, but excited as well. I checked in, put my stuff in my temporary dorm, met my roommate, then went to the Student Union to start off the day.
On the first day, the first thing I went to was a free-stuff fair sponsored by the various services DePaul has to offer like their Career Center, Housing Services, Rec Center, and Athletics Department. I picked up a ridiculous amount of free stuff! I got two water bottles, a tee shirt, tons of candy, two bags, a collapsible hamper, soooo many pens, rubber bracelets galore, and more! After the fair, all the students and parents went into this large conference room where there was an introductory speech from the dean of students and were then assigned into groups. The groups were divided by major, so all but 5 people from my 28-person group were going into Digital Cinema. We did some icebreaker activities in our groups, then went on a tour of the Lincoln Park campus. After the tour, we had a talk from the Campus Safety department, then had dinner. The dinner was an awful imitation of Chinese food, worse than airplane food! So, I didn't eat too much. After that, we went to the Theater School and watched a performance about different issues like diversity, drinking, sexual/relationship violence, etc. It was pretty funny, and handled the issues well. Afterwards there was a talkback session with our groups about the issues from the show. After that, we went to the rec center. First, we had an hour-long "competition" between all of the groups, and mine won which was pretty great! I got another free tee shirt from that! Then, we were let loose in the rec for an hour. Finally, we went back to the dorms and they had some activities lined up on all the floors. I played cards for awhile with a group of people from my floor who were pretty nice and welcomed me over, to play with them. Our group later went to a different floor where some of the orientation leaders were doing "spirit animal readings" which was something that couldn't be described, but had to be experienced! All through the building, you could hear the singing (well, screaming) of the people on the Karaoke floor. At midnight, we all had to head back to dorm rooms, although it didn't matter if it was our own. So, my group went back ton one person's dorm and played Apples to Apples until about 2:30 in the morning!
The next morning, I had a protein bar in my room while I got ready because I 1.) wanted to sleep in and 2.) remembered the quality of the previous night's dinner and wasn't about to try their breakfast. We went back to the Student Union, got into our groups again, and did some more fun games. My group started off by playing some rock, paper, scissors based games, but then we decided to do trivia. That's when I pulled out the big guns... Not many people who didn't go to grade school with me know it, but I'm a BEAST at trivia. I was on a junior Academic Challenge team in 5th and 6th grade where I carried the team, I consistently kick ass on trivia games, and for a long time, I held the record in the European History category on the app QuizUp. So, people were incredibly surprised when I, the unassuming girl that people assumed had about average, maybe above-average intelligence knew the answer to all these obscure questions without hesitation! I got a round of applause, and if that's the most impressive thing I do in college I'm okay with that! After playing games, we all got L tickets and took the L down to DePaul's Loop campus.
At the Loop, we went to a brief talk from the Career Center at DePaul, then we went to register for our classes. I'm really excited for my schedule! Three of my four classes are related to my degree! I am taking a class called "The Foundations of Production," a screenwriting class, a class about ethics in computer games and cinema (it counts as a gen ed course!!!!), and then my "immersion week" course that continues for 7 of the 10 weeks in the quarter. My classes are from Monday to Thursday, and all go from 11:00-4:30, so I'm super excited! I'm also really happy about my AP credits- I don't have to take a single science class or history class again! After scheduling everything, we had some boxed lunches (which was the only half-decent meal they provided) then went on a brief tour of the Loop campus. We then went to Millennium Park and took some group photos by The Bean, then had a brief Q&A session with our Orientation Leaders before heading back on the L to Lincoln Park to head home.
Overall, I had an amazing time at Orientation and I'm glad it was so fun! I'm really optimistic about my first quarter at DePaul, and yay for having about 5 weeks until I move in!
