You know that Boston University students are a little weird when you find one describing to two small Asian boys how unprotected sex feels infinitely better than that with a condom.

Things actually went pretty well considering that I’m probably going to never see most of the people again. It’s something that I found hard to accept in Stuyvesant until I realized that I knew plenty of people by face but not name or action, and I had never seen our valedictorian before. I had to go through realizations like this for every school change. They have all been marked by a noticeable increase in population: 7 kids a grade to 50 to 800 to 3000. And let’s not forget the college population of all the neighboring campuses, boosting that 3000 quite a bit.

Perhaps other people realized this as well, because everyone was extremely social. Not just “say hi to your roommate” social, but “say hi to the person sitting next to you” social, and even “say hi to the person sitting two seats away from you after a minute of silence” social. Except for alone time here and there once a planned activity was over, we were kept in groups according to what school we were in (Arts & Sciences, Engineering, Fine Arts, Management, etc.) so there was at least some regularity in who we were seeing every day. In addition to those cool people, I actually saw and hung out with people that I knew. There was a multi-activity excursion for people who arrived a day early (like myself), and I found myself sitting only a few seats and a row away from Courtney! as well as more seats away from Shelly and Dimitri (sp?). Very hawt coincidences.

The actual orientation was from Thursday to Friday, but since I wasn’t keen on waking up at 3 in order to get there on time Thursday, I opted to move in a day early. Out of 600-700 kids at orientation, around 200 usually arrive early. We were roomed up with the person next to us in line, and I got put on the second floor of Rich Hall, which wasn’t all that great to be honest. No AC, a curtain and a pole for a closet, bugs in the shower, etc. In its defense, all the rooms already had MicroFridges for us to keep stuff in, and unlike every other room I heard about, ours was actually cool at night. It was even a little cold on Thursday morning because it rained.

The first day was rather nonchalant except for meeting those three familiar faces. The second day had plenty of things lined up, most of which weren’t exactly interesting. There were a whole lot of talks from the faculty and the student advisors, which had a habit of putting me to sleep as the day went on. I eventually pulled through, and was rewarded at the end of the day with a “free” shirt (we had to pay for Orientation, after all), kareoke, a comedy show, music bingo, and Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero. Unfortunately the wireless DDR pads were very unresponsive, and Shelly and I were craptacular at Guitar Hero, but it was still a nice way to end the day.

The primary goals of orientation are to have us take our writing assessment and to have us register for our fall classes. The writing assessment was 50 minutes long, and damn it was a boring 50 minutes. We either got a page from Toqueville’s Democracy in America or Machiavelli’s The Prince. I unfortunately got Toqueville. I didn’t know shit about politics, much less the history of it, but I do know how to attack a person’s writing style and integrity. I think I did a pretty damn good job, but I only got a 3 out of 4 or 5. Not quite enough for me to skip a writing class.

Every BU student at orientation clocked in a lot of supervised hours planning and registering for their classes. First we had two 3-hour sessions with our student advisor, where they went over the required courses, how we might want to go about them, and how the registration process worked. Once we had planned a schedule, we were taken to our temporary faculty advisor to have our course list evaluated and improved. Mine was a nice Asian compsci professor who was brimming with excitement about his subject (which is a good thing!). He probably thought more highly of me than I deserve, considering I just barely got through System Level/Graphics and slept through AP Compsci (but still got a 5 on the AB version!), but he did recommend a good teacher, which I took note of when we were shuffled onto the next stage of the process.

Even though we had planned our schedules with our student advisors, we now had another chance to do so, this time with our faculty advisor’s suggestions in mind. There were no real changes in mind, just in the type of programming language (using C++ instead of Java), so it wasn’t as stressful for me as it was for the people whose faculty advisor completely reworked their schedule.

Once we got these new schedules approved, we were then directed to the final stage, where they sat us down in front of a computer with an access code to unlock registration for us. It wasn’t a random lottery like it was in Stuyvesant; we simply punched in what class and section, and then that was that, we were a part of the class. We were required to put down alternate classes in case one was full by the time we got to the computer, but thankfully I just managed to squeeze into the compsci class.

After that…we were pretty much done. The best speeches had already been made, and the only reason I didn’t fall asleep (I hope) during the closing ceremonies was because there was an awesome piece of chocolate on every seat! I wasn’t really in the mood, but I stole some for Shelly. After that, we went our separate ways and I linked up with my family. We set up a Bank of America banking/checking account, and I finally got a credit card! It’s a joint account, so the bill gets sent to my parents. Which, you know, is good, so that I don’t have to worry as much about spending (yea, like I can really spend that much when I can’t help but research every alternative). But it also means I’ll have to stick to free porn.