Day 3

So I completely failed at keeping this blog up to date, meaning that right now I'm writing about events that happened a week ago. Needless to say my memory became fuzzy about such events long ago, so the next 6 or so posts will be much more brief and have less details than the others. Anyway, here we go on to Tuesday of the first week:
That day was our first lab day, which meant that our schedule was divided into two segments separated by lunch. This also meant that there was 2 and a half hours of Computational Biophysics and 4 hours of Robotics. While I enjoy both of these classes greatly, that is a lot of hours of intense programming and information. I was pretty wiped by the end of the day. Thankfully I had tie-dying to look forward to in front of Castilian South after dinner. I didn't have a plain white t (or any music by them XD), so I ended up doing my white running shirt. It looked super awesome, but I had to wait until the next day to see how it would come out.
Wow, I really have no other recollection from that day.....

Day 2

The second day at COSMOS was the first day of classes. After getting ready in the water pressure lacking bathroom, I headed downstairs and met with my cluster. We walked to the DC where we ate another awesome meal and then headed to one of the science buildings.
Our first class was Biophysics, and we learned a little bit about what the class would be focusing on. Essentially we were going to learn about the physics and statistics involved in biology, using programs that we would learn to compose in C to aid us. Since I have interests in all of those regions I was pretty excited.
Next we went up a floor to a classroom to get the lowdown on our other class, Robotics. We were treated to an in depth, if lengthy, slide-show about the history of computers, and then we were introduced to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots that we would be working with. For those of you who don't know, not only am I a ridiculously big fan of LEGO, I also have worked with Mindstorms when I was younger. But one thing I had always wanted to do was program them without a GUI to help me, which is just what we were going to do.
The last individual class we had for the day was a science writing class. I am currently forgetting the names of all of my teachers, but I'll have their names and links to their sites tomorrow. Anyway, the writing class was really more like an introduction to coding html, which we are going to use to make a website in which we'll post our daily activities. If all goes according to plan, this very post along with the others I make to Blogger should end up there, and some of you may be reading it from my site right now. To those readers: it's a pretty nice looking site, am I right?
After class and dinner I rode with one of my roommates KC (not actually spelled like that) to the Rite Aid down the street to pick up a couple of toiletries we had forgot. After thoroughly indulging ourselves in the plethora of aromas offered by Axe, Old Spice, and other various companies. As you can imagine, it was fairly amazing.
That pretty much wrapped up my day. After a little TF2 I was quite ready to sleep.

Day 1

And so it began. Yesterday my parents dropped me off, I checked in, got moved in (with the help of my family), and then met up with the other 199 students. I got hooked up with my cluster and we all introduced ourselves and did "ice-breaking" games. It was pretty much standard procedure, and everyone seemed pretty nice. I also met our RAs, Tommy McCormack and Anda Fox. They were really awesome and seemed super cool.
The DC (dining commons) deserves a paragraph of its own. This place has at least 5 different counters at which different food is served every day, three times a day. And since we're part of the program we get to eat there for free! Everything that they serve there is really great, and almost everything has a vegetarian option. There is also a dessert bar, and.... wait for it.... an ICE CREAM MACHINE!!!! It's so awesome!
I met my roommates, who were all really nice. We got to talk a lot when we set up our laptops to use this super-fast internet. I'm talkin' 2mb/s down! (looking back at that in a few years will really antiquate this) And at this point I it's way to late to talk about today, so I guess I'll be updating things a day after they happen.
Anyways, that was yesterday, watch out for a post tomorrow!

Introduction

Hello everyone! If you're reading this before/while I'm at Davis, be sure to follow me. If you're reading this after that, make sure to read all of my (hopefully) exciting stories. I'm going to attempt to make a post every night to keep you all updated on what I'm doing while at COSMOS this summer. If you want, you can check out the UC Davis COSMOS program, learn about cluster that I'm in, and look at past courses in their archives.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy!