Garrett Goes Greek (Maybe, Potentially, Possibly)

Woohoo, a shiny new blog! This thing looks nice. Preemptive apology: there is nothing interesting here. Go about your day.

First off, my bad for not posting...y'know, last week. The past eight-or-so days have been very busy, I suspect to help with the transition into college life (i.e. not constantly thinking of home). There's a lot of individual stories I could write about the past week, but that involves a lot of remembering and I spent a good chunk of today reading about the principles of cyber security, so remembering kind of sucks right now.

Just got back from dinner, where I sat with a representative from Sigma Alpha Epsilon. His name is Dec, and he's probably the nicest upperclassman I've met thus far. Aeronautical engineer, wants to work SpaceX, likes to snowboard, dresses sharp. What's not to like? And he was very friendly and forthcoming, both we myself and the other dinner patrons.

I was on the fence about "Going Greek" before attending the meeting tonight and enjoying dinner with Dec, but now, I'm excited to try and win a bid. Is it win a bid? Get bid on? I dunno. I wanna join -- there.

SAE said they were all about making men into better men into gentlemen. Now, when I hear "gentleman," I think Zeke Linn. That kid knows style, and he's suave as heck. Bonus points to you, dude. So joining SAE is totally something I can see myself doing and enjoying being a part of. Rush Week is next week, so I guess the process really begins there.

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I came into this week thinking that EGR 115 (Intro to Computing for Engineers) would be my hardest class, as it is reportedly THE most dropped class on campus. Earlier today, I helped a sophomore do our first programming assignment (writing a program to find the surface area and volume of a sphere when the user types in the radius). This is the gist of the code:

% User entry
disp ('The raidus must be 0 < radius < 1.0e100');
radius = input('Enter the radius in meters: ');

% Calculations
volume = (4/3)*pi*radius^3;
surface_area = 4*pi*radius^2; 

% Display results
disp ('The Volume (in meters cubed) is ');
disp (volume);
disp ('The surface area (in meters squared) is ');
disp (surface_area);

To some, that may look complex. But the teacher gave us a finished program that calculated volume, so you really only had to transpose two lines of code and find the formula for surface area to finish it (all in all, adding three lines of code). So I'm thinking this class won't be the hardest as of now. Nah, I think that honor goes to Intro to Cyber Security.

Our first class was Monday. Our second was yesterday. Our third is tomorrow. We were assigned approximately forty pages of reading, due by tomorrow. Welcome to college, I suppose. I'm writing this blog rather than read the last six pages simply because I need a break from that dry book. (On a side note, we finish the book by December. It's pushing 900 pages).

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While I have this moment, I'm gonna apologize for the lack of zest/excitement/actual interesting content in this first post. It's late, I'm rushed, and I don't know quite what to say as of now. I'm thinking of stuff, though.

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To sum up this past week: Nick is so friendly he's going to die, Tyler is really into fraternities, and there are ducks EVERYWHERE in our dorm. Oh, and post-it notes. I still don't get why that is so funny to the other five. Something about bringing girls over, I think...

Assuming I don't post tomorrow, expect highlights from the week, weekend expectations, hopefully some pictures, and other personal junk. I'm tired, I have reading, I don't know what else to say, and I need to go buy a toga.

-Garrett