A little bit more than 24 hours after landing in Philadelphia's International Airport, here I am in my appartment using wireless Internet to feed the blog. Of course things have been rushing in the last few hours. I guess it feels weird, but I feel too tired to meditate about that.
This is the story of the freshly arrived new students - which includes both the exchange and freshman (first year) students.
Between yesterday and now all have probably : gotten their home keys, fetched their PennCard (Student ID card), formated their computer to make it accessible to the university's wireless Internet, opened a banking account, bought a phone and gotten a little and strange jet lagged sleep (considering the exchange students cases).The phone point most particularly surprised me, with a prepaid card one actually has to pay to receive text messages and phone calls...
Tomorrow the New Student Orientation (NSO) week will begin. Many social events aiming at integrating us to our new environment and prepare us to life on campus are going to take place. This evening already, "small group dinners" took place, i.e. we had at campus local restaurants in an informal way with groups of exchange student an d a Penn full time student.
We were all prepared to campus life by reading reports written by previous exchange student, but once on the spot everything goes so fast.. Suddenly many details you wouldn't have bothered with become crucial : exact location and correct entrance of a building, which room to go in the building... Everything happens in a flood of more urgent formalities to coordinate with, it is tempting not to deal with less compulsory projects such as tutoring French courses at Penn to earn a little money. It might not be the priority to deal with at the moment, but later would mean to late. Happily, things will soon settle down for the best.
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