Yesterday was the mandatory Orientation for grad school. Surprise surprise, it sucked.
    It was just pointless. I didn’t gain anything out of it. Maybe if I hadn’t gone to an open house before applying or maybe if I hadn’t gone to “new students day” after being admitted it would have been useful, but there wasn’t anything yesterday that I hadn’t already known.
    The School of Communication’s graduate program at American University has three sections. The first is Speech (this is for like speech writing, PR, or running political campaigns). The second is Journalism and the third is Film.
    Out of like 100 people, like 50 were Speech. The rest was split between Journalism and Film. It was frustrating ‘cause ALL the young (my age) hot girls were in Speech.
    You know what sucked worse? I was the fattest person out of everyone there. Ok let me be a little more specific.  I was the ONLY fat person there! Everyone was stick thin. I’ve never seen so many anorexic looking girls in one place since I met all the women from Miss USA contest last spring.
    So that sucked.

    I still don’t get why the thing was mandatory. They talked about stuff like “how to get finical aid” and things like that. HELLO, everyone there went received an undgraduate degree and has paid for this year. Of course we know how to get financial aid.
    If that wasn’t childish enough, we also had to do this lame icebreaker. We stood up and told everyone our name, where we were from, and what program we were in. Afterwards we were giving a green sheet of paper with a list of 20 descriptions. They were things like “can speak Chinese” “has lived on 6 continents” “was an undgrad at AU” …stupid stuff.
   It was a scavenger hunt and we were told the first person done wins a prize.
   Being me, I yelled out “Free Tuition?” everyone laughed. I was then told “no something form the book store.” Of course, I could have kicked myself for making the joke before reading over the list. It seems one of the things on the scavenger hunt was to find someone who can tell an original joke in under 30 seconds.
    It’s not that I don’t like being social. I LOVE being social. …but I like it to be on my own terms. So I was a tad overwhelmed when all 100 or so people came up to me to have me sign their scavenger hunt.
    Everyone also wanted to hear a new joke so with the first person that asked I respond with “I looooooove brocili but I HATE puppies.” I then kept saying that to everyone who wanted to hear a joke. I know it doesn’t sound like a joke, but trying saying it to a random person and I guarantee they’ll laugh because its so random.
   When the scavenger hunt was over the people in charge of orientation went down the list seeing who people found for each thing. When they got to “Who can tell a joke in under 30 seconds” everyone yelled out “SCOTT!” and the guy in charge said “Scott where are you? Let’s hear a joke.”
    I sat there quietly and everyone turned and looked at me. I still sat there. Then I looked around confused and said “Who the hell is Scott?” …everyone laughed and then I pointed at the guy in charge and said “BOOM! That was a joke in like 2 seconds!” everyone laughed again.
     One of the interesting things about the whole day was that one of my old professors from Towson is now doing the same program that I am! It was really cool to talk to him. I had him four years ago when I was sill trying to figure out my strengths and weaknesses. So it was neat to know he vividly remembers me and was talking about several of my projects I did after being in his class that won awards at film festivals.
   Overall it was an interesting day. If we had gotten more time to just network and be social that would have been cooler. I almost feel the whole day should have been one big long party instead of getting a tour of campus or stupid junk like that.