Well, it's more like a half-week. Classes start on Wednesday, which means that there are two days of the week where there is absolutely nothing for me to do. Well, there are things to do, certainly, because Rush is this week, but I've decided that I'm too tired to even go to a single frat event. Yes, the free lobster and steak dinner is nice, but I just don't want to talk to people right now. I want to stay in MacGregor House and do random, brainless shit in the entry lounge. I suppose this is my way of savoring the free time. I'm sure a lot of people are going to frat activities, but I would not know because I am not there.

When people see that I blog over here, as I do spend a lot of my time in the entry lounge, and I do my work in the entry lounge, they ask about whether or not I blog for admissions. I talk about my aspirations to become aforementioned blogger, and they inform me of how difficult it is to land that position. I've heard. I'm trying to up my game here and come up with creative titles and creative content that is not just lazy dumping of things I did in my blog now. I like writing, but I never have anything to write about fiction-wise, so let's write some exciting non-fiction, shall we? Well, I'm still working on titling things. Hopefully, I'll have higher quality blogs in the future and my writing will improve as the blog keeps going.

So before I get started about classes, I want to talk about what I did before classes start. Well, technically the four days after orientation ends and before classes begin. You know how, in the mornings your brain gets a little foggy? There is this wave of tiredness and sleepiness that just consumes all your faculties. I felt that for a very long time on Sunday and Monday (On Saturday, I had gone out to meet some friends from back home who are also in Boston now). I suppose I was just exceedingly tired from all the REX events and the endless chores that comes with having a new place to live. Either way, those two days I could really just feel my brain rot from the inside. I just sat around, watched TV, tried to work and failed, and other unproductive, brainless activities. I guess I was recuperating? I mean, it's definitely not good to get caught up in toxic productivity.

On the morning of Wednesday, I didn't want to get out of bed. I forgot that I had set an alarm for weekdays at 8 (it is now set to 8:30), and I decided to commit to waking up instead of falling asleep again, because my first class is at 11 and I could use that time in the morning to start reading syllabi and putting all my assignments onto my Notion so I won't forget when something is due. I did that in the morning, and I felt nice and productive. Well, I would have felt more productive if it wasn't so damn hot these days. It's September, and the temperature is still in the upper 80's, reaching 90? I like working in the mornings because of how nice the weather is, but not these kinds of mornings.

The class at 11 isn't even a class that I'm actually taking. There is a credit limit for freshman, and I really wasn't about to take 3 math classes and no GIRs (General Institute Requirement). It's kind of scary when your first class in college is a class that you're auditing. Well, it's kind of scary in general. It really felt like the first day of high school or something, and it didn't help that everyone here is also kind of short. Thankfully the professor isn't scary (I might have started curling up into a ball and crying if the professor was scary) and I also met someone I knew who was actually taking the class. Well, he's supposedly taking 84 units this semester which is way more than the prescribed 54. He told me he was either going to drop or audit the classes. I wish him well in this school year because that is still a lot of classes. He's the academic type and he said sometime in the past that he wasn't planning on joining any clubs, so I think he'll manage.

Anyways, here are my first impressions of the classes I'll be taking this semester! (in the order that I went to the class)

Day 1:

Class 1: 18.705 Commutative Algebra with Maulik.

The content was not as difficult as I feared it would be. At least, I understood the first lecture perfectly fine, though the first lecture was focused mainly on review. Still, that's a good sign because that means that I know all the background that I need to know for the class! I was attempting to self-study this class in the two weeks before I came here, so I suppose I will not have too much trouble at the beginning. It's a small class of probably not more than 20 people. Professor Maulik is a good professor. He speaks in a very engaging tone and I felt that I understood the concepts very well from his explanations. I had struggled previously with the universal property, and I think I understand it better after he went over it briefly. I am truly optimistic that I will be able to follow the entire class and do decently, especially given the nature of this professor.
As a side note, the classroom was cold. I was wearing T-shirt and shorts because it's absolutely boiling outside. It's an hour and a half class and I think I started feeling the cold around halfway through. That last 45 minutes was too long because of the cold.
As for workload, well I haven't had the time to start the first pset. It is Sunday morning as of writing this. Oopsie.

Class 2: 18.701 Algebra 1 with Yun

Well, 5 minutes in, I pulled out my phone and started playing Honkai Impact. I plan on skipping lecture on Friday since it's recorded. (Update: I did, and I watched the lecture online. I did not miss that much) That's the context that you should view my following comments.
It's in a big lecture hall, and there are maybe 70 people in the room. I'm sure a good third of the people are freshman. I'm pretty sure that lecture hall was chock full of Math Olympiad kids and adjacent. I don't really have much to talk about. When you've wanted to learn higher math as much as I have, you'll have attempted to watch so many intro to group theory videos, and you'll be very familiar with the kinds of examples they pull out in the first lecture. It's a pretty standard class. The pset doesn't seem impossible, though I have spent a significant amount of time on it (compared to my other classes. I really have not spent that much time in general on my homework and that should really change).

Class 3: 21M.011 Intro to Western Music with Neff

It's one of those classes that's pretty adamant that you don't use electronic devices, which is unfortunate because I wanted to take notes for this class on an iPad. On the first lecture, we listened to some plainchants from the medieval ages and we had a discussion where people volunteered adjectives to describe the pieces. I really had no idea what to think about them. I was also very sleepy for this class. We talked about some terminology to describe the music and that was really it. It doesn't seem like a hard class (yay!) and I think it will be mostly graded on participation (yay!). Music classes are generally fun and chill, so I guess it's good that I have a chill class?

Class 4: 18.100B Real Analysis with Melrose

I had my trepidations at first, but Melrose is a great lecturer, just a little curt over text. My one gripe with this class is that Melrose asks us to read the textbook before coming to class, where he will cover the more important bits and answer questions. Reading a math textbook is hard. There's something called mathematical maturity, and that comes from reading math textbooks, at least from what I've heard from more mathematically mature people. I suppose it's a good thing that we're gaining mathematical maturity like this, but man the Rudin is a really dense textbook, and he just skips so many steps. It's okay, though, because math is a trial by fire.
I haven't started the pset for this class (though I did the reading), so we'll see how I survive.

Class 5: 8.01 Physics I with Dourmashkin

The class setup is a bit strange. It's a room full of round tables and the instructor desk is in the middle, somewhat close to the front. There are whiteboards on the walls surrounding the room and numerous projectors such that it is nearly impossible to avoid seeing the screen. The professor is a very friendly guy, and there are a lot of TAs for the class, most of them being undergrads. We spent the first half or so talking about the normal first day of class things - how homework works, office hours, other resources, etc. Then, we got into the content, and boy was that something else.
Out of all the lectures I've been to so far, I struggled the most in this one. I would like to point out that this is an introductory physics class that all undergrads must take or test out of (and the test is much more difficult than the class). Meanwhile, 18.705 is graduate level. I thought that class was pleasant. I was frantically writing in this class. I'm still not entirely sure what I wrote down. The professor defined the variables so quickly. It was like he was talking in 2x speed. To be fair, it's partially my fault that I wasn't following a hundred percent because I caught myself thinking "I really need to take notes for this class on an iPad" half the time. The other half, I was completely overwhelmed.
At the end of the class, we had to work on a problem as a group. A groupmate just started writing on the board while I was still processing what was going on in the lecture. I just tried to do it on my own, and realized that it wasn't any kind of special thing, just a distance and rates problem.
One thing that I noticed as the professor went through the syllabus was that the tables were like Connections categories (for lack of a better analogy). I was sitting at a table that seemed exclusively female Chinese. The table next to us were male, etc. etc. I'm sure it's some neuroscience/sociology of how people gravitate towards others that look like them and feel safer with those people because of evolution or something.

And that's my first week of classes. It feels so long. I have so much pset I have to do. I should write more but also I have no time. I should get better at saying no to things I don't want to do and saying yes to things that I do. Catch me next week to see how many psets I did complete in the time given!