New Student Orientation

I've already been at BYU for a week, so I wasn't sure how fun or useful the New Student Orientation would be. The first day, after everyone moved in, each hall area had a carnival and dance party. There were a lot of games to play, a lot of food to eat, and too many people to meet! It was all pretty fun though! Then for the real start of orientation we were put into pretty random groups of people and forced to be friends with them because we had to spend all day with them. Whatever, my group was pretty fun and I already knew a few people in it from Late Summer Honors. On the first day of New Student Orientation we played games with our group to get to know each other and then we walked around campus and saw a lot of stuff. The library tour was when it actually started being a fun orientation because the tour guide we had was very enthusiastic about everything. Later we had a presentation about the honor code which was actually really, really funny! I think everyone now has the angels singing "That's against the honor code! That's against the honor code! That's against the honor coooooooooode!" stuck in their heads now. All that was fun, but there's still more fun coming up! After the honor code presentation we all went to the football stadium for a pep rally type thing. First we made a Y shape on the bleachers and then we did cool stuff like the wave and a weird swishy arm thing which looked really really weird. Well anyways here are some pictures of that thanks to the BYU Facebook page!

In this picture believe it or not, there are still people coming up to be seated in their spots! I was seated kind of in the very middle of the bottom part of the Y. Then finally, after a longggg time waiting, we got everyone up on the bleachers and into the Y shape!

We also have a time lapse video of the formation of the Y and the wave and it's all pretty cool!

Then after all the fun with making the Y we had a pep rally where we were introduced to all the freshman sports players. We saw the cheer team, some of the football players, some of the basketball players, some women's soccer players, volleyball players, and we also saw the marching band! Then we ended the whole thing with an awesome fireworks show! There's a video of that too!

That was pretty awesome. And that was just the first day of orientation!

The next day for New Student Orientation we met up with our groups again and then we continued on touring the campus. After that they had meetings for the major you were interested in, and at the engineering meeting all the different types of engineering tried convincing me they were the best. They all shoved papers at me and told me a bunch of information that I don't even remember now. Then there was an information fair where we got a ton of free stuff from all the different companies on campus trying to get us to buy their stuff. There was also a service fair where a bunch of different service groups were trying to get you to serve for them. A lot of the service opportunities looked really great, but I probably won't have the time to do most of them, and I'll just have to pick one or two to do. After that there was a banquet for women interested in engineering and that was pretty fun because I got to meet a lot of other girls who are also interested in engineering. My friend Mary from my Late Summer Honors class was there and she's a lot of fun!

After all this stuff was over, we had our choice of activity to pick. We could go hike the Y, go on a scavenger hunt, play giant twister, see the movie The Color of Paradise, go to the art museum, go to the dinosaur museum, or go to the planetarium. Mary and I decided at the banquet to go see the movie because it counts as one of the Honors program Great Works experiences. We decided to see if anyone else wanted to go with us, so we walked over the the building in Heritage Halls where Travis, Nick, and Austin were staying. First we went to Travis's apartment because he texted us and told us he was there. When we got there Travis was not there, but two of his roommates were. They were really funny and totally trying to hit on me and Mary. Well anyways, we then left to go to Austin's apartment to see if he was there. We knocked on the door and waited a while, but nobody answered. Then we went a few doors down to Nick's apartment, and right as we knock on the door Mary gets a text from Nick saying "I'm making brownies and my friend thinks she gets some but she actually doesn't! Ha!" So he couldn't come to the movie with us until his brownies were out of the oven. Then we hear a door down the hall open and close and we look over and see Austin sitting there, locked out of his apartment. He said he had been in the shower and was putting on clothes to answer the door, then he went outside to see who it was, but forgot his key and the door closed behind him. Mary and I felt bad for being the cause of him being locked out of his room, but it was also really funny. He had to run outside barefoot to try to find his roommate who had a key. While he was getting back into his apartment we found Travis and Nick's brownies had finished baking, so then we all walked to the movie together. The movie was actually a really well-made movie! It had a lot of symbolism and deeper meaning, and I really wish I could speak Farsi so that I didn't have to rely on the subtitles because I feel like some of the dialogue was slightly different in translation than it would be. We had a group discussion of the movie afterwards and it was really interesting seeing everyone's input on the movie. After that we went to the Friday Night Extravaganza and learned a bunch of new dances, then we got to eat ice cream! The ice cream flavor that the BYU creamery made for our class was called Seriously Chocolate. It was pretty much just chocolate ice cream with Oreo pieces in it. After all that fun we all went over to Austin's apartment to watch a movie, but then we realized that we wouldn't be able to finish it in time for the curfew of being in an apartment of someone of the opposite gender, so we just hung out and talked instead.

Tonight there is another dance party! I think that will be my 5th dance party since getting to BYU 9 days ago. Even when there hasn't been a dance party there have been fun activities every night! I think all the fun activities will slow down a bit once classes start on monday, but I think it will still be a lot of fun!