Highlights of the 2005 University of Michigan Orientation
Published 3 September 2005
Hi! You've stumbled upon a blog post by a guy named Ryan. I'm not that guy anymore, but I've left his posts around because cool URIs don't change and to remind me how much I've learned and grown over time.
Ryan was a well-meaning but naïve and priviledged person. His views don't necessarily represent the views of anyone.
We all love orientations right? Take an entire group of people that doesn't know each other, make them nervous for the upcoming semester, stress them out about lodgings and logistics, and then fill their heads with every bit of information they'll need to know for the next 700 days. Here's the bests and the worsts of my orientation at Rackham School of Graduate Studies and the School of Information.
- Days
- 3
- Hours
- 22
- Price of Gas
- $3.36/gallon
- Times I used my car
- 0
- Undergrads wearing too few clothes proportional to their BMI
- 3.21?ó104
- Most Prolific Litter
- Keg Cups, Red
- Nights when undergrads were not drunk and yelling at 2am
- none
- Random Livonia people encountered
- 3 Edit: 1 more encountered Saturday night
- Acronyms learned
- 42
- Names forgotten
- 200
- Free Pens
- 3
- Free meals
- 6
- Best Free meal
- Panera bagels, juice, coffees, fruit, pastries and more
- Coffees drank
- 3
- Cingular day minutes wasted arguing with Comcast
- 114
- Amount of money those vampires will get to suck out of my bleeding corpse for the rest of my life
- $0.00
- Best Overheard Conversation
We're looking for our beer pong table.
Somebody stole it already?
It was inside our house…
- Best T-Shirt
- "Consent is Sexy", SAPAC
- Faculty ABCD Award
- John King, for alerting me that the first event of the week was not actually at SI, but across campus, and then walking me there.
- People met
- 115
- Times I was asked where Alma was
- 115
- Minutes spent listening to descriptions of services only to be told that they were
all on-line.
- 360
- Times told I looked like Ben Affleck
- 8
- Times I was quickly reassured that was a compliment and not an insult
- 8
- Times Gigli and Daredevil were trashed
- 16
- Near-death experience
- Wandering into the restricted area of the Naval Architechure & Marine Engineering research areas, where they test boat models for the Coast Guard in fast-moving 14-feet deep water. Then told,
It's not that big of a deal, but if you fell in you would die.
- Wish-for-death experience
- Two hours into the Rackham information-you-already-know-and-could-be-covered-in-fifteen-minutes panel
- Fewest days after school officially starts before homework is assigned
- Negative six, SI 504