First early morning...

And I'm not sure how I feel about it. The past few days I've been able to sleep in because I didn't have any early morning orientations like my other roommates but today was my turn. I had to be at a Steinhardt M-PAP orientation at 9 am, which seemed hellishly early compared to my (so far) usual wakeup time of eleven or so. When I got there I saw that they'd provided Starbucks coffee and various pastries which I was so excited to see. They know us so well already! Us music and arts students can't survive before noon without coffee.

The orientation itself was really fun. I made a new friend, Sonja, when we were checking in and we ended up sitting together. She's a studio art major, and she's from New Jersey, I think. Poor thing had really bad allergies-- she said something about being allergic to her dorm room-- and kept having to get up and leave to go blow her nose. I felt bad for the guy sitting on the end of the row because he had to get up every time to let her out.

We heard from various Steinhardt staff members who had a lot of really helpful tips on surviving our first year, and we got to know our Orientation Leaders, or OL's, who were current students at Steinhardt. We played a "speed meeting" game where they numbered the rows and had the odd rows get up and move to the next odd row back and turn around to the even row behind them and introduce themselves. I met a lot of nice people, most of whom were Music Business majors (seems pretty popular).

After that they broke us up into our various majors so that we could meet everyone else and find out more about our programs. I met about one-third of the VP's, because a lot of people had their diagnostic hearings during the orientation time. Most of the VP's who I met were Classical emphases, but that's okay because we're spending the first two years mostly together; they don't split us up until junior year. had two OL's who were both VP majors: Sydney, a MT emphasis, and Will, a Classical emphasis. They answered a lot of our questions and gave us so much useful information about the program and what to expect from the coming years.  One interesting point they brought up was that as VP majors, we kind of have a built-in excuse to wear sweats and tank tops to class most days out of the week. I have an 8 am dance class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and with five minutes in between most of my classes I most likely won't have enough time to change into something else. So if anyone asks we can be like "well I had an 8 am dance class, I didn't have time to change."

Tomorrow night we have a meeting/mixer with our mentors, which I'm really looking forward to. I actually already met my mentor Taylor on Tuesday at my first orientation. The cast of Sweet Smell of Success performed a few numbers and she's in the show, which I didn't know. So I was just sitting in the house waiting for the presentation to start and then she came up to me and was like "Melissa?" and I looked up and recognized her from her Facebook profile. She's really sweet and friendly-- she dragged me up to the front of house and introduced me to some second- and third-year VP majors and some of my fellow freshman.