Orientation began yesterday, and you know what that means — free food all week! And, since we’re all grad students and presumably therefore overage (mostly, but not quite true, I’m sure) — free alcohol. Lots of it. I’m beginning to think they don’t believe we can actually socialize effectively without it. Well, it is Caltech. Sigh.
I went to Convocation yesterday, which was about 2/3 full of undergrads and their parents. It was quite long, and included the several requisite slurs against MIT, but was mildly interesting sometimes aside from that. The rest of the week is filled with fun things in the evenings and boring but semi-required things during the days (e.g. TA training and learning about the Honor Code). Some people actually have placement exams today…I definitely don’t envy them. Good thing I’m not astronomy.
Oh, and I found out yesterday that out of 278 new grad students, 75 are women and 116 are international. I think nearly a quarter of the new women are in my department. The male:female new grad student ratio in GPS is 1:5 or something ridiculous like that. Weird, but I guess it was something like that in EAPS too.
