First day of class

Today was my first day of classes at UIUC. The first one was at 11 AM, but I had to get up at the normal time anyway because I had to go to the bookstore to buy some three-ring binders for the textbooks that apparently come in loose-leaf (stack of unbound pages) format. There were no sufficiently large binders, so I split each of my two physical textbooks into two volumes.

I had some extra time after the bookstore, so I went ahead and watched the chemistry lab safety video and completed the quiz.

With my newly bound book, I went to the main quad for the general chemistry lecture. Much of the time was taken by an introduction to the online course administration system, which I had already looked around. The professor then proceeded to review very basic concepts, presumably to jog our memory from previous chemistry classes. A worksheet related to the discussion section (which meets tomorrow) was already made available in the online system, so I later completed it just in case.

Right after chemistry was calculus. The course intro was nice and brief; the professor directed us to the course site for all information. He then proceeded to present the basic concepts we need to do calculus. Mostly, he reviewed vector operations. Judging by the titles of the upcoming chapters, this class should ramp up fairly soon.

Later in the day, I rode the bus over to my last class of the day, the chemistry lab, where it turned out I didn't need to have already handled the safety quizzes. The TA went over the lab policies and the safety features in the room. Next week, we'll have an actual lab to perform.

The first day was quite easy to manage. Tomorrow contains four classes instead of just three, and starts earlier.