Andres stays at Reed

No, I’m not committed to Reed. Don’t trust the title. I just went to Reed Admit Day (RAD) and stayed the night. So. Transition!

I started the day eating hotel food from the Quality Inn we were staying at. Then we drove back to campus and signed ourselves in. Some faculty welcomed us and said some words. What I mostly got out of it was that there isn’t much political diversity, there is a “stress culture,” and students sometimes deal with stress using fire. That last point is a good thing, in my opinion. Anyways, dad and I used this time to come up with a game plan: I would do a math session, the reactor tour, lunch, the canyon tour, the library archives tour, and the physics information session, in that order.

At first everything went according to plan. At the math session, some profs talked about the math department. It’s pretty small, but I think that’s just because it’s a small school. There’s 6 math classes, 2 computer science classes, and a few stats classes. Calc AP would let me skip intro calculus, which I think would be nice. Their thesis project is to write a paper which explains a math topic in a simple way. So, like, the math IA. Dual math-physics majoring is pretty easy. All in all, it’s something I think I’d like.

The reactor tour was really cool. Not quite amazing, but still really cool. Reed has the only nuclear reactor managed by undergraduates in the world. You can start applying as a freshman, and they certify 15 students a year. After that, you are certified to operate any nuclear reactor in the world. It’s pretty rad. Also people use it for experiments and things, so that’s cool too. Mostly I just want to work there.

Then we had lunch. I had a club sandwich with Giancarlo (as I now know it is spelled) and his brother, who is a Reed alumnus. Giancarlo’s brother and I discussed Reed, and how it was better academically than most other colleges, and that it was really easy to get into a graduate program from Reed. An advantage of Reed over, say, Yale or Johns Hopkins is that Reed is completely focused on undergraduates, as are all of its resources.

Then, Giancarlo’s brother revealed that he had a class schedule dniaunsaainfine me use it to find a math class to break into. I chose Discrete Structures, which sounded promising, and Giancarlo and I went to the library to attend. Unfortunately, the class did not exist, or else I misread something. Either way, Giancarlo and I got tired of waiting, and we went into a neighboring office to ask for help. The teacher their was very nice, and he looked up a class for us to go to. We sat in on a statistics class, in which students use a free open source program called R to analyze data, while understanding what’s happening. It was a pretty standard lecture, with a bit at the end about the Challenger disaster. I think it was nice.

When we left the library, I went back to “base” to attend “living at Reed and in Portland.” Previously, I had planned to do the library archives tour at this time. I was late for both, and so went on a tour of campus instead. At first I thought I wouldn’t really get much out of it; I had basically memorized the campus already when I had spent two hours walking around it on Sunday. Actually, it was pretty cool, a kind of general information tour. I learned that Reed has a paid outreach program where you go teach science at schools around the area. I learned that the rond is a sanctuary for salmon, so it’s all sorts of important for agencies and things. I learned that the biggest dorms are in the Old Dorm Block. I confirmed that Reed has an archery class, and learned that it has a fencing class as well. It was cool.

Then there was the physics information session. Not much happened. Their physics department has laser cutters, 3D printers, a telescope on the roof, and 7 full-time faculty. Good for them. Also, of the 20 Reedies in the physics department, two went to CERN last summer. And, of course, there’s the nuclear reactor.

That was the end of RAD. I hugged my dad, said goodbye to Giancarlo, and got ready for the overnight stay. My host was named Sasha, and they also hosted a guy named William. The three of us had dinner at the cafeteria; I had a burger, two cupcakes, and a Gatorade. We discussed life at Reed, and cool things like the Odyssey program (a big camping trip), Weapons of Mass Distraction (fire dancers) and queer life (which is very nice at Reed). Then we went to Sasha’s room at the top of the Old Dorm Block, in a divided two-room dorm. The other room of the dorm was inhabited by a guy and a girl, as far as I could tell. We dropped off our stuff and headed out.

We quickly discovered than neither William nor I had thought to bring the schedule for the evening, so we didn’t know where anything was. Sasha took it upon themselves to give us a tour of campus. We started by going down to the rond, where Sasha showed us AHAHAHAHAHAHA! Nine hours of travel have occurred between that last sentence and this one. To be fair, two of those hours were because of time differences. Still, I’m going slightly insane. But I still need to finish this. Because otherwise I will forget. Because I have no memory function in my brain. I’m not even sure if I’m being sarcastic.

Right. Sasha showed William and I some islands on the rond and told us about the lampreys that come with the salmon. Then they showed us a “physics pit,” which is a room off of the physics building that has really good acoustics. Then the three of us, joined by a random schmoe who was missing his host, went to the pool room. Apparently there’s a huge social scene in the pool room, which has six pool tables to play at. We played two games with teams, Schmoe and I on one team and William and Sasha on the other. We won the first game because Sasha hit the 8-ball into a pocket, and lost the second game because Sasha hit the 8-ball into a pocket but this time in the right way. Then Sasha left to do homework, leaving us to our own devices.

We didn’t do much with our own devices. William and I played around a bit more with the pool tables and chatted about physics and stuff. Turns out he doesn’t think we really have a promising theory of everything in the works yet, and he especially disagrees with string theory. William said he was hungry, so we said goodbye to Schmoe and went back to the cafeteria, where he used his meal card on pizza and a cake (which was for some reason labeled “brownie”). We talked for like an hour, mostly about college and academics, and ridiculous physics IAs he had witnessed. It was fun. When William finished eating, we went out to walk around campus, and just sort of wandered in the dark. By this time it was 9:00, which was when Sasha had told us to text them, so I texted them.

Sasha instructed us to, and I quote, “come by the nog, that’s Griffin Mckinley.” William and I puzzled about what that could possibly mean, and made our way to a map. After a few moments of staring at the map, William pointed at a dorm building labeled McKinley. Connected to it was another dorm named Griffin. We figured this was our best bet, and headed there. Sure enough, there was Sasha, in the area between the two buildings which was apparently called the nog. They let us into the nog and, after learning a few simple fire dancing tricks (with glowy lights instead of fire), we headed for the S’mores with a CSO event, which was the only event that we remembered from the schedule. On our way there, we crossed the bouncing bridge, which bounces. By the way, CSO stands for Community Safety Officer, and is pronounced “sizzo.” Some of the students, including Sasha, don’t entirely trust the CSOs, but I think they’re okay.

Anyways, by the time we got to the event, all that was left was a little fire and maybe a dozen people. We talked and I had some toasted marshmallows. It was fun. A lot of interesting people are potentially going to Reed. The CSO seemed nice, too. Oh, and someone went into the naked tree, but it was really too dark to see them. When the fire died down, at a bit after 11:00 (although to me it felt like midnight), we went back to Sasha’s room. We slept.

I woke up at like 6:00 and started packing up as quietly as I could. I was really slow about it. At 7:15 I woke up William, as we had agreed beforehand. We packed up, said goodbye to Sasha, and left. We had a quick breakfast before we left: I had an “avocado toast” and he had whatever. Then I skedaddled to the airport. Dad and I finished One Punch Man and started The Story Of Math. Then we had to wait at the DIA from 2:00 to 5:30 so I wrote the first half of this. Then some more traveling happened in which dad watched the live movie of Your Lie in April and we both cried, even though I couldn’t actually hear anything. Then we rented a car but there was some trouble so it took a while, and then we drove all the way to Johns Hopkins instead of to the hotel, so we had to drive back. Then I wrote some more, and then it was now. I need to sleep.