Schedule! Laptop! Cohort!

For me, today was the start of orientation, because I'm part of a group of about 38-ish SOM students doing a two-day math review (aka Math Camp), which I assume I was invited to becuase I didn't do any math in my career and didn't take any in college, other than integral calculus first semester, 12 years ago. I'm glad to have the refresher; today was pretty basic -- linear and nonlinear equations and their accompanying graphs. Not hard, but it's stuff I haven't thought about since the Spice Girls were popular.

Doing this today also meant getting to pick up my laptop and get some orientation info, like the name of my cohort and my class schedule. The laptop is an awfully nice perk ... it's "free" (included in tuition) and has all the programs we'll need, plus wireless access to the Internet on campus. I really haven't looked at it yet.

My "cohort" is the group 50-some students with whom I'll be taking all my first-year classes. There are four: blue, silver, gold and green. I'm in blue. I met a couple Blue people at Math Camp and think I'll be meeting everybody else Wednesday. I've heard that these are the people I'll get to know particularly well.

I also got my schedule, which seems to be on a quarter schedule. The first quarter, which is eight weeks, includes some eight-week classes and others that are shorter. Looks like I'll have classes starting at 8:15 a.m. Monday-Thursday, but no classes on Friday, both of which are great (I'm a morning person). The courses are (1) Basics of Economics, (2) Spreadsheet Modeling, (3) Basics of Accounting, (4) Probability Modeling & Statistics, (5) Problem Framing, (6) Careers and (7) Game Theory -- again, those don't all necessarily happen simultaneously, though it looks like at any given time there are pretty much four or five classes happening at once.

Then there's a week for exams, followed by a week for some type of management teamwork thing with a schedule TBA, and then the next session of classes begins the last week of October. Those are the Fall-2 Courses in the integrated curriculum, so the classes are called Competitor, Investor, Intro to Negotiaion, Customer and Sourcing & Managing Funds. Those seem to last about seven weeks, followed by exams and winter break.