Orientation Day

So apparently my blogs weren’t posting!  Good thing I had written them and saved them in a Word document :o)  Here is the post that I wrote yesterday about the first day at sea, then I will post my blog for today in a little bit.

Last night we had a brief overview meeting where they introduced all of the faculty and staff.  The dean told us some pretty cool facts about our voyage so these are some of the ones that I found interesting:

There are 721 students on this voyage (847 people total with faculty, staff, and families) and this is the first voyage ever to have full enrollment.

There are 300 schools represented on this voyage, and the top 3 are as follows: U of Colorado, U of Pittsburgh, followed by UVa with 32 students.  Colorado and Pittsburgh were the previous schools that sponsored the Semester at Sea program.

Anyway, at the end of the meeting we broke up into small groups that had been assigned to us when we boarded the ship.  These groups are pretty nice because they are smaller (mine has 12 people) and led by a staff member to talk about experiences or questions or anything.  It is a pilot program to have these groups so they are not quite sure how often we will meet, but last night we did get to know you activities and then this morning we met again to talk about the trip so far.  The rest of the day today we have just been at presentations straight through.  There was a lunch break when everyone took naps and ate and then it was back to presentations about various topics for another 3 hours.  A lot of it was extremely repetitive from UVa orientation about honor code and such, so I found it pretty boring.

Seasickness has definitely hit the ship!  They give out free seasickness pills everywhere on the ship, so I haven’t been sick at all and my room is in the back of the boat which is much smoother than the front.  It is getting pretty hard to walk around the ship normally since it is pretty up and down, but everyone looks stupid trying to walk with the handrails so it is fine.  The TV in our room shows 2 channels: one with ship announcements and daily schedules and the other one has a map of where we are in the ocean and how fast we are going, etc.  The map channel shows that we are definitely in the middle of the Atlantic right now and the water looks like it!  It is pretty cold and misty outside and the water definitely looks extremely cold and isn’t as blue as tropical ocean.

I think that is pretty much all for this afternoon – not a very exciting day.  Classes start tomorrow so it will be interesting to start those and then there will definitely be more free time to explore the ship instead of being stuck in meetings all day.  Hope to hear from everyone soon!!