College

So I'm off at college now. It's an incredibly relief to finally get out of the house and have a little more independence. I love the campus here; Stevens Institute of Technology is located right on the Hudson river in Hoboken, NJ, across from downtown NYC. The view is breathtaking, especially at night. I can only imagine what this real estate is worth.

They gave all incoming freshmen a pretty nice laptop, so that's a plus. It's got Vista Enterprise, 4GB RAM, BluRay player and burner, NVIDIA Quadro FX with DX10 support, and even a biometric finger print reader. They also threw in an optical mouse, a backpack carrying case, and a printer. Also, a ridiculous amount of software is installed on it already; Visual Studio 2008, Visio, SolidWorks, Office Pro, just to name a few of the heavy hitters. It was nice to see Paint.NET and Putty included among the more expensive offerings.

I'll be pursuing a bachelors degree in computer engineering while at Stevens. Also, they offer as part of the scholars program I've joined to get a masters degree alongside your bachelors, at no extra cost. Basically, I get my bachelors and my masters in four years, and then I'm done. Sounds like a good plan to me, although I'll need to work twice as hard and take a few summer courses to keep up.

Classes don't start until Monday, which is when I'll be back into the swing of things. They've been showing us a good time for orientation, with trips to Madison Square Garden, ESPN Zone in Times Square, and lots of other interesting activities. I'm certainly getting a huge dose of independence right now, which is what I wanted. Hopefully everything stays this great for the rest of the semester.