A&M New Student Conference

It's always great to be on the A&M campus. Every turn of a corner brings up some memory that you cannot help but blurt out to your child, who is very interested, until about the 10th story between the dorm and the MSC. Oh, and she's heard half of them before. 

I am so impressed with the brand new Memorial Student Center. It's beautiful!

Rudder always smells the same as it did in 1990. It's not a good or bad smell, just one of those definite scents that takes you right back to school days. Reminds me of great dates, shows, panel discussions, working student organization tables at events, etc. I also like that no matter how hot and humid it is outside, you walk into Rudder and it's like a refrigerator. Soooooo nice.

I guess they're just leaving the store in G Rollie, even though there is now a Barnes & Noble A&M store at the C. The G Rollie store is great on game days. Seems like a small use for a big space, but the money that thing generates probably more than justifies it.

I thought most people were going to stay on campus for the conference. Turns out everyone in Lauren's major but Lauren and I stayed in a hotel. It was convenient to stay in the dorms, and of course the students running the accommodations were wonderful and so friendly! I do have some advice:

1) Bring your own fitted sheet. You get two flat sheets, which would be fine, but the mattresses are made of some sort of 25th-century nylon fabric with a zero coefficient of friction, so the bottom sheet slides all over the place through the night. I tried every sort of tucking there is, to no avail.

2) Bring a laptop. There aren't TVs in the dorms in summer. Netflix or Hulu is helpful when winding down for the night in a very quiet corner of campus. We had heard the wifi was slow, but that wasn't the case. We watched a couple of comedy shows on Netflix and the streaming was fine, as long as we turned off HD.

Students can log onto the net with their credentials. The network is tamu-wpa. You have to do some cartwheels to get the password for tamu-guest, so good luck with that. And never ever ask for your child's login info, because if the university finds anyone other than the student logging in with his credentials, they ban the student from online access to their account. I cannot imagine what a huge hassle that is for the student to deal with. Everything is online now.

3) They say to bring your own pillow, but the pillows they provided were actually fine. There was also a freshly-washed blanket provided, though they said to bring one.

4) Pack light. There are no elevators in the dorms.

Lunch is easy to find on campus. Breakfast and dinner, not so much. In summer most places are closed altogether. Most of the open ones close early. I think people were just eating at Sbisa.

Wear comfortable shoes. They tell you, but I just want to repeat it. You will walk for miles, especially if you stay on campus.

My favorite part of the whole three days was the Corps of Cadets presentation during the final event of Day 1 in Rudder Auditorium. (It was a student activities talk, with a mini- yell practice at the end.) During their time, two senior Corps members gave a brief history of each of their subgroups, and brought out representatives from each of them. They really moved the crowd. They got the most enthusiastic applause of the entire conference at the end of their presentation.

During the conference, I was surprised at how few of the students were familiar with A&M culture. I always assume a great majority of students who attend A&M have family members who attended, or at the very least have seen a football game or two on TV. It was not the case at all. It was great fun watching students completely new to the experience learn yells and sing the school song during the last program of the conference.

Lauren is now officially enrolled in classes. Her schedule is much like mine always were, with all my classes at times I liked... except one. There was always that single class stuck out in the middle of nothing else, so I had to make a special trip to campus. I preferred all my classes in the morning, so I could be done by lunch and have afternoons to play. (Except for the one day I inevitably had a 4pm class to go back to.) Lauren prefers to have all her classes after lunch so she can go to bed very late and sleep in. She doesn't start any day before noon, except on Tuesday when she'll have 8am Biology lab. Not bad!