A Summer! I Had One!

Me on vacation in San Diego. Don't I look happy?

WHEW. And what a summer it has been! Granted, we're more than halfway through September and the semester started in late August, but NO MATTER. I will be telling my tale of summertime campus adventures over the course of a couple of posts, so for now, brace yourselves for part one.

In order to catch up on classes after switching majors from Architecture to Architectural Engineering (I'll get into that in another post) , I decided to take a couple summer classes, Calculus 2 and IPRO 322. The original plan was to commute every day (which from Naperville is not preferable for me--I like sleeping, and waking up at 4am to get here by seven just wasn't jiving with me), take two classes during the day and come home in the evenings. I had a similar he[ck] schedule last summer, except when I came home I still had the pleasure of going to a night class at the local community college. Fortunately for me, I was able to get a hold of on-campus housing for the summer not a week after the summer semester started.

You see, I am in a fraternity, Alpha Sigma Phi. When I got off the IIT shuttle bus at 7am, I would walk over to the chapter house on the Quad and would crash there for an hour or two before work and class (Did I mention? I work too! Joy!). Now, before you ask me, "Tony, why on earth would you go to campus so darn early if you don't have work for another hour or two?" The answer is thus: I have no transportation of my own, and, fortunately for me, my dad happens to be going my way, as he works here at Illinois Tech. So I have to go by his schedule, which, not-so-fortunately for me, means waking up before the sun.

This is where I stayed during the summer

The Resident Advisor (RA) of the chapter house noticed me hanging around so early in the morning (it's kind of hard to ignore a grown man sprawled across a couch, face pressed into the cushion creases), and asked me why I wasn't living in the house for the summer. I didn't really have a reply to that, so he offered me an empty room in exchange for some manual labor that needed to be done around the house that summer. So huzzah for me! No more waking up before dawn! No more falling asleep at the dinner table! And I could still get to work on time. And now I am an expert at replacing screen doors and shoveling ceramic (long story). What a beautiful thing.

During the weekday I went to class, studied, and generally was an academic. On the weekends I turned into my alter-ego, LaborMan, and toiled away in between hanging out with friends. And after the summer semester I got to spend two weeks in beautiful sunny Arizona, where I golfed my arms sore and napped in some of the most beautiful places in America, including San Diego, which we drove to from Phoenix. I could have not asked for a better summer (well, it might have been better had there not been classes at all, but that's how it goes).

In my next installment (this is sounding more and more like a radio serial) I will detail my first-ever IPRO experience. Tune in next week (or whenever I get around to posting)!