June 25

Today was our first day of class. Class starts at 9:00 every morning and ends at 4:00, the same number of hours in a typical school day, but today we were supposed to be down in the dorm lobby by 8:30 so we could walk over to our classrooms with an SRE (Student Residence Educator), just so we could get a good idea of how to get to our classroom from the dorm building. My classroom is in the Sullivan Center at 36 South Wabash Avenue on the twelfth floor.

The entrance to the Sullivan Center (Screenshot of Google Street View)

I walked into an elevator filled with probably 15 students, most of them going to fashion design on the seventh floor, but I saw that the button number "12" was lit up, so I knew someone on the elevator was in my class. When we got to the seventh floor, everyone got out except for me and one other girl. I asked her if she was in the Interior Architecture class, and she was. Her name is Zoe; she was born in Iowa, but lives in India because her parents work for the American embassy.

We have lots of students who flew internationally. Someone on my floor came from Turkey, someone else on my floor came from Toronto, someone else on my floor came from Mexico City, and someone in my class came from Puerto Rico. I'm sure there are a lot of other students who flew overseas, but I haven't met them yet. We also have many people who don't stay in the dorms, but rather commute from home every day.

Sorry for that quick tangent. Anyways, Zoe and I rode the elevator up to the twelfth floor where we both checked into the building by scanning our ID cards. We wandered around the twelfth floor trying to find our classroom. It's a little confusing because it's somewhat of a labyrinth. When we got to the classroom, I discovered why I hadn't met anyone before then who was in my class: There are only 5 of us! I'm the only boy in the class, which I'm completely fine with.

We went around in a circle sharing our names, where we were from, and why we came to the program. My teacher, Stephanie Slaughter, (I'm still not sure if they call teachers by their first name or last name at SAIC) works at the school AND works in a design firm. Her TA (teacher's assistant) is really nice. Her name is Lindsay, and she happens to be from Lafayette, Louisiana, the same small town where one of my friends' family is from!

Ms. Slaughter handed out several pieces of paper with instructions for our first project. We will basically be building a model to illustrate our understanding of key vocabulary for Interior Architecture.

I never received my supply list for class when I was at home because the teacher wanted to do supply shopping together. After Ms. Slaughter talked about what we will be doing for the next three weeks, we all went to Dick Blick and Utrecht to purchase our supplies. It ended up being surprisingly inexpensive because Ms. Slaughter already had some of the supplies in her classroom that we could use.

For lunch, we walked to an office building and took the escalator down to the basement level, where there is basically a huge food court with every type of food imaginable: American, Italian, Mexican, Greek (Mom & Dad), and more. I had a chicken quesadilla, and its was amazing!

We walked back up to the classroom to finish work. We had to cut foam core with x-acto knives to make the walls for our models.

Class ended at 4:00, and I walked back to the dorms with everyone else in my class. Our homework was to finish making these box-looking things out of foam core and thin cardboard and to glue straight-pins into pieces of foam core to make walls. With several breaks, I ended up finishing the homework at 10:30 and getting in bed at 11:00.

I couldn't fall asleep because there were three people on the street in front of the building screaming at each other. At one point they were in the middle of the street! One of the women pushed another down onto the ground. I'm assuming there was probably alcohol involved. After about 20 minutes of watching them scream at each other, they ran eastward, and I could go to sleep.