Nik

So not everyone knows, but Halloween is by far my favorite holiday. The best part is, there are 5 nights of it here at Iowa! I get to dress up funny and do weird stuff all day, without getting too many awkward stares. Costumes are always an important part of Halloween and this year, I had two. First, I was (am) a nerd. That costume looked like this: 

Then later this weekend I attended the midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show, as I do every year. I highly encourage this event, it isn’t for the faint of heart, but if you like weird humor it will keep you laughing the whole show. For this event I dressed as Brad Majors, one of the main characters. I don’t have any pictures of it yet though, but I’ll keep you posted! (He is sort of a nerd, so the outfits are similar.) I hope everyone’s Halloween was as eventful as mine!

Homecoming is such a fun time here at Iowa, and the weather has been awesome! I was able to check out the parade, which was really neat, and there is just a lot going on on campus. So many different events occur around homecoming like concerts, residence hall socials, and a bunch of other stuff. Right before homecoming Active Minds did “Stomping Out Stigma”. The event was a success. Here is a picture of my friend Gail holding all the stigma balloons.  Speaking of Stigma and other scary things…There is no shortage of fun with Halloween coming up. It is my favorite holiday and I can’t wait. This year I’m wearing a Tron costume that I will post pictures of later. 😀 Also, I’m going to a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show,which, if you have not done, I highly recommend it. This year I will be dressing up as Brad, and accompanying me will be the always lovely Stephanie as Janet. It isn’t the most amazing movie when you watch it alone, but the midnight showings are great!

One word to describe it: Whirlwind. Yeah, my week has kind of been everywhere. I was able to attend both Honors Primetime and On Iowa! These programs were both incredibly fun and rewarding. Primetime was my first real taste of a college course. A group of students interested in the science field and I worked closely with a professor to learn about “DNA and Disease”. Specifically we learned about Microarray technology, and Alzheimer’s disease. I had never even heard of Microarray technology before, as I am sure many of you have not, but it was actually pretty interesting. Shortly, it deals with how the genes in your DNA are displayed. We worked with some pretty cutting edge software to find what genes are related to Alzheimer’s disease. Then we matched our results with the results of scientists that had contributed their information to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The genes we found matched up fairly well, so I would say the project was quite a success.

Now, if you don’t like science, that might have bored you. Sorry about that, but I had to. Now we can talk about a program that even non-science nerds can enjoy, On Iowa. The idea is that each incoming freshman is placed into a group of students with an older advising student. We did some work with our small group just talking about different aspects of college and having fun, then we all met up at Kinnick Stadium. The first thing I saw in the stadium was free food, (that is always a plus in my book).We learned the Iowa fight song and numerous other ways to show our Hawkeye spirit.  A video was shown about a great man whose name is almost synonymous with Hawkeye football, Nile Kinnick. Then there was a sweet fireworks show to end the night. I thought it was a pretty cool program, obviously since it was its first year it had its flaws, but I still thought it went fairly smoothly. All in all a great week, not to even mention all the cool people I have met along the way. Now it is time to buckle down for classes.

P.S. This is the nerd in me talking, but did you know there are Iowa Quidditch shirts? Needless to say one of my favorite garments lately.

During the summer, it seemed like this day would never come, but finally it’s here! I only had to take five trips to get my stuff in, and I’m on second floor so it wasn’t bad at all. I went around campus and found all of my classes. They are all really close. I actually found that if I go down a couple flights of stairs and then walk about 50 meters I am in the chemistry building. (The place where most of my classes are…Score!) I have already met a ton of new people. A bunch of the guys on my floor are pre-med like me, so we have been having a good time griping about our chemistry and calculus courses together.

My day was packed, I went all over campus, first I stopped at the library to check out the facilities. Then I headed over to the office of study abroad (OfSA). I know it is a little early, but I would really like to study abroad, and with a major like Biochemistry, I think planning ahead would be helpful. After they gave me a few options to check out and walked me through the program I went back to Burge. One of my friends stopped by and gave me a tour of Iowa City (Well…At least the downtown). There are a ton of interesting shops and restaurants, hopefully during my time here I will get to visit most of them. Once the tour was over I ran over to Currier, to do the mandatory check-in meeting. Of course, leave it to me to forget my card that we had to have… Luckily the people running the meeting were really nice and they just let me sign in on a sheet of paper. When the meeting finished up we moved on to meet some more friends in Daum, we ended up meeting their RA and he hung out with us for a while too.  Overall, I would say I definitely had a successful move in day, now lets see what day two brings.