Pre Orientation (August 20th until August 26th):

I did the multi-element pre-orientation trip. It was awesome, we went camping, backbacking, river rafting, and cannoning. I made so many friends on the trip. Two funny stories from the trip:

-On the first day of backpacking when we got to the campsite one of the leaders showed us the water pump and told us to fill our water bottles, she began to use the pump and then someone pointed out the sign that said non-potable water. We ended up using iodine in the water so we could drink it.

-Later that night we were given the option to either sleep in a ten that we had made using a tarp or to sleep in the permanent shelters that were at the campsite. Me and three other students chose to stay in the ten, we asked one of the leaders if we would be okay there at night. He said that we would be fine as long as it did not rain really, really hard. It rained really hard. All of our stuff got wet. (It was still lots and lots of fun)

Finally at Johns Hopkins (August 26th until now):

So from August 26th until August 30th we didn’t have any classes, instead we met people from various departments and learned more about the school. We also participated in some very fun Hopkins orientation traditions. My favorite of these was playfair.

On August 30th classes started. I was quite worried about the transition however once I got into class I realized that my high school (Milken Community High School) did a really good job of preparing me and that I would do fine. All of my professors are really nice and willing to help. My favorite classes are Robots in Science Fiction, Discrete Math, and Intermediate Programming.

The orientation activities continued throughout the week. I really liked first night (it takes place on the first night of classes, the upperclassmen welcome the freshmen) and the trip to the inner harbor/the national aquarium (which was only open for Hopkins students when we went).

Rosh Ha Shanah was cool too, the Hillel here is really nice and the food was good too. I made a bunch of friends at all of the Hillel events.

I am writing you this letter to inform you that today I will be speaking at the TED event in San Francisco. I will be speaking around 7:30pm PST during the Pete Conrad Award speech. If you want to watch me live go to http://www.tedxsf.org. But you already knew that…being the Internet and all.

-Nate

The Conrad award was given out at the Conrad foundation’s innovation submit a few weeks ago. The submit took place at the NASA aims research center in mouton view, California. It was fun and I learnt a lot , the best part of the trip was when I won the award.

Atlanta for robotics was awesome! It was cool to be in the same place as hundreds of thousands of high school students who have similar interests to me. Additionally once we had fixed up all of the damage done to our robot in the LA regional we won every one of our matches. Making our win-losses at championships 5-2-0. Our final ranking was 23rd on the winning field, it was our best season yet!

Currently I am on a trip for my integrated American studies class at Milken. More to come about that soon…

My teacher’s reaction is kind of scary, if he represents the average American then his lack on knowledge of what is happening and his blind faith in Obama makes me really scared for the future.

Additionally it is completely inappropriate for a non-humanities teacher to talk about politics in class.