“Okay so that was terrible but fun show me your signup form.”

The guy leading signups laughs. "Glad you like it! So we do have a five dollar due, that covers supplying our pile of loaner equipment and bureaucratic stuff, but you can pay that whenever as long as it's in the next month or so. Here's our rules and regular meetings," paper is handed over, "And we also have a waiver you need to sign. Just acknowledging that this is a contact sport, you might get hurt. Standard stuff." Another paper.

She will review the waiver carefully for the more obnoxious clauses that can be in such things, sign it, and pay later.

“See you then!”

Now, how about more things worth checking out. Anything on agenda item two?

The waiver doesn't have anything more suspect than 'this club and the University is not responsible for injuries sustained in this activity'.

...For item two, aside from the shooting club's kitschy display of monster-shaped targets, there's the Spirit Bearer Appreciation Society. Apparently it's a bit of a running joke to call them the Magical Girl Fan Club?

Easy jokes don't communicate very much. How do they actually present themselves?

They are a research society! Though it's pretty clear after talking to them for a few minutes that they don't do much if any actual research, as in peer-reviewed studies, on magic and monsters, more like a newsletter or gossip club on it. Though one of their members is supposedly writing a book about monsters (he's not here today).

Do they, like, publish the newsletter for non-members?

Well, there's a (badly put together) website she can visit, and they donate a copy or two of each one to the school libraries, but printing things is expensive so they don't have a lot of extras.

— would they be interested in help with their web site.

Well, that depends. It'd be volunteer work. And it'd be a little iffy to let some random freshman change up the web site on a whim, even if she is in CS. Maybe she should come to meetings and get to know people and, like, write up a plan and propose it then?

She'll consider it but not make any plans right now; this would be a nontrivial intellectual effort and presumably there will be, like, homework competing for that.

Nice talking with you. Next?

Nothing especially relevant to her interests can be found after that.

Then it is time to go.

On Sunday she actually manages to peruse her textbooks. Thing she already knows, thing she's heard of, nifty thing, what even is this…

Freshmen are required to take an annoyingly high ratio of 'basic' classes. Math, physics, English, some kind of liberal art (whichever she chose). She only has two actual CS classes - one is 'Introduction to Computer Science' and one is 'Foundational Programming'.

Formal logic is not programming-y! It's pretty weird, actually. But the intro to computer science book claims it will be invaluable in later classes.

Hey, it's good to know a little bit about everything. Well, some things. She's totally behind the principle here. And she knows that bits and Booleans are the foundation of computing.

But then it's lunchtime and then she will spend some time vaguely beginning a prototype of Teddy's suggestion of partial copies and catching up on network things and then it is dinnertime and okay better try to be well rested for the first day of classes.

Classes! Has she bothered to try and learn the bus system, or will she just walk? Either way, physics 101 is up first. The lecture hall is easy enough to find - and it's a big lecture hall. Easily 300 or more students are crammed into the seats when the professor introduces himself!

"I know almost all of you are engineering students of some description. A lot of you will have already covered a lot of what we'll be doing in advanced high school classes. But pay attention and get into the habit of good schoolwork. I will tell you from experience that high-level classes are much harder."

TAs then pass out a syllabus to everyone as the professor does a variety of flashy physics displays - bouncing balls, tricks with springs and spinny things, setting off a small explosion - interspersed with descriptions of when they will cover the concepts involved.

There is no score for attendance, but they will have weekly quizzes on Fridays and those are a decent fraction of the grade. There are also discussion sections where they do work on problems as a group (attendance is graded there), homework (can be completed on paper or online), and practical labs. Plus, of course, two midterms and a final exam.

Well, this looks like it will be reasonably interesting.

The rest of the course introductions go to a similar tune. The list of topics they'll be touching on in CS 101 is enticing in its variety - A brief history of computing, basic computer architecture, concepts like the operating system, compilers, all the abstraction that computers use, introduction to algorithms, a primer on some data structures, the general idea of how to optimize code, a short look into systems architecture and APIs, and finally three full weeks on debugging and case studies of particularly interesting/important bugs.

Ooh, levels of the systems she hasn't actually gotten to know very well already. (Going to college for what you're already doing does have this problem.)

And the CS class launches into the first topic and gives her homework right off the bat too! Learning! This is exactly what college is supposed to be about.

Teddy shares the CS discussion section with her, but the first bit of lab work is simple enough that the TA holds her own sort of mini-lecture after the standard academic introduction and getting everyone's credentials sorted out, so he doesn't actually get a chance to talk to her, and then-

Time flies. It's Saturday morning almost before she knows it.

The first thing to do is to call her parents like she promised.

Now, what else is on the agenda for the weekend? Any club meetings? Events-announced-on-flyers? Optional continuing orientation things?

The ACM meeting is this afternoon in the Siebel Center building! Plus the foam-swordfighting club will be in a park about half a mile outside of the main campus for a few hours.

One homework thing! Some work on the idea Terry had about partial backups! Catch up on forum doings! Lunch! Meeting!

The ACM meeting is mostly an introductory sort of thing. They have a small social and the speaker at the front goes over all the events and activities the ACM actually does.

Terry is there, of course. He finds a seat near Kaitlyn. "I've been thinking more about my 'distributed storage' idea, I want to talk about it after this if you have time?"

“Sure. I wrote a little bit of code for it already, but I'm not sure how to routinely verify that all the pieces are right; not that this isn't a problem already but if you're storing less than everything it's reducing the margin for corruption —”

But she should also listen to what is being announced.