wm161.net

College – Week 2

Friday marked the end of the second week of my (hopefully) 4-year stay at The University of Akron.

I’m the first of my family to go to any form of higher education, so the whole experience has been totally new to me. My two roommates are respectively the 2nd and 6th members of their families to have been in college. Both of them currently have family members in their second year here too.

Before coming here to Akron, I crawled most of the internet (and just about all of Everything2) to try and learn exactly what the “College Experience” is like. Nobody wanted to tell, so all that I knew was that everybody drinks, your professors are just people with names who talk a lot, and ramen constitutes 80% of your diet (the other 20% is beer).

Gee, I feel silly now.

Most of my professors are actually graduate students (one is a part-timer who teaches at a local high school). They have personalities comparable to people back in Jefferson (read: nutters), and are on a two-way first-name basis with us. Its hardly different than high school.

Yes, there are a lot of people who drink. Specifically, my neighbors. Well, they used to until they got the grand idea of quaffing a gatoraide bottle full of vodka and monster. Aside from those two, drinking is still pretty popular. Every weekend you can hear the halls filled with voices of excited people prepping to go out on the town to some random party.

As for feeding, I have a meal plan. It costs about $3,000 and lasts the whole semester. I’m not sure if other colleges have such a thing, but the plan pretty much guarantees that you get fed. Here at Akron there is “Rob’s Cafe” inside Robertson hall. When you use your meal plan, they swipe your ZipCard and it acts like a debit card. Several other eateries around Akron also accept your ZipCard, so McDonald’s can be paid with your meal plan too.

Another nifty feature about the ZipCard system is the All-Campus account. Its like a small little savings account you or your parents can put money on. The money can be spent anywhere zipcards are accepted (like the local bookstores, or the bowling alley). If you have a US Bank account, you can link the two together so you never worry about adding money to the card.

So about that Rob’s Cafe…

It is incredible. Every national cuisine is available there and made-to-order on demand. Omlettes, Waffles, Cereal, Wraps, Pizza, Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Salads, Soups, the list goes on. Their waffles are incredible. Not having one before you leave Akron is a cardinal sin in my book.

Prices there vary according to the meal selection available. You should know that because it is inevitable you will use up your weekly allotment of $50 before Sunday when they recharge the accounts. Breakfast is around $5, Lunch is $7 and dinner is $9.

At the moment, I have nothing to occupy my weekends. During the week I have classes and work at my dorm’s builtin food delivery service. On the weekends, I struggle to maintain sanity by sleeping in until noon and wandering campus aimlessly. Currently I’m working on joining several clubs to occupy myself, such as the Green Dragon Kung-Fu club and the Zips Programming Network. There isn’t a bowling league or club yet, but myself and two other Jeffersonians filled out the form asking if there is any interest in such a thing.

The content of wm161.net by Trever Fischer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License unless noted otherwise.
See http://wm161.net/copyright for more details.