Alright, so the first day of college was incredible - yes, it really was. I know I’m at home here at Lehigh. Everyone is nice, everyone seems to have the same goal in mind: to become a more intelligent person than you were when you arrived. And it seems like we’re already accomplishing that, but I’ll see how far it goes before some start breaking away from the fun and learning and run off to do less productive things. By the end of the day a lot of the students in my dorm seemed very interesting in running off to one of the many first-day parties off-campus to get drunk. Naturally, none of them had any connections in order to get off-campus, so their drinking fest seemed more like a childish dream than anything. And Lehigh is really cracking down on alcohol this year; they’re dreaming if they think they won’t get caught.

I do now have my schedule, though! Mty week isn’t as busy as I though - but I suspect there will be a lot of long-term assignments to take up my time. I never have to get up early, never earlier than 8am, which is a relief. Most of the time I don’t have to be awake until 9 or 10am, and there are hour breaks between my classes for lunch. Usually I’m out by 1pm, but Mondays and Fridays I have classes until 4pm due to my IBE Seminar and my Physics Lab courses.

There’s a LOT of enthusiasm here at a Lehigh, and I’m glad to be a part of it. Everyone’s really excited - not just in my dorm but all around. The choral department is especially friendly, and I know I’m going to fit right in as I did at Ridge. Dr. Sametz, or simply Doc (like we call possibly EVERY person on earth with their doctorate), is a wonderful man who I hope will fill Retz’s quite large shoes as a choral director. He was very impressed with my audition, and actually extended the audition to fuss around with me. There were four parts to the audition, but it seemed like he kind of just made stuff up as he wanted to. First, I sang the solo piece I brought - he played it INCREDIBLY fast… and INCREDIBLY slow at times. I was wondering where his sense of tempo was, and was hoping he didn’t think it was me being nervous and straying from the beats, because I was in no way nervous! After that, some range tests, after which his eyes lit up - he was pretty amazed at my range, which stemmed from the lower bass scales to the high Tenor I scales. I’d say I have a good three octave range, perhaps more.

Either way, he noticed that my higher notes were recently developed. After he asked how long ago I was able to sing high like that, I told him it was a development that began in the last year as I learned to control my voice better.

Then it was chord analysis. He played a chord of three notes, and asked me to identify the top note by singing it back. He Also asked me to sing the bottom note. But I transcribe music, so I’m really very adept at this skill of picking out notes from chords - he noticed, and started trying to mess with me. He played four-note chords. He played chords that didn’t make any harmonic sense - they sounded ridiculous. And when I got them all correct, he did something I don’t think he did for anyone else: Asked me to identify the middle note. Again, piece of cake. I did finally mess up on one by accidentally singing the bottom note, but I got the middle note a second later.

Sight reading was very easy. In fact, I was pretty sure I had even sang the piece before, but it could have been a similar classical piece. Either way, once it was all said and done he looked at me, laughed and smiled and said, “Yeah, you’re cool. You’re done here, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

And now I’m in the University Choir! (And soon the all-men’s Glee Club!) I’ll be off from now until Sunday at an alternate orientation - the Choral Retreat. It’s a choir boot camp… just like AMA. Woohoo!

After dark came the carnival, which I really only found fun because they had DDR. I swear, after yesterday I have legs of steel. I’m gonna be fit and skinny after my Lehigh adventure for sure. ;)