Exploding Muffins and Cursed Wi-Fi

De Anza High School on a sunny morning.

I woke up this morning to the sound of an acoustic guitar. Not that anyone in my family plays the guitar; it was just the sound of my phone’s alarm going off. After getting out of bed, I quickly got dressed and ready for school. But to my own surprise, I remembered that it was a Saturday! What was I doing out of bed so early? As I considered going back to sleep, my dad came into the room and reminded me about today’s blog tutorial at De Anza High School, effectively crushing any hopes I had of going back to bed.

Before today, I had no idea that muffins could explode when exposed to enough heat, so I guess you actually do learn something new every day. Anyways, after retrieving the burnt remains of an accidentally-microwaved muffin (someone hadn’t had enough sleep), my dad and I departed for the blog tutorial. Luckily, we didn’t get lost, which happens to me very often, and there was a large Ivy League Connection banner on one of the gates outside the school directing us where to go. At this point, my dad dropped me off, and I walked inside. 

An ILC banner adorns the gate outside the computer lab.

I was actually looking forward to today, since I would have the opportunity to meet most of the other ILCers, and I would get to learn more about what we would be doing on our experience over the summer.

Don without a Hawaiian shirt?!

Don was waiting for us inside the school’s computer lab, and I was rather surprised that he wasn’t wearing one of his signature Hawaiian shirts. It turns out I was actually thirty minutes early to the tutorial, so one of my fellow Chicago cohort members, Tamika, and I helped Don arrange the chairs for the other students. When we finished and most of the students hadn’t arrived yet, I decided to log onto a computer and finish up my Blogger profile (which we were supposed to already have finished over the week).

Soon, a girl who looked about my age sat down in the seat next to mine. We introduced ourselves (her name was Katherine), and she seemed friendly, so we talked for a while. After a few minutes of conversation, most of the other ILCers had showed up, so Don began the tutorial.

The first thing Don did was hand out a huge forty-page packet full of everything we would need to know. Throughout the tutorial, he managed to cover nearly every single item mentioned in this packet. Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder what sort of magical powers Don has that allow him to be so productive.

Most of the session was very interesting to me. We talked about Don’s multiple evil personalities, boring blogs that didn’t include any punctuation or capital letters, and we also took lots of photos for practice.

 

A photo of someone taking a photo...

However, the tutorial didn't go as smoothly as I thought it would. The main problem we had was with the Wi-Fi, which kept displaying error messages no matter what we did. This kept happening throughout the whole session, which was incredibly annoying.

Overall, despite the burnt muffin and continuous error messages, I had a really good time today, and I also made some new friends (hooray!). I’m looking forward to the next ILC event, and I’m also looking forward to the trip itself, which will no doubt be a truly life-changing experience for me.