My Pre-College Experience And Undying Love For Rochester

It has been rumored that if I were to get a cut, I would in fact bleed blue and yellow. People often ask me when my love for University of Rochester started and many are surprised with the answer. It didn’t actually start when I was born, contrary to popular belief, but was actually the product of my experience as a student enrolled in one of Rochester’s Pre-College Programs.

The summer going into my junior year of high school, my mom wanted me to do something productive, instead of just playing video games and wasting away in my house. She handed me a list of University of Rochester’s Pre-College courses, and told me that I was going to be spending one week of my summer living in the dorms and taking classes.

I ended up choosing to take classes in engineering and robotics because, at the time, I was heavily leaning towards majoring in something related to science.

Engineering Course
The course in engineering actually convinced me that engineering was not the path for me. Even though it did not personally entice me to become an engineering major, I had a ton of fun on the projects we did and now hearing about the projects my engineering friends are working on at school, I occasionally think that I made the wrong choice.

One of the projects we had during that program was to build a bumper for a remote controlled car using tape and straws (we were limited in our supplies but I do not remember the limits). The goal was to prevent the egg that was resting in the bed of the remote-controlled truck from cracking. The coolest part about this activity was to see all of the different ideas that my classmates produced and how vastly different their concepts were from each other. I’m pretty sure my egg cracked.

I also remember from that program:

The instructors proving the Pythagorean theorem to us, which I had never seen before and never saw again until calculus.
Doing the coke and mentos experiment and the professor explaining how it worked. (We also sprayed coke and mentos all over each other!) I think the best part about this was going home and showing it to my friends.

Robotics Course
The course in robotics was my favorite of the two and I definitely recommend it to anyone who ever played with Lego as a kid or has ever watched any of the shows with battling robots. In the course, you use Lego Mindstorm kits to design and program a robot to complete an assigned task. The kit comes with a variety of sensors which enable you to program the robot to respond to various stimuli. I remember that one group made a robot which was programmed to approach a certain place and then launch a ball into a basket when they clapped.

This course sparked my interest in programming and this very summer I’m actually teaching myself programming languages! To this day, I’ve never had an experience similar to this!

A Taste of the College Experience
As much as you’re taking these interesting classes and being productive during the Pre-College Programs, that’s less than half the fun. Since I stayed residentially during the course, I slept in the freshman dorm, Gilbert Hall, with thirty other residential students and also got to spend time talking to my RAs in the program who were current Rochester students. Quite a few of my fellow residential classmates ended up attending Rochester and I keep in contact with my RAs from time to time. I’ve seen the list of RAs this year and quite a few of them are friends of mine. You should be excited and feel free to ask them any questions about college life, classes, applying, etc.

The first day or two, we had a lot of icebreaker activities to help us learn each other’s names. The activities were well planned out and definitely accomplished their goal. One of the games we played is where you go around a circle and say your name and an animal, and everyone’s name and animal that came before you. One of my classmates said “Tony Tilapia” and everyone referred to him as that for the rest of the week. It worked though; I still remember his name and animal even though it has been three years!

After we had learned everyone’s names, we were free to spend our free time doing whatever we wanted. We would stay in the lounge talking, playing card games, and gooning around. I can vouch that it was quite similar to the first few weeks of college and is definitely a taste of the college experience. It was actually hard to acclimate back to high school because I just wanted to live in dorms with my friends and never have to leave school. Just another reason to crush it in high school!

As much as all of this conspired to form my undying love for Rochester, the part of my Pre-College experience that had the most profound impact on me was exploring the campus and enjoying the aesthetically pleasing nature of the buildings. I had to read a few books for my AP Composition and Language course (The Hot Zone and Of Mice and Men) and I ended up spending a few hours just reading in both Rush Rhees and Gleason libraries.

I also highly recommend visiting the athletic facilities on campus! They're absolutely excellent and with them being so easily accessible, there's no reason to not get into a workout schedule.

More than just the libraries, the beautiful brick buildings covered in ivy made me want to come to Rochester and be on campus. During the spring and summer, campus is absolutely gorgeous with everything flowering. However, even during the dark depths of winter, I look at the buildings and I am happy to be attending such a beautiful university.

In the end, my Pre-College experience left me completely enamored with the University of Rochester and convinced me to apply Early Decision, without a second thought. I hope that everyone’s Pre-College experience is as heartfelt as mine. I am excited to meet this year’s Pre-College students and hopefully a few future Yellow Jackets!

I recommend liking the University of Rochester Pre-College Programs Facebook page for more content about the Pre-College programs! Likewise, you can follow us on Twitter @URPreCollege.

Here's a photo of me with J'Kela from August 2010 when I was a Rochester Scholar: