There was a mix up of rooms during our first session which was amusing. The lectures were told on their timetables that they were elsewhere to us. They did find us and come down to us but it was funny being the one of the few waiting around at the start thinking, "is this all of us?" There was only 3 or 4 of us waiting by the door before anything happened. I managed to mix with a few of the other students by the first session; Danielle, India, Jay, Michel, but most of us still went off on our own for the short break. We rejoined after lunch to talk about timetables. Obviously, the ones they were handing out weren't really for me but for the first years but I was using theirs as a guide to understand how they worked; room code, module code etc.
Tuesday was pretty long but for good reason, we met the careers and employment lady who talked about how she can help us get placements and further work and even answered some of our own questions that we'd left for her on post-it notes. After this, it was time for my first proper visit (this side of the year) to Kedleston campus for a bit of a tour. By this point in the week I had made connections with Petra. We walked up to the Kedleston together from markeaton and had been chatting quite a lot about what we're wanting to do. We was expecting two, one as a library induction and a site tour but the guy that lead us claimed their is only one so we went with that. It was much shorter than expected as we had been given an hour slot to do what we originally thought was two tours but this just meant that we had a longer break. This gave us chance to pick up loads of freebies, mostly pens as we spoke to all the
We had to get back in time for a monster jam session at 2pm. I got talking to a few more of the guys through this but it was hard work since their was so many guitarist but were told that we didn't have to play if we didn't want to, but I wanted to of course. Kimmy wanted to play everything. I started trying to sort playing bass, one of them had a dodgey input so I had to swap it for the other which worked fine. I didn't play much bass since the other guitarists, Tom in particular were noodling about and our drummer (whom I'd met before on the applicant day) was still moving the kit about. So we couldn't really do much, not at least without a drummer until he was ready. Eventually, he had a bit of a play then disappeared so that was my chance to take the drums. A risky move when I had not played in a good couple of months but I'd say it went well, I managed to hold together 3 jams at least and one of them got quite progressive. Interestingly, me and Tom always new when the ned was coming but the others not so much. Maybe it's because the others didn't want it to end. We had a comical moment with this actually which involved me hitting the high hat bell as he played the last note and we both just laughed. I did end p playing a bit of guitar. I played someone else for a bit which was an ok experience, it was an Ibanez but then I switched over to mine. I think Phil (one of the lecturers found my guitar quite interesting). I moved around the different practice rooms to see what was happening. I nearly lost my drum sticks and lead at one point because I left them in another room by accident. I got talking to the guy that runs the music society (not sure if he's a first year or not, probably not and I can't remember his name) but he's really cool. He has a band together already, the other two member Guy and Sam seem really nice too. Great musicians. We ended up jamming to Pina Colada, me playing piano with the boys singing along to end the day. That was nice.
Wednesday was pretty simple but an early start for the equipment centre induction which finished earlier than expected since we hadn't enrolled yet and they planned to set up all of our accounts but impossible without being enrolled. We did however have enrolment timetabled next, so they were kind of in the wrong order basically. I met Ben in cafe today, a Photography student. He seems an interesting character with a good sense of humour. I'd noticed him before sat outside Birtannia Mill and we got chatting. We had a similar problem in the last session where because it take so long on the admin side for enrolment, we couldn't see everything we needed to find exactly where out course resources were.
Thursday was mainly the welcome talk at Derby Theatre which I didn't realise until recently that the Uni own this theatre. Interesting. It was as welcome talks go, I guess. Lets get everyone excited about university and the surrounding city. Some parts were quite inspiring and made me realise a few things, other parts were humorous like when they were introducing our lecturers with another group and they thought Micheal was absent even though he was stood on stage and completely missed off Phil. Brilliant. We were given out maps after to find our way around the city. I'm sort of familiar with Derby but still don't know my way around that well, not like Nottingham. I buddied up with Petra and we did the main ones around the city centre, the music shops and nipped in Ryans bar. We bumped into Ben again before we headed back. It was a really wet day and we got soaked from walking around, so much that when I went back to my car my jacket was soaked. I swapped to my coat to nip up to Kedleston and on retiring my jacket was still wet!
Friday was an easy day, turn up at 11am for a performance from singer songwriter Mitch Ross. He sung and played acoustic guitar for us through Phil's little Bose system and it all sounded very good. I thoroughly enjoyed his performance, his cover and originals were strong. He played a Phil Colins song that I didn't recognise until he reached the chorus. I love it when covers sound so original. We had one more lecture in the afternoon about well-being and how to look after ourselves which sounds a bit patronising at first. The lady shown us some breathing exercises for when we feel overwhelmed at the end of the session, I'm not sure if the lady had already exited the room. I hope she had, Phil was well wishing everyone a good weekend and Micheal said, "Lets go get depressed". His sense of humour kills me, I swear.
All in all, It's been an inspiring week to be reminded of the facilities available to me, find out about all the other little things that will be useful such as careers advices, wellbeing and the library and its just been great to familiarise myself with both Markeaton Street and Kedleston Campus. It's been a nice opportunity to meet the new students too and maybe for them to even meet me.
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