First Impressions and Introductions

Good evening, all! My name's Breanna Poteet, and I'll be doing this blog for my GT1000 class this semester. I'm a first year at Georgia Tech, majoring in Materials Science and Engineering. I'm originally from Buchanan, Georgia, the county seat of Haralson County, about an hour west of Atlanta and a world away. Moving from forty acres of hills and trees to the middle of a bustling city has been quite a transition, and I'm still not quite sure what to make of it.
  My hometown (the red dot) in relation to the rest of the Southeast

To understand my perceptions and impressions of Tech, it helps to understand where I come from. I grew up on an old farm in rural west Georgia, the daughter of a preschool teacher and an airplane inspector, playing in our creek and running around barefoot for the majority of my childhood. As a young girl, my mother, sisters, and I would go visit my great-grandmother on the weekend, and help her work in her fields. Some of my first memories are of all my relatives gathered around scalding, peeling, and canning tomatoes for soup to sustain us in winter, and it's these memories I hold most dear. As a part of my upbringing, I was raised in a Southern Baptist church, and I accepted Christ at a young age. First and foremost in my life, I strive for my relationship with Him to take utmost priority, though I am not perfect and often struggle.

But anyways, back to GT. I was on campus two weeks early for Tech PrEP, a pre-calc course, so I suppose I was slightly less confused than your average freshman at 8:00 A.M. on August 22, but somehow I still found the prospect of starting college (finally!) more than a tad bit daunting. That morning dawned, and I scurried from class to class, praying I'd remembered their locations and names, along with 20,000 of my peers. My first impression of Tech was truly akin to that of a just-disturbed anthill, with students furiously darting between classes like so many ants trying to frantically get from place to place. My impression of Atlanta wasn't much different, only with more diverse ants and more varied reasons for running about.

As far as dorm life, and my impressions of it, it definitely takes a bit of getting used to. Back at home, I have a room to myself, so having a roommate was new. After a week and a half, I'm still not too fond of communal bathrooms, but I suppose that's just part of being a freshman at Tech. All in all, there's good stuff, like having a decent roommie, and awful stuff, but on the whole, the good outnumbers the bad.

This semester at Tech, I'll be focusing mostly on academics, with some, but limited, extracurricular involvement, just because I want to try and get my feet wet at Tech before diving in totally. I'm still unsure if I'll be co-oping, studying abroad, or doing research at this point, but I hope to find out soon. The extracurriculars I'm involved in so far include the Society of Women Engineers, the Technique newspaper, the Baptist Collegiate Ministries, and Hall Council. I'd  like to give Humans versus Zombies, Muggle Quidditch, Mock Trial, and fencing a try as well. In the mean time, however, I suppose I'll just have to wait and see what the year has in store.

One last laugh:
A lesser known fact about my home county- Tallapoosa, a town about ten minutes from mine, was once known as Possum Snout. See if you can figure out what's wrong with this "cat"!