How’s it going everyone? I am Adhav Arulanandan, no worries if it takes you twenty tries to get that right. I’m from Crystal Lake, Illinois, about an hour out from the Windy City. I am a first year Aerospace Engineering major (and Physics soon). I will be graduating.

My high school English classes ran the gamut from the boring and rote Literary Explorations III to the more exciting and free Creative Writing. They were always writing-heavy though, which was an issue since I was awful at writing going in to high school. All the practice helped me get a lot better, and it was through my Creative Writing class that I learned the issue was that I concerned myself too much with what I anticipated my audience’s reaction to be. I focused more on just getting my ideas onto the page with less of a self-inflicted filter, and I saw my writing quality rise. My biggest regret was not realizing this sooner, since I never had the opportunity to apply this to my speaking ability. I’m still a nervous wreck when I get up to speak to any crowd of more than zero people. This is (obviously) my first English class at Tech, and it is where I hope to improve my public speaking skills the way I did my writing in high school.

I haven’t watched much TV in the last three years, mostly because in my high school dorm, we didn’t have cable (I also procrastinated a lot, leaving myself no free time to watch TV, but let’s just blame my high school). I would, however, go home most weekends to Bears games and recorded episodes of The Big Bang Theory and The Middle.

Don’t give me that look of pity, we’re relevant again.

My brother and I also tried to finish Friends, which for some reason took us three summers, and this summer we started BoJack Horseman. My junior year roommate binged Netflix shows, and I often watched with him, even during the following year when we were no longer roommates. The shows we watched (though I missed episodes in between), included The Office (US), How I Met Your Mother, and …

It’s been a while.

Orange Is the New Black, which is the series I will be reviewing for this class. It is a show about a women’s prison and inmate Piper’s journey through a life that she, at first, is clearly not cut out for. A friend introduced it to my roommate and I by gushing over the incredible job the creators do with character development throughout the series, and even by watching a few episodes of the first season I was able to see what he was talking about. I was a fan, but homework piled up and took over, so I never finished. But now I have an excuse: it is, literally, my homework to watch this show.