All prepped and ready to blog

Today marked the arrival in Venice of 27 WPI students who will be here until December 19. It is the final group to officially mark the end of our protracted, multi-year 20th anniversary celebrations. As indicated in my blog entry at the beginning of the preparation term, these teams are tasked with completing some long-standing project themes, as well as with breaking some new grounds to set the stage for the next 20 years of projects in Venice.

The students have moved into their apartments, which are located in the more "Venetian" sestieri of Castello and Cannaregio and they have probably already had their first gelato and panino... (and who know what else?). Having learnt our lesson from last year's flood, we did not rent any apartments on the ground floor this year...

It is always fun to see the wide-eyed students, finally setting foot in the city they have been reading and studying about for the past two months. Venice is such a surreal place... even for me.

Tomorrow, we'll have our first group meeting at the Settemari club, and then the projects will begin in earnest. We have an exciting array of topics this year, all of which have been blogged about by the respective teams as they prepared their project proposals back in Worcester.

I will dedicate a new blog entry to each project in the days to come, as the teams zero in on the full spectrum of activities to accomplish their respective missions.