Sweet, glorious freedom

I just finished my last final. This means that I have ended a semester. This is a magical, magical thing indeed, for soon I will be home and sleeping in my own room and spending all day doing very little (besides hopefully coding my 4d minesweeper...need to work on that). That sounds like good fun.

As far as finals week has gone...it's been some of the best fun I've had while I was here. There was no homework, so all we had to do was study and take on average about 2/3 a final a day. That's not too bad at all. Plus there were noisy minutes...I now have a battle tye-dye Grace Hopper shirt to treasure forever.

I'm probably not going to post much during break, just so's ya know. Talk to ya guys when classes resume!

1/8

Finals occur next week...thus, this post will be short, as life's a bit crazy right now. I have a Humanities portfolio due Friday along with a CS project that my partner and I have almost finished prettying up. It's weird...pretty soon, I'll be home again. I don't know what I'm going to do for a month.

This weekend will probably prove to be nice, though. Friday night is Eastmas Eve, which should be nice and festive, followed by Saturday noon's Eastmas celebrations and Saturday night's Casemas party, in which there will be SNOW. I'm excited. It's going to be fun. Plus, hopefully I'm going to get a chance to go climbing this weekend. Sometime in here I'm going to study and take finals as well, but I'm feeling okay about classes right now. Physics seems potentially scary, but that's about it.

I'm sort of excited to see how next week turns out. We don't have a study week before finals, like the "Reading week" at other colleges, but we do have Quiet Days over the next week...that is, during the next week dorms are not allowed to be noisy at all, due to the many tests being taken and the studying occurring. However, restricting us to be noise-free 24/7 would be both sad and illogical, so we have "noisy minutes", or 15-minute periods every day in which great amounts of noise are produced by any means necessary, such that we won't go insane with the quiet.


I'm frankly intrigued by the amount of quiet spare time I'll have next week...I have one final each due Monday and Tuesday, one in class each on Wednesday and Thursday, and I'm not leaving campus until Saturday. Should be nice. But I'm sort of already anxious to start second semester, as I'm super-happy about my schedule. Hmm hmm hmm.

Scooter

I hope everyone had a nice break and ate well and had a good time with family. My break was quite nice, but it’s nice being back at Mudd.

This week has actually been reasonably light homework-wise…I’ve managed to stay ahead of assignments enough that I’ve been able to show my friends Kill Bill 1 and 2 without having to stay up particularly late to make up for lost time. Mind you, the light homework this week is probably connected to the larger projects due next week, but that’s all dandy.

Tomorrow is pre-registration for spring semester for me…I’m simultaneously excited and a bit scared. See, Mudd has a very large core curriculum, meaning that freshman schedules are pretty much out of our control for the 1^st semester. However, next semester we have 2 types of electives we’re required to take – one PE and one humanities/social studies/art class. Unfortunately, the way our schedules turned out makes it very difficult to find a lot of classes that fit, and seeing as freshmen are at the end of the line for registering for classes, I’m assuming that a number of the humanities electives I like are going to be full when I get there tomorrow. Oh well. It will work out somehow.

What else is new…oh! I have a new form of transportation! See, my goal previously was to learn how to unicycle reasonably quickly once I got to Mudd, and then to use that to get between classes. Unfortunately, unicycling is rather difficult and not a super-efficient means of transport. So, knowing my sister brought a Razor scooter that she didn’t seem to be using, I asked if I could borrow it. The glorious thing about using wheels to get to class is that there’s a slight downhill from the dorm end to “ac end”, or the classroom end of campus. Thus, one can pretty much just get on the scooter, and with a few kicks you can get up to a pretty good speed. It’s been making me extremely happy, as it seems to cut my commute from my room to class down by half, meaning more time for breakfast! Also, I like scooters. There has been frequent giggling and shouting of “WEEEEE!” in my traverses of the campus.

The calendar year’s almost over, guys! Good luck all of ya with whatever’s on your plate.

Edit: I may have spoken too soon about the scooter. On the way to Physics, I faceplanted due to the poor approximation of the ground that wearing pumps gave me. Fortunately, a friend saw me fall and got me cleaned up for the most part. But I need to negotiate this whole balance-with-strange-shoes-on thing.

Warm Turkey

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Eat lots of food and be grateful and stuff! Here's a post I wrote up yesterday - enjoy.

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I just have to give a brief tribute to how much Math 11 blows my mind. Right now I have Prof. Jacobsen, who teaches us Calculus. I will admit that I already like math quite a bit…I took what I thought was a lot in high school (though it turned out to be the bare minimum at Mudd) and generally liked learning the concepts. It more or less made sense.

That was before this class. Now, not only does it make sense, it's ridiculously awesome. We started this class with no idea of what anything was. We invented the idea of limits, and then derivatives, and then integrals. And one class period we just defined the natural log function as lnx = the integral from 1 to x of dt/t.

Today, we didn't have much material to cover, so just for kicks we did some stuff with complex numbers. That is, we proved Euler's identity that e^iθ = cosθ - isinθ, then went on to show e^iπ + 1 = 0, and then made polar coordinates for imaginary numbers make sense, just for kicks. To clarify how happy this makes me, I have to tell you that right now, in Quantum Physics, we're using imaginary numbers ALL THE TIME and up until a few weeks ago I had no idea that Euler's identity even existed. And then, with a brief flurry of chalk and a spoken explanation, it all makes sense. It's fantastic. I feel so happy.

Oh, and that's not even bringing in to this point how cool it is to have Prof. Jacobsen as our prof. I think that usually, with regards to math at Harvey Mudd, Professor Benjamin gets a bit of a celebrity status because of how dynamic he is and his ability to do "mathemagics"…he's quite a character, and pretty much everyone on campus knows who he is. Prof Jakes is less known, but I would say that he's a prime example of how nice it is to go to a college with professors who care. Whenever we finish a large proof, he asks, "Ca va?" (French effectively for "Is that okay?") and we all respond with a loud "Oui, ca va bien!" ("Yes, that's good!"). He's eccentric and fun and makes me look forward to morning classes, which is a formidable feat for a population experiencing continuous mild sleep-dep.

Right now, our professor is drawing a diagram of an airplane wing to introduce multivariable functions. And I think somebody just mentioned a multidimensional chicken. I love this class.

Party Time

Well, it's approaching Thanksgiving…tests and quizzes are occuring, and classes are starting to wrap up a bit. We're writing our last paper for humanities class, for instance. Mine currently contains 600 words about Albert Einstein's hair, so I am pretty thrilled, as you can imagine (don't worry, it's a legitimate topic, and his hair provides suitable evidence for my thesis). Also, we're soon starting upon our CS final project, for which I'm suuuuper excited. Physics is very quantum, as it should be.

This weekend there are going to be two fun parties rather than one…usually there's about one thing per weekend going on major-event-wise. Tomorrow night, there's Funball, which involves a lot of candy, blacklights and techno-music. That one's hosted by East. Then on Saturday night, there's a fancy-dress party called Long Tall Glasses taking place, which should be nice. I even got a dress! It's shiny! Yay.

If I haven't mentioned this enough, I really, really like Thursdays. I got to sleep in until 11:20 today, meaning I got over 9 hours of sleep. While it is perfectly possible to get a nice amount of sleep here with the right amount of applied effort, as I've said before, I will admit to averaging around 5-5 1/2, so that much sleep is a rare commodity for me. It should be helpful for Chem lab today, as it means I'll be less likely than usual to totally muck up our experiment through my own clumsiness. Ever since I toppled that one flask in the ice-water bath…

It's been a long week. A long several weeks, in fact. I'm looking forward to going to see family for Thanksgiving Break. Mind you, I feel a little sad missing out on Eastgiving, the Thanksgiving celebration held by East for those trapped on campus during break. But seeing family is rare and nice. It's a good thing that I've ended my vegetarianism in time for this holiday. Bless you, buffalo wings that broke my will power against meat.

Progressing

We're getting to the middle of the second half of the semester…we're beginning to have midterms and such. It's all very exciting. I've been quite enjoying the classes. We're now taking Quantum Physics, which is quite exciting and complex, literally, as we seem to be exciting particles to get photons and developing probability amplitudes with complex numbers. In the meantime, there's CS, which is always fun, Math 11, which involves taking everything we learned about calculus in high school and proving it, and Chemistry has been pretty dandy.

Today, in fact, Is particularly cool with regards to chemistry. In first year chemistry, one of our labs is Lead Lab, where we take soil samples from a nearby elementary school and test them for lead content. Not only that, we get the elementary school students to help us take the samples; they get to learn about how to graph data, what hypotheses are, and what this lead stuff is anyways. Today, my lab group is going back to the school a final time to present our findings on the samples we took. The sad thing is that our group's hypothesis was wrong. In fact, it was completely wrong…we have a ridiculously high level of certainty statistically (99.9999% for those who like stats) that the alternate hypothesis of which sample site has higher lead content is actually opposite of the theorized one. But that's not the point. The point is that we got data with significance. Lots of it. I'm looking forward to convincing our students that being this completely wrong about our hypothesis was the coolest thing that could possibly happen…we were wrong and learned something super cool anyways! Now I just have to figure out why there was so much lead in the soil right underneath a tree in the middle of a field.

We've had a lot of prospective students visiting campus these past few weeks. Which would be super-cool for us (my roommate and myself) if it weren't for the fact that most of them are boys…it's hard to get to host a visiting prospective student that's a girl. This past week, though, some girls visited, and we got to host one, which was fun. So, if you're reading this and you're a girl interested in attending Mudd, I highly recommend that you visit here and say hi.

Everyone should keep leaving comments and emailing…and if you leave a comment, check back, as my blog won't tell you if I reply to your comment.

Birthday

November 4th was my 18th birthday, and it was an awesome one. The following things occurred:

0. On Tuesday night, I was "kidnapped". See, there's a special antiquated law around here that says that taking any person under the age of 18 across county lines without parental permission constitutes kidnapping. The county line is maybe a mile away from us, and a little past it is an In-n-Out. Thus, after watching Dr. Strangelove for Humanities class on Tuesday night, I was carried to my friend's car for a kidnapping. A kidnapping involving a strawberry milkshake and fries. Not too bad.

1. At 12:00 AM a large group of people arranged for my twin sister and I (did any of you know I have a twin sister? I have a twin sister. She goes to Mudd too.) to be showered - a.k.a. picked up and carried off to a shower in another person's room and put in the shower fully clothed and momentarily drenched by said shower. Naturally, knowing that they were going to track me down and wanting to at least put up a good fight, I found a place to hide - under my desk. And it was a good hiding place, too, until SOMEONE told the horde exactly where I was hiding. My efforts proved fruitless, and I was indeed showered.

2. I finished all my homework due Thursday (today) in advance of yesterday, so I did not have to do any homework yesterday. I would just like to point this out because I've had a few messages asking about whether the homework load is as terrifying as it seems from some of the blog posts written by myself or other bloggers. The answer is yes and no. Yes, sometimes there is a ridiculous amount of homework here; yes, you'll probably end up staying up very late sometimes. But it is possible to manage it, as long as you do your homework before the night before it's due sometimes. At least for freshmen. I can't speak for other years much. The point is, I stayed up until 2 AM this week a bunch, but had I wanted to, I could have fallen asleep at or before midnight every day. I just didn't want to. So don't fret.

3. At around 4 PM yesterday, after class and a brief nap, I was told to go to East courtyard. And, after standing around with a bunch of people wondering why everyone was gathered in the courtyard, a singing telegram sent by mother was delivered. It should be noted that the deliverer was dressed up as Dr. Frank N. Furter from Rocky Horror Picture Show. There was a pretty good-sized crowd including the by the end of the…performance? It was about 20 minutes of oddity involving some singing and some general embarrassment of my sister and myself. We both got teddy bears, though. Actually, it was pretty awesome, albeit weird.

Many more fun things happened, including watching Firefly, procuring cake, getting a super-cool shirt from a friend (it says "It's ON like a PRAWN who YAWNS at DAWN" and depicts a prawn holding a coffee cup), and generally having a good day. Class was also attended, for the record. And my dad's visiting this weekend. Over all, life is pretty peachy keen.