Planet Olin

First off, I am still alive and kicking, I just haven't posted in a (very) long while. I'm blaming my total lack of ability to write non-scientific papers and the fact that I think in math now. But I'll do my best to be coherent...

Stanford is VERY fun; in fact, in some highly publicized Princeton Review survey (we all know how accurate those are...) Stanford was voted as having the happiest students. I can see why: sunshine, free food and/or alcohol are proliferous. Example: the Design division of ME throws a kegger every Friday afternoon, open to all ME students. And currently the sun is shining, not a cloud in the sky, and it's probably 80 degrees out. And it was that way yesterday. And it will be that way tomorrow.

Stanford is also seriously kicking my ass. Or rather, Stanford classes are kicking my ass. I'm taking just three graduate level classes (which is all the credits my fellowship pays for, which is just as well...) and eating a lot of humble pie. I look back upon PDE's with fond memories; compared to Classical Dynamics, that class was easy - I routinely spend two full working days each week to finish each Dynamics problem set (consisting of 5 problems) and that is with a lot of help from the TA's. (It's funny - all of Olin's advertising puts great emphasis on the fact that at Olin, TA's don't teach classes, but
A) Even at a research 1 university like Stanford, TA's do NOT teach classes either, even undergrad classes. They teach extra problem sessions or workshops.
B) Often, the TA's are better teachers than the prof, since they took the class before and know what issues students have. They also teach how to solve problems, rather than teaching concepts/theory, which is equally as helpful.)
In short, I love TA's. Lord knows I spend enough time with them...

Stanford classes are also really cool (despite kicking my ass). Biomechanics of Movement, the one BME (biomechanics) class I'm taking this quarter is ridiculously interesting. Ever wanted to know the force-velocity-length curve of muscle? How you actually walk? Why running on different surfaces makes you run faster or slower? Well, now I know. In Linear Algebra we've talked about how Google works, both the search algorithm and the page rank algorithm (turns out it's just a very clever use of matrices and column spaces) and lots of other applications (modeling gas fields, anyone?) It's pretty cool to be taking classes that don't have to teach how to draw a FBD or solve a 2nd order ODE and can move on to the cool applications of those ideas.

Stanford quarters are ridiculously short. I've been here for just a month, and already I have midterms next week (after which, I might cease to wax poetic about the wonders of learning stuff and instead admit how ridiculously badly I'm doing.) The good news is that graduate classes here are generally graded on an A+ to B- scale. The bad news is that getting a B- is a bit of a warning and a C means you should pack your bags and go to some place less demanding. Scarier than grades, though, is the prospect of quals next year. But we'll burn that bridge when we get to it...

And last but not least, Stanford research is very exciting. I've been sitting in on the lab meetings of Prof. Andriacchi and Prof. Delp's labs to get an idea of the kinds of projects they have open to new students, and it's all just really cool stuff. The good news is that since I'm funded, I don't have to join a lab group right away to find someone to pay my tuition, but I should still be around. The way it works in ME here, (unlike, say, EE) is that most people who take quals (93%) pass, but in order to even be allowed to take them, you already have to have a thesis project, advisor, and funding all lined up. Since ME's generally take quals the fall/winter after their first year, that gives a one year "courtship" window to find a lab, advisor, and project before finishing the MS. That sounds like a lot of time, but I'm so swamped with work this quarter that I haven't been able to do more than go to lab meetings and meet with professors, so I've done essentially no research. I am lucky, though, in that I'm reasonably certain of the lab I want to work in (Andriacchi's Biomotion lab) and the project I want to do (osteoarthritis, probably early diagnosis of or obesity links to), so I just have to convince them that I'll be a good researcher. Which shouldn't be that hard to do ;-)

I've been a horrible slacker at updating this thing. However, I think I have a legitimate excuse. I started dating a guy, and instead of surfing the web and logging onto gAIM at night, I've been watching movies and making Sweedish pancakes. To answer the two questions everyone has: his name is Paul, and no, I don't have any photos of him.

At the moment I'm in Te Anau for a few days. Most of my plans for going hiking have been spoiled, because thanks to a long winter there's a lot of snow up in the high country. So now I'm figuring out what lower altitude hikes I want to go on, all the while trying to convince Paul that he ought to come out this a ways.

When I get back to Dunedin I'll write more about what's been going on. There will even be cool pictures of a forest fire.

One Munro done, 283 to go! Had a fantastic hike up to Lochnagar in central Scotland this weekend despite absolutely atrocious weather. The day started out nicely but quickly deteriorated to steady 20-30 mph winds and several spats of rain while we were climbing over a 6 hr period. Wind chill brought the temperature down to the mid-20s, but the view from the summit made it all worth the hike. The countryside is so usual here, like somewhere between the mountains of New Zealand, the outback of Australia with a bit of the Rockies thrown in.  There's such a beauty to the place, though. I could just send hours sitting atop one of the hills watching the small, golden shrubs covering the landscape make slow, undulating waves with the passing breeze.

Went to Stonehaven on Sunday and took another much shorter hike along the coast to Dunnottar Castle, an old ruin near the city at the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. I’ve got some more photos up at http://photos.yahoo.com/enviro0025. I went with a group of French exchange students and I’ve run into so many recently that I think I’ve been exposed to more French speaking than English while being in Scotland. I’m overjoyed actually since I was hoping that I’d run into other spoken languages aside from English while I was here (I was expecting Gaelic, but French is great too). Sadly, my French is still very poor.

I found a really interesting website called Gapminder (http://www.gapminder.org/- kudos to Mel and Matt Ritter for originally finding a site linked to it) that shows graphically differences in health and income throughout the world. It really shows some of the misperceptions that I know I at least had about much of the rest of the world and helps in putting everything in perspective. Definitely a site to check out.

1) Receive a meeting request. Don't answer it. When questioned, respond, "Oh, I got it, I just kind of hoped it would go away."

2) Receive a meeting request, and for some reason, accept it. When the meeting time rolls around, sit in your office until the meeting organizer comes to track you down (>= 10 minutes after the meeting start time) asking if you're going to meet. Respond, "Oh, I didn't know the meeting was still on."

3) Send a meeting request to 5-6 people for a half hour meeting. Secretly, in your head, decide that this half hour is really just the time it will take everyone to arrive in the conference room (after you've had to go around and track them all down, of course), and that in actuality, the meeting request you sent is really more of a start-time suggestion. Plan to spend at least 2.5 hours on this meeting. Don't tell any of your invitees, and instead look offended when they have to leave for other meetings they scheduled after your half-hour block.

So Thursday was quite a bit of time spent at Olin, first as a CORPORATE GUEST (woo) for Career Initiatives Day, and then just as a plain ol' alumna for the later events.

The later part was quite the cycle of emotions. First of all, as some of you may have noticed at the alumni panel, I REALLY LIKE MY JOB. And it was really exciting to tell you guys how it will all be awesome and wonderful for you -- finally, after bitching about all the stuff we had to go through as the oldest students, it's really nice now to be able to say how great it is ;) So that was fun. Then the faculty cocktail hour, while not very well attended, was still fun to see how everyone was doing, and it was interesting to talk to profs about how things have changed sans the 06ers (not selfishly... not that I expect everyone cries all the time... just curious about how the personalities of classes have changed without always having our class around). And dinner? Dinner was weird. Walking from the OC into the dining hall, grabbing my plate and a tray and walking through the line... I actually got chills. I mean, Jon and I went for brunch a few weeks ago, and that somehow was fine -- it was more casual, it was just us, and it felt like we were visiting. But this, with the previous events of the day, as well as the large group of people from my class coming in at once (many of whom were my usual dinner crowd anyway), it felt really, really strangely familiar. And it was so easy to slip into the routine despite not having had it for so long. Also, I just really enjoy large groups of Olin kids. The conversations are very special. Fun! But weird.

The earlier part of the day was pretty much everything I love about Candidate's Weekend, multiplied by some factor I can't think of right now. CWE is great because I got to tell people I didn't know how awesome Olin is. Career Initiatives was great because I got to tell all the people I *do* know about the new stuff I'm doing that's really awesome. Again, as you might have noticed, I really like my job. It was cool to see you guys interested in the vehicles we brought and in the stuff the other Bluefin folks had to tell you about the company. Also, it was cool to see the frosh (but weird to have people politely introducing themselves to me like I'm a *real* corporate person... ha!). But most of all, you all really impressed the Bluefin folks. The EE manager with me had been in a kinda crappy mood earlier, and he told me how much the afternoon cheered him up. Brian, the president, was actually the one whose idea it was to come to this -- I didn't even know about it until a couple of weeks before. He was the one interested in coming out to recruit you guys. And normally, Bluefin's a little sketchy about letting even one person (let alone three) take over half a day to spend on non-project stuff ... but they told me afterward that the day had been more than worth it. So well done, you guys. You made me very proud and you're slowly converting what was previously a pretty MIT-centric company. You guys really rock.

On a side note, those of you who signed up for the Bluefin open house... remember how I told you it was a Tuesday? It's actually a Monday. Anyway, I'll have the person who does these things send out a reminder in the next week or so. Sorry about the mix-up :\

10 hours for a four page paper. Not quite as good, though more typical for me.
How much of that was staring and pacing, I'm not sure.

I used Arial to push the page count up to five.
This is the first time I've ever done that. Arial at 12 pt. looks gross.
I much prefer Garamond, but that would have made the paper just barely past 3.5 pages in length.
*edit* Went to Times New Roman for exactly four pages. I couldn't take the Arial.

I probably should get someone to review for coherence and typos, but eh.
Why I'm posting about this, I'm also not sure.
Worthless.

Stench is gone again.

The stench is back.
"With a vengeance," says Chris.

I can feel the sleep deprivation setting in.
I'm thinking about doing uncharacteristic things.
This post is an example.
Entirely my fault, no complaints.

Speaking of sleep deprivation, I'm thinking about finding a month long sleep study to participate in at the beginning of the summer.
It will fund the rest of my summer travels.
Those things pay ridiculously.

I feel popular today. After getting woken up at 8 by my cell phone ringing, and checking my voice mail to find that it was People Magazine, I decided to call the reporter back. Because I have only positive things to say about being a page, I figured that it would be hard for me to say anything that could be taken out of context. I'm pretty sure that the only thing that could misconstrued was when I said that yes, the program was strict, but it was necessary because we were a bunch of 16 year olds who would otherwise get into mischief (but what 16 year olds wouldn't?).

The reporter really wasn't all that interested in what I had to say. I talked a little bit about page life, and how structured it was. He was really keen to hear about how pages interacted with congressmen. I was a bit vague, since we were getting into territory where it would be easy to take a remark out of context. I'm sure the guy not exactly thrilled that I kept going back to how well protected we were...

So anyways, after twenty minutes the reporter called it quits, and I went upstairs to check email. That's when I saw a message on Facebook from a Scripps-Howard reporter asking me to email or call her, because she wanted to know about life as a page, job duties, etc. I rang her, and she told me that she's been hearing about how great the Page Program is, how amazing it was, how well we were supervised, and all that. Did I have anything to say about members making advances towards pages? Needless to say, I didn't, and she sounded pretty disappointed.

Sooner or later reporters will figure out that there is a wall of silence surrounding the Page Program. It's not because there are dirty secrets; it's simply the nature of the program to not call attention to itself.

Once a page, always a page.

Sooo.... apparently despite the fact that it's been four years since I learned to tie a tie and wake up at 5am (and learn not to wake up Mr. Dingle in the Cloakroom), the fact that I was a page still counts for something. People magazine just called, wanting to interview me. I think I'll give them a call back. My guess is that there's not a snowball's chance of me being quoted, because, like most all former pages, I'm showing my solidarity with the program and saying only the positive things that deserve to be known about life as a paje.

Now to find a store that sells the US edition of magazines, so I can eagerly start running around in a week trying to see if I got quoted.

Stop and Shop has changed since I stopped staying up all night to work on problem sets.
It's strangely nice and clean these days.

I am tired.