Caltech

Adios!

Hey guys!  After blogging for you guys for two terms, it's time for a break.  Sorry I've been so spotty this past term, but I hope some of the stuff I've written about has been helpful anyways.  As I said in my last post, I'm SURFing at MIT this term.  Part of what makes the SURF (summer undergraduate research fellowship) program so amazing is that for Caltech students, you can do research anywhere.  I have friends in Korea, at Stanford, at MIT, and other places around the world.  It also makes you realize how well prepared Caltech students are; we can go anywhere and fit in easily.  That being said, so far my SURF has been really awesome.  I have been doing a lot of cloning to make the protein sequences I will be using for the rest of my project.  I'm actually doing my first protein expression today and I'm really excited (and nervous to see if all my hard work over the past two weeks will work out). 

 Other than that, life is very normal and by that I mean boring.  The one downside of doing SURF at home is that I'm not around techers all the time, though they do still have a strong presence in my life.  There's another Caltech undergrad in my lab, named Cece, who's also a sophomore chemical engineering major.  In addition, two of the grad students in my lab did their undergrad education at Caltech, so we talk about the different houses, people we know in common, and a bunch of other stuff.  And of course, I have made friends here at MIT (really, they don't bite :P ).  In fact, I found out that the freshman in our lab is in the same sorority as two of my best high school friends and is moving into one of my friends' room next year.  Strange coincidences.  Also, one of my great friends and treasurer of Page House is also doing research at MIT (in the same building as me, incidentally).  So we've met for dinner a couple times and talked a bunch... it's really nice to have a friendly face around.

So other than all that, life is pretty chill.  Except it's sad that I won't be blogging for you guys anymore.  I remember reading these blogs as a prefrosh and even before applying and it was part of what made me realize what I wanted in a college and what Caltech had to offer and how much those two had in common.  I can only hope that maybe even one of my posts has given someone a good feel of what Caltech really is and what it offers to different people.  After two years at Caltech, I find more things to enjoy and people to meet; part of what's amazing about Caltech is that there is a small enough population that it's very easy to meet a lot of people.  For those of you guys coming to campus in the next year (or maybe two years...?), I look forward to meeting you.  Thanks so much for reading my blogs over the past six months.  I had a lot of fun writing them :D.

And... done?

Okay, guys, I'm going to apologize one more time for my scattered-ness this term.  It's been crazy and hectic and I haven't blogged much.  I'm sorta dissappointed with myself.  But oh well. 

Finals are completely done and I've already gotten some grades back.  Just waiting on the rest so I can (hopefully) breathe a bit easier.  And SURF started today for me!  I'm in lab right now actually (oops, should I really be blogging?  Yes, because I'm waiting for my mentor to come back), but I'm probably not where you think I am.  Unless you have a really good memory or stalk me or know me, you probably don't remember that I am doing my summer research at MIT instead of Caltech.  But in any case, I'm starting all my cloning and stuff for my actual project tomorrow, so today is meant to be very low-key and training-focused.  I have all my safety stuff taken care of (some of it carries over from last year, so it's less of a hassle) and get to start the fun stuff tomorrow.  YAY!

I guess I should give you guys a quick rundown of what's happened since I last blogged.  First off, ditch day!  It's not fair to the seniors who designed my stack to not give it a full post, so I will... tomorrow (get it, get it, ditch day is tomorrow... or some I'm told).  But as a brief summary, our stack was about game shows/reality shows.  It started with "Who's Line is it Anyway?" then moved to "Minute to Win it" and later "The Amazing Race" with snatches of American Idol, Project Runway, and Iron Chef America.  It was a lot of fun in the end and my group was awesome!!

Hm, what else?  Oh yea, I was given the responsibility of being a UCC (Upperclass Counselor... not to be confused with Upperclass Camp Counselor which are the prefrosh's leaders during Frosh Camp).  UCCs, as I talked about in my last blogpost, are meant to serve as mentors and helpers to younger students if they need help.  It's one part of the Caltech safety net and also helps with the house's social events.  Pretty much, it was sort of a big deal for me and I'm really excited for next year :D.  I'll have 4 frosh in my alley (and two seniors and my roommate and I) and I can't wait to plan some really cool alley events.  It's going to be fun!

Oh, and of course graduation happened too.  Graduation's so strange because you're super happy for the seniors, but you don't want to see them go!  So it's super bittersweet.  The same was true in high school I guess, but for me, it's an even bigger deal in college because I've lived with these seniors for the past two years and have formed some super tight bonds with some of them.  But congrats Class of 2011!  You guys did it!  Plus, seniors graduating means new prefrosh now!!!  And new prefrosh are always super fun.  Til next time...

Nommynomnom

Sometimes you choose your alley event because it sounds cool.  Sometimes you choose them because all your friends are going.  And sometimes you just are hungry and realize that there's an alley event leaving right at that point.  Yep, that's what happened this term.  Alley events are basically house events that are planned by the UCCs (Upperclass Counselors... not Upperclass Camp Counselors as anyone in the Class of 2015 will meet at Frosh Camp).  These range widely in terms of activities... food is common but other things often happen.  I've been bowling, eaten Korean BBQ, and eaten curry!  And best of all, everything subsidized (the house will pay 10 dollars towards your activity, which typically means a free meal).  Plus, typically, as it's organized by the house, there are typically cars so we can try places a bit further from Caltech... it's a good deal all around!

This time, I didn't put a lot of thought into my choice of an alley event.  I saw that there was one this weekend, on Sunday night and it was to Noodle World, a place I had been to before and really enjoyed.  Pretty much, they serve lots of types of noodles from a bunch of Asian countries so just about anyone can go and find something they like. In addition, the UCC, Ziying, was a good friend of mine so I knew I would have fun if I went.  I had told Ziying I might come, but that I would let him know the day of and if there wasn't room, I would give my spot to someone else. 

However, on Sunday night, I was hungry.  I wanted food.  I wanted soup noodles (I was a bit sick that week and who doesn't crave soup when they're sick?).  Basically, I really wanted to go to Noodle World.  So at 6:30 (we were supposed to leave at 7), I told Ziying I was going and he said it was fine.  So I talked to prefrosh in the IRC chat put on by admissions until 7 and then we left for Noodle World at 7.  In total, seven of us went including admissions blogger Jenn, who saw us as we were leaving and hitched a ride (she's not in Page so she paid for her own food). Noodle world has three locations, all around Caltech, in Alhambra, San Marino, and Old Pasadena.  I had been to the branch in Old Pasadena before, but we went to the Alhambra branch, which was MUCH bigger.  When we got there, there was about a 15 minute wait, so we ordered boba milk tea from the takeout area and waited for a table.  When we were seated, we helped some of the people in our group that didn't know what to order and I got the Chinese Noodles with BBQ pork.  Yumyumyum.  It was warm and noodly and yummy and exactly what I was craving.  Other people got pho, ramen (not the just-add-water kind!), and chow mein for example.  Everyone seemed pretty happy, though one person didn't really like their dish.  I got leftovers that I had on Monday for lunch too!  Overall it was a fun time and I got to talk to some Pageboys who I might not talk to all the time!

More Dressing Up!

I've raved a bit about this before, but never in a million years did I expect to dress up as much as I do at Caltech.  Between formal dinners, concerts, and random other things, I go through about 2 nice dresses a term... but I love it so I'll stop complaining.

Last week, the main event was ASCIT formal.  Probably the easiest way to describe this is prom for college.  ASCIT is Caltech's student government and a lot of the social activities for the entire campus tend to run through ASCIT (which by the way stands for Associated Students of Caltech).  ASCIT formal has been happening since forever, though we didn't have one last year because of the Third Eye Blind concert that happened on campus instead.  As much as some may have appreciated that, I personally really enjoyed the formal.  Anyone who reads these knows I like dressing up and ASCIT formal gave a great opportunity to do that.

On top of this, it was on a boat.  Yes, we were on a boat.  Everybody look at us 'cause we're sailing on a boat (yes, there were a lot of "I'm on a Boat" references in the week preceding it).  In any case, tickets went on sale the Monday before the event and were sold out by Wednesday; there were only 350 tickets for the undergrad population and they were only 25 dollars so there was actually a large amount of interest from students.  However, it was still possible to get tickets as not everyone who initially bought a ticket wanted it by Friday. 

Anyways, by Friday, the excitement had built.  After house dinner (which had crab cakes... yum), I started getting ready.  We were taking buses to the boat dock in Marina Del Rey and then boarding the boat there.  Here's a picture of my date, Ziying, and me walking the red carpet:

From there, we entered the boat.  There were four levels.  The first was a hangout area with couches and tables all around.  The second was an eating area with tables and chairs.  The third was a dance floor and was filled with balloons.  The top floor was an open-air deck and was really pretty! 

Most everyone started on the first and second levels and ate dinner (a second time... though by now we were pretty hungry).  It was a buffet with a lot of Italian food and was pretty good.  And.. well, you guys know I like food.  Once eating was done, everyone sort of dispersed.  Probably my favorite part of the whole experience was the top desk.  It was big and open and let you see the water all around (we actually saw a couple seals sitting on a dock and maybe a dolphin at one point).  Plus, when you have a friend who's short and adorable, it's great fun to tie a balloon to him and treat him like a little kid (by the way, Happy 21st Birthday Ka!!):

At other points in the night, we played cards and danced, which was also a lot of fun.  It's always great to be able to forget about the normal tech-y things and have fun ON A BOAT!

Such a busy term...

Every time I sit down to write a blog post, I am amazed at how much stuff I should talk about.  I've never had so much fun at Caltech and yet been in such a whirlwind.  It's almost incredible how much can happen in such a short amount of time...

1. Elections for Caltech's chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers: This was an organization I was part of as a freshman.  When you first get to Caltech, there's a giant club fair where people sign up for as many clubs as they want (depending on how much email they want to get... oh and their interests).  When I was a frosh, I saw AIChE at one of the boothes and signed up.  I knew coming into Caltech that I wanted to be a ChemE (don't worry if you don't know what you're planning on majoring in... there's plenty of time to decide and change and stuff once you are here).  Later that term, all the frosh who had signed up received an email asking for frosh representatives for excomm (executive committee).  AIChE is somewhat strange in that all members of excomm are elected in either their freshman or sophomore years; typically clubs include more senior members.  I submitted my short paragraph explaining why I wanted to help with AIChE and magically I was one of the frosh reps!  I helped out quite a bit that year with planning, making food at the ChemE BBQ, and convincing people to come to events (though free food was probably more persuasive than me).  Last year, I ran for vice president of the organization and unfortunately lost.  In the past year, AIChE has made some really exceptional steps; they set up a student-to-student mentoring program as well as a student-to-industry mentoring program.  These programs are exceptionally useful to the average student as chemical engineering provides many possible paths after graduation: grad school, industry, finance, and (possible but not typical) med school.  By exposing students to a range of possibilities, they are better able to make the best decision for them. 

In any case, when I got the email about AIChE elections again this year, I decided to run for treasurer.  It was a position I am pretty sure I can succeed at... I survived core math after all!  In addition, I really wanted to contribute to the chemical engineering community as a whole.  And unlike last year... I WON!  I was really excited and I'm looking forward to the next year.

2. Midterms+grades: Wow, midterms through me for a loop this term.  In general, I tend to do well on midterms and less-good on finals; I blame tiredness and dumb mistakes, though it is a frustrating trend.  This term, my midterms were really hard though!  ACM was miserable for me (still trying to figure out why) and the average on orgo was a 33/60 (yikes!).  It made everything pretty stressful.  Thankfully, I did well on ChE63b (thermodynamics) and Ec 11.  Oh well.  It happens and at Caltech it typically will happen to everyone eventually because everyone is so smart so that makes you feel better. 

So yea, that's a brief overview!  My next post will be about the wealth of formal event over the past week... it's been crazy how many nice dresses I've been wearing!

Warning, warning...

Danger, danger!  This post is really outdated.  Sorry.  Yeah, so I really want to talk about prefrosh weekend despite the fact that most of the people I interacted with that weekend have already made their college decisions.  First off, I realized how many of you guys actually read the blogs!  When I write posts, I have no clue how many people are actually reading them (other than I know my parents do).  So it's really cool when someone comes up to you and asks, "Wait, are you one of the Caltech bloggers??"  It's really great.

Anyways, despite this being my sophomore year, it was really my first prefrosh weekend I could enjoy.  Last year, I had a bio set that kept me quite busy.  This year though, I was done with work on Thursday and got to hang out with a bunch of prefrosh.  My parents also happened to visit that weekend and I had an orchestra concert so I didn't have a ton of time, but it was still really nice to be able to meet at least part of the next class.  Prefrosh weekend dinners are always some of the best attended; a lot of professors who hold 7pm classes will often allow students to come in late after dinner over this weekend because they know PFW is important.  Plus, it's now nice enough that dinners are outside!

So many prefrosh (and so many Pageboys)!  We also had some *cough* unique entertainment with one of our current frosh attempting to rap.  It was unexpected and he did a decent-ish job of it.

That night, we also had a bunch of activities with the prefrosh!  First, we had midnight wieners, a Page tradition.  Basically, if at dinner, the waiters and other members of the house decide that dinner isn't good (which is pretty rare!), we will declare midnight wieners.  That night (at midnight...) grill team will cook hot dogs for anyone interested (which is usually quite a few people).  For prefrosh weekend, obviously midnight wieners wasn't necessary (yummy CDS food!) but was a lot of fun!  In addition, we had members of social team making root beer and coke floats.  Yum!  Check out this soc team member, James:

Finally, we set up a bunch of different games.  There was a volleyball net outside and we rented a bunch of trash cans and filled them partly with water, creating a giant game of water pong (of course without drinking any of the water...).  After a while, that turned into a game of volleyball.  Inside, we set up a ping pong net on one of the tables and played ping pong with whatever paddle you could find.  This proved to be very entertaining as at an given time, a tennis racket, a phone, a Ma1a book, and a frying pan were likely to be seen.  One of our frosh was also giving breakdancing lessons in the lounge, people were playing Rock Band, pool, and various card games, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. 

So yeah, prefrosh weekend was great!  I talked to more prefrosh at a lunch on Friday and helped some people get around campus.  Unfortunately, I was busy for the rest of the weekend and didn't get to hang out quite as much.  But Class of 2015, I can't wait to meet you guys for real during rotation next year!! 

Catching up....

Hey guys!  I realize it's been forever since I've posted, but it's been one of those times.  Despite "only" having three sets due per week, I've been just keeping my head above water this term.  I had a couple insane weekends (ARC retreat and cocktail party, which I've already written about, orchestra concert, some interhouse parties, etc.) and really busy weeks (presentations for my humanities class, orgo quizzes, and sets oh my!).  Oh and prefrosh weekend of course!  I don't really know where to start on this blog post.  I guess I'll just talk about something that's been on my mind a lot lately, music.

First: I'm taking this awesome class on Beethoven.  Basically we go to class for 90 minutes and listen to classical music (typically Beethoven) for the whole time.  It's pretty fantastic.  And by pretty I mean amazingly.  It's really helped rekindle my classical music nerdiness, which has been great.  In addition, my roommate, Ying is taking the class so we often listen to pieces together.  On Monday, I gave a presentation on the Seventh and Eighth Symphony; the project gave me a chance to look in depth at the two pieces, do research into their origins (they were composed in the same place, one year apart and premiered only 2 months apart for anyone who's interested), and really learn more about Beethoven.  In addition, we had played Beethoven's Seventh in the orchestra last year so it was a nice recollection to my young, innocent freshman year.  It's really awesome that Caltech offers the range of humanities classes as they do, especially as such a small school, and it's clear that students appreciate them.

Second: Orchestra concert!!  This was our third concert of the year and our second to last one!  Unfortunately, due to a miscue in scheduling, we only played at Occidental College as opposed to at both Caltech and Occidental.  The program was also quite unusual: we opened with Procession of the Nobles by Rimsky-Korsakoff and followed with Schubert's Symphony No. 6.  After intermission, we played the Afro-American Symphony by William Grant Still, which was beautiful, but much different than the typical symphonies we play.  It was filled with jazzy rhythms and had an incredible amount of soul to it.  At the same time, it was not just a jazz piece.  In fact, it opened with an english horn solo, which was played beautifully by someone who works at JPL.  The whole thing was a lot of fun and in general, we played fairly well. 

So yeah!  Prefrosh, if you love music, Caltech has lots of opportunites for you to explore different aspects of music and learn and grow.  Despite that I am playing less than I did in high school, I feel like each time I play I really improve, which is a nice feeling.  And it's also really cool to know that anyone around you can describe how the physics of how your instrument works.  Welcome to Caltech.  I'll try to update sooner next time!

Page Cocktail Party!

Just about every house has their own traditions.  A lot of houses go on ski trips, some go on beach trips, others visit the desert.  The traditions are (obviously) well established and are something that the house members tend to look forward to.  One of Page's traditions is cocktail party.  Page cocktail party is Page's main "formal" event other than formal dinners.  What makes it a bit different is that every attendee is required to be invited, have a date and be properly dressed, while at formal dinners, dress is more optional and dates are certainly not required.  However, the "date situation" is something that always causes a stir around the house.  For people in relationships, it's not really a big deal either way.  However, for those who are single, they need to find someone to go to cocktail party with (sorta like prom but more friendly).  In the end, everyone who wants to go can go, but the leadup is a lot of fun.  This year, Page cocktail party was the same night as ARC retreat, so I ended up being late (and missing out on a lot of picture opportunities).  However, when I arrived (around 11:30ish), everyone was already sitting down.  There was a bartender making drinks (each named after one of the 8 undergraduate houses and all available in non-alcoholic forms).  Last year, they named the drinks for notable Pageboys, which everyone had a lot of fun with.  Once everyone was at the party, we mingled and played cards.  In addition, various Pageboys volunteered to play live music for the entirety of the party.  It was a lot fun.  Well, here are some pictures (because this atmosphere is really best captured in pictures):

Christine was really excited by the shrimp cocktail (Christine really likes shrimp if you couldn't tell)

From left to right: Steph, Kelly, Ying, Christine.  This was one of the music groups that played.  All four girls are sophomores in Page House and (clearly) they formed a flute quartet.  Last year, Steph, Anson (now a senior), and I played various trios for about 2 hours through the night.

Roommates!  And enantiomers!  This is me (on the left) and Ying.  We both saw these dresses on a website and both wanted the one we ended up wearing.  However, I thought Ying wanted mine at the time.  It was very confusing.  However, we have since called them our enantiomer dresses as they are non-superimposable mirror images.  Yay Caltech and orgo humor!

ARC Retreat! *

So one of the really neat things about Caltech is that it is small enough that it's very easy to get involved in different activities.  Obviously if you don't plan well it can overwhelm you (but that's true anywhere), but needless to say there are plenty of opportunities.  So, when house elections came around, I decided to run for ARC representative for Page House.  The ARC (Academics and Research Committee) is a student's main link to dealing with problems that occur in classes; however, it also runs some really cool programs to encourage student-professor interactions such as student-faculty lunches (where once a month a group of students who sign up get a free lunch catered by the Athenaum (the nicest, members-only facility on campus), and get to talk to a prof).  In addition, the ARC publishes a guide to academics for freshmen.  In recent years, newer programs have also started through the ARC, including course capturing, so it's now possible to re-watch certain classes' lectures if you feel you may have missed something.  All in all, it seemed like an opportunity to stretch myself and work to make Caltech an even better place.  Unfortunately, I did not win the election :(.  However, the next week, I received an email asking people to apply for ARC Rep-at-Large positions and, as I talked about last term, I applied and received one of the openings. However, by the time this happened, it was near the end of term so my first ARC meeting was on ARC Retreat.

At Caltech, at lot of major clubs have retreats.  This is typically a weekend or part of a weekend where the entire group goes off campus to avoid distractions and does work for the club.  Obviously it also has the benefit of being able to experience some new places around the Southern California area.  For ARC Retreat, we went to a house in Corona Del Mar that is used as a research laboratory for the Davidson Lab.  The rooms were very basic and about half the people slept on couches or mats on the floor due to size restrictions.  However, we also didn't have to spent too much money for accommodations either, so we were able to use a lot of the budget for food (and what college student doesn't like food?).  When the retreat planning began, I volunteered to organize food; this meant finding a nice place to eat, figuring out breakfast foods, finding somewhere to order delivery from, and of course the always important snacks.  And everything I planned worked!! :D

Here's a picture of the group of us in front of the laboratory where we worked. Front: Margaret, Middle (L->R): Mahati, Pushpa, Bhagav, Malvika, Lucas, Me, and Ishan, Back: Catherine, Race

Over the course of the weekend, we discussed how the ARC was currently working, the expectations for the year, and new things that we wanted to accomplish.  Each point was well discussed by the group, which we don't really have time for in normal meetings with everyone's busy schedules.  Overall, it was super productive!  To celebrate, we went out to a fancy dinner (using the money we saved on lodging).

Yum!

Um wow...

So in my last post I told you about the classes I was taking and I sort of alluded to the fact that this was probably going to be a rather rough, busy, but awesome, term.  Now that I have my full schedule I've realized it even more.  Here's my google calendar for a glimpse of my schedule:

Yup, you can see it.  I have 8.5 hours of class on Monday and 7.5 hours of class on Wednesday.  My other three days aren't bad at all which is good (except for Ch3b lecture which got scheduled for Thursday at 9:30 because that was the only time everyone in the class was free...eww).  Luckily, the first week has been sort of chill (we only had about 90 minutes of Chem Lab to get us acquainted with the lab and go over safety and stuff because the professor wanted to keep everyone in the same place).  So here are some of my first impressions:

Ch41c: This class should be very similar to the earlier terms of orgo.  I like orgo, ergo this term should be fun.

ChE 63b: The second part of thermo seems to be shaping up to be significantly more difficult than the first part, but we haven't really gotten into new material yet.  The professor is very keen to have us learn programming (in MATLAB, which I have some knowledge about).  In addition, the sets are going to be due on Thursdays, when Ec 11 sets are also due, so I'm going to have to start something early...

ACM 95c: This class seems like it's going to be more difficult than 95b but that could also be simply because 95b was quite straightforward (and a lot of review from Ma2a).  So far the class seems interesting (we're doing quasi-linear first order PDEs... don't worry if you don't know what that means... I didn't either before starting the class!).

Ch3b: The lab component of this class hasn't started yet, but I just came back from our first lecture and I'm really excited for lab to start.  The first lab that we're tackling involves forming an oxime and using a Beckmann rearrangement to predict the stereochemistry of the product.  I need to start my prelab for this class... (hm, it's amazing how good blogging can be for procrastination...)

Mu 123: YAY!  I love this class already.  I'm taking it with my roommate so we've been listening to a lot of classical music in our room lately.  The class is really well organized and includes a huge range of people (grad students, undergrads, etc).  On top of that, we basically listen and discuss Beethoven for 3 hours per week.  So I've been spending a lot of my downtime getting ahead in this class (doing the reading and taking the quizzes).  Woohoo (shoot, I should start some of my harder work...)!

Ec 11: This class seems like it's going to be really interesting.  The professor did his undergrad work at Caltech so he knows what our life is like.  Other than the daily (in class) quizzes, this class seems like it's going to be fun.  Plus I know about 10 people taking it so there are lots of people to collaborate with!

So that's a general overview of some first impressions of this term.  I'm in class for 26 hours per week which is probably going to be a bit rough, but I also have some good down time as well (especially at the end of the week).  This coming weekend is going to be a lot of fun with Page Cocktail party and ARC retreat, so I'll let you know about that soon!