Caltech

News Day Tuesday

For as long as I can remember, my parents have kept a stack of news magazines in a wicker basket in the bathroom. As a kid, I loved reading the jokes and humor pages and rarely did more than glance at anything else. At one point, however, I decided that reading full-length stories was like eating vegetables—unpleasant but obligatory—and resolved to read magazines from cover to cover. Sometime last year, although I never read the newspaper, I happened upon an... Read more →

My Favorite Course of Freshman Year

A year ago, I was an excited prefrosh savoring the sweet scent of orange blossoms as I explored Caltech’s campus with my family. We’d come during finals week, so most classrooms were empty and hallways were quiet. However, outside, we ran across a professor and group of students testing small boats. The boats floated on plastic bottles, with Styrofoam cups and a rainbow of wires heaped on top. We watched them whiz around on the water for a bit. The... Read more →

Failing My Math Midterm

Spring term of freshman year is the first term on grades. Even after twenty weeks of adjustment under Pass/Fail, I didn’t know what to expect. Would the difficulty of classes be curtailed by point-picking students? How many students would be able to maintain high-school-high GPA’s? Or were we destined to make what most would under a bell curve grading system—C’s? I wondered this when I signed up for the tricky track of third-term freshman math, but didn’t have enough answers... Read more →

Spending Summer

Ten weeks. Less than a single Caltech trimester—that’s all the summer I have? Come on, see the glass half full. I have ten whole weeks of summer—fifty weekdays and ten weekends. The bulk of my time I’ll spend SURFing, that is, working in a lab for Caltech’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF). Most SURFs take place at Caltech, but mine is at a university near home. Each weekday after work, I have at least four free hours. I have a... Read more →

Joshua Tree, the Bee's Knees

I blogged about my trip to Joshua Tree National Park once already, but it was totally the bee’s knees, so here’s round two—in photos. Lizard. Bee. Tree. More Bee. Read more →

Why I Love Caltech's Cafeteria

Freshman year of Caltech is over, and—besides friends, clubs, and maybe classes— there’s one thing I’ll really miss this summer. Every weekday morning this school year, I awoke to the promise of the cool, tangy juice of plump red raspberries bursting in my mouth. Their sweet morning greeting motivated me to slide off my bunkbed, slip on sandals, descend a flight of stairs, and cross the courtyard into the cafeteria within minutes of my 7 AM alarm. Raspberries were my... Read more →

Liquid O2 is Blue

I didn’t know that liquid oxygen is blue until last Friday, when my physics professor brought it to class and let us play with the three-hundred-Celsius-below-zero substance. A bar magnet (ferromagnetic), liquid oxygen (paramagnetic), and liquid nitrogen (diamagnetic) I did have a vague recollection of being told before that liquid oxygen is magnetic, but in class, we briefly learned why. Although liquid oxygen has an even number of electrons, molecular orbital theory decrees that two of these electrons abstain from... Read more →

Good Night Sunrise

Last weekend I slept in a tent in the desert with three friends, squeezed together side by side like sardines, while infants’ wails rang from the tent in front of us and snoring blared from the one behind. The one of two campgrounds with running water in Joshua Tree National Park seems to be pretty popular for Memorial Day getaways. At 4 a.m., our tent was the obnoxious one. My alarm chimed loudly enough for the occupants of all twenty... Read more →

My First 짜장면 (Jajangmyeon)

Today, for the first time, my friends and I cooked Korean food on our own. My mom is Korean, and when she makes Korean food, I’m typically assigned the task of chopping vegetables or mixing salt into rice or some else mundane. The most pivotal role I’ve played in Korean food prep up until today has been spreading rice and vegetables on a sheet of seaweed and rolling it up to make kimbap, the Korean lookalike of sushi. Even then,... Read more →

Brioche + Berries + Bollywood

It was a fun Sunday evening. First, there was dessert. Then there was dancing. Brioche is French butter bread. It has a soft, velvety texture and a rich, slightly sweet flavor. My friends and I had purchased some from Trader Joe’s after being tantalized with samples. We really didn’t want to know how many hundred and seventy calories each slice contained. But that didn’t stop us from slathering our slices with vanilla cream cheese frosting and piling lemon-raspberry sauce on... Read more →