Lots of great comments about Monster Golf from the last posting. If you guys are ever at Caltech look me up and we can go play a round or two. We have ten clubs and twenty balls so we can definitely do large groups.
Something cool I left out of the last post was how we got the monster golf clubs. Caltech has a fund called the Moore-Hufstedler Fund (MHF) which funds about $180,000 a year of random student proposals. They paid to have Jimmy Eat World have a concert at Caltech a couple of years ago, they bought gym equipment for the houses, every year funding a bunch of proposals including helping Ben and me buy $300 worth of Monster Golf clubs. Thank you MHF!
But Monster Golf was last week. This week is Midterms.
I don't talk about classes a lot on this blog. The parties, etc make for better conversation, but Midterms week seems like the right time to break that rule.
What can you expect from Caltech Academics?
It's difficult. But not because you have so much more information thrown at you. It's because you are expected to think about the material, analyze, and apply your knowledge.
This differs a lot from High School. In High School you would learn the power rule, you would practice the power rule, and then on the test you would regurgitate the power rule. Caltech doesn't have much regurgitation. This was problem on my Mechanics Midterm:
What is the minimum length of a 1-inch diameter solid steel bar that can be bent in a full circle without yielding? (Yield stress = 30 ksi, E = 30,000 ksi)
We had talked about bending forces. We had talked about yielding and elasticity, but we had never done this problem. You had to take your knowledge about the material and figure it out.
This is a much more interesting, fun way to do science. You feel like you are actually discovering something, like if you were in the 19th century you could have been Rankine (a dead thermodynamics guy), but it also means that you don't get 100's on your tests anymore, which is fine because everything is on a curve. This is a favorite image of mine.
That being said Caltech hard. I had done physics in 10 weeks that MIT phys majors spend 15 weeks on. I was the top of my class in High School. I came to Caltech and was in the middle. That's something that you have to accept. The advantage is there are people to help you now. I'm very good at Thermo and so I help Ryan in that in return for him tutoring me in Mechanics.
So I guess the only question is: You up to it?
Next time we will cover something less serious :)
-Tyler
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
-Albert Einstein (And Tyler Hannasch)
