Caltech

First day of school, y'all!

Even though it’s my first week of senior year, I had the first week of school rush I did during my freshman year at Caltech. With some definite differences.

First, the University of Melbourne is huge compared to what I’m used to. There are over 25,000 undergraduate students at Melbourne Uni. (One of the words I’m still getting used to. I have to correct myself: it’s not college, it’s not school, it’s uni.) A huge difference from Tech’s 900. I’m used to walking around campus and saying hi to about every third person I walk by. Here, though, I feel that if we didn’t keep texting each other around lunchtime, I’d never run into anybody I know.

Oh, and by the way, it’s winter! So I’ve been throwing on layers every morning. During orientation, rather than stand around outside in the cold, we ran into one of the cafés on campus for refuge (and food!). Here's Maria enjoying coffee something chocolately.

The campus itself is only a few times bigger than Caltech’s, but they’ve crammed in way more buildings, which makes it difficult to get around since there’s so much.  I spent a lot of time walking around lost this week. It’s not like the first day of school at Tech when there’s about 200 frosh that are walking in a funny-looking mob from math to chem to lunch. Thankfully, I’ve given myself plenty of time to find out where I’m going, and if not, there’s a handy map in my student diary (planner). There have been a number of times when I’ve sworn I saw Union House, knew exactly where I was, and walked in exactly the opposite direction that I wanted to go. (Union House is a place that houses places to grab food and sit down to eat, one of the bookshops on campus, lounges, an Apple store, and a number of other things I’ve yet to explore…) I also keep making a giant loop that always lands me in front of the arch in the picture below. At least it's a good landmark.

I’ve also been doing a lot of vocab learning. Not just new spellings that still make me do double takes (like “enroling” instead of “enrolling” and “specialised” instead of “specialized”). I’ve learned that when someone asks you what course you’re in, it’s not the class you’re currently sitting in, but rather your major or field of study. There are also no classes, they’re called “subjects,” and your recitations are “tutorials”. Also, many classes have “readers” that include the reading material for the whole semester: handouts, essays, excerpts from books, etc. The one for my “God and the Natural Sciences” class is just over 600 pages. No big deal.

 

People here also often say “ta!” for “thank you,” something I definitely wouldn’t have caught if someone hadn’t pointed it out to me. More entertaining than all the new words, though, is how much Mia (who’s from Canada) and I are rubbing off on our British friends, and vice versa. Sarah shudders every time she catches herself saying “trash,” “laundry,” or “sweater.” (“Everything I say is coming out in American! Sweater?! It’s a jumper!”) On the other hand, last night, I caught Mia saying “I’m just going to the loo.” I’ve had my slips of a British accent, too. However, I’ve decided that if I can get them to say “y’all” even just once, I’ll consider my mission complete.

Jess, a friend of Sarah’s from home that was visiting, warned her, “If you come back to England saying ‘y’all’, I will disown you.”

FINAL She'll be comin' around the mountain when she comes...

Throughout this blog, I’ve interspaced pictures from our arrival at the resort because I think a blog is easier to read if there are a lot of photos.

So, on this last Monday evening, Jaeeun (a GIST undergraduate in my lab) and I found out that we were expected to perform a dance for our lab group at the workshop we were attending on Wednesday. That’s right; they gave us two days to learn a K-pop dance. They even told us not to bother to come in to work on Tuesday and to just stay home and practice! We rehearsed for 1 hour on Monday night with the help of a GIST student who can actually dance and then again on Tuesday morning. Jaeeun and I are both stiff and not very good at learning dances, so this was very difficult for us. You can see the dance we learned here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTzxiCjSctA

 

After two hours, we took a break for lunch and our weekly lab meeting. I met Sylvia for lunch at the nicer restaurant on campus. They actually have a menu you can order from and you get more food and more side dishes. It was extremely hot on the way to restaurant. For the past month it has been cloudy and rainy, but on Tuesday it was at least 90 F. My bicycle seat was so hot I could not sit down; I had to bike standing up!

At the restaurant I ordered pork cutlet. It is my favorite thing to eat when I miss the US. Pizza would be the best, but it is expensive and I have to go off campus to get it. The dish is a big thin piece of breaded pork coverd in some kind of sweet-ish brown sauce. It isn’t like anything I’ve eaten in the US exactly. It is just one of the non-spicy foods here made of meat I am used to that doesn’t contain bones that I need to avoid. Also, they always serve it with a knife and fork. Now, I’m good at using chopsticks, and for many foods I think they are easier to use than forks, but nothing says USA like a fork.

Let me tell you about our usual lab meetings. The meetings and presentations are in English. Usually three lab members will present a powerpoint of their research and/or a related paper they have read. It is difficult for a lot of the students because they do not know a lot of English. Professor Tae is also very particular about wanting them to show everything and explain the data and trends and he asks questions in English.

On a related side note, professors here are more formal than the ones I’ve met in the US. In Korea, hierarchy and age are very important. There are polite forms of many Korean words that you should use when talking to elders, including colleagues who may only be one year older.  There are familiar forms to use when speaking to friends or younger people and there are also neutrally polite forms to use when speaking to people approximately your age that you don’t know well. Anyway, my point is that here it would be unthinkable to call a teacher by their first name, unlike in the US. Also, I have heard from the Korean graduate students here that in private meetings with Professor Tae, he will yell at them when he scolds them! This doesn’t upset them because to them it is a normal thing to expect. In the US, I think a professor would only yell if they were extra angry, but here it seems that professors yell simply to emphasize a point! The Korean students said that he does not yell at international students, especially non-Asian ones because he knows they are not used to Korean culture.

There are also special titles that you should use when referring to people older than you. There are a lot of them, depending on the gender of the speaker and the gender and age of the subject. The only ones I know right now are the ones relevant to me. As a girl talking to people in their twenties and thirties, I should refer to older boys as oppa and older girls as Onnee. If I need to call someone by name, I treat their name as a prefix, i.e., “Carly-Onnee”

 

Back to the narrative….

After the lab meeting, the students began discussing the specifics of our upcoming trip in Korean. I heard my name a few times, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying, so it was quite frustrating. That is okay though, because it encourages me to study harder. I am taking a Korean class four days a week here, and it is very helpful.

That night Jaeeun and I practiced our dance for another two hours. We got tired and hungry in the middle, so we took a break and Jaeeun convinced another GIST undergraduate boy to order food for us. Yay for free food! For those of you not yet in college, you have no idea how wonderful free food is… Anyway, we ordered sundai, which is made by stuffing pig intestine with a rice and blood mixture and then cooking and slicing it. I know it sounds gross, but it is a popular snack food here and it is actually pretty tasty. We also had duboki, which involves rice cakes and vegetables covered in a spicy red sauce, and some kind of fried vegetable thing that we dipped in a vinegar-soy sauce mix and wrapped in lettuce. It is very popular here to order delivery food, especially late at night or when it is raining.

The next morning we met our lab members at 7:30 am to embark on our six hour drive. There were 15 of us, so we took one normal car and one huge van. The two boys who drove wore pull on sleeves on their arms to protect them from the sun. We were surrounded by mountains during the entire drive. However, the road was pretty flat. There were tunnels through the mountains and bridges over the valleys.

 

They have some really nice rest stops that sold a lot of different food including ice cream and fried food. We went to a decent restaurant at one of them for lunch. I did my usual thing, which is that I wait for everyone else to order and then I copy them! The most popular food ended up being a sweet soup with rice noodles, beef, and onions. There was also rice, and some side dishes, including two types of kimchi. This soup is known as the king’s food and variations of it are sold all over Korea. The way to eat it is this: scoop some meat from the soup into your spoon, scoop rice into the spoon and then eat them together. This was very complicated and difficult for me because it required using a spoon in one hand and the chopsticks in the other. I used the spoon in my left and the chopsticks in my right, but I think most Koreans use the spoon in their dominant hand, so now I am trying to learn how to use chopsticks with my left hand. It is hard, but not as difficult as I thought it would be.

I also had my first entirely-in-Korean conversation at the rest stop! I saw a food I liked, said I liked it, another girl said she thought it was delicious, and I agreed with her. Yay!

When we finally reached the resort in Sokcho (my own phonetic translation…I don’t know the official English spelling), 6 hours after we started, we went straight to the workshop. It was a series of powerpoint presentations of something sciencey entirely in Korean. Occasionally there were English words on the slides, but not enough to know what was going on. I spent several hours practicing sounding out the Korean words on the slides, but since I did not know their meaning it was still less than entertaining. Professor Tae said that the speakers were all important people; former or current presidents of the Polymer Society of Korea or CEOs of companies.

                Afterwards we checked into our rooms. Six of us girls shared a room. There was one bed. The rest of us had to sleep on mats on the floor, as you can see below:

All of the pillows were, relatively, quite hard and heavy. Sand is the closest comparison I can make to the filling, but it was a little lighter with a larger grain size.

For dinner that night, we joined all the other people for a HUGE buffet. I tried nearly everything, so I was super full. It was really delicious. My favorite part was the cinnamon tea from the dessert table. It is a popular dessert here that is served to a lot of restaurants. After dinner, the “recreation” started. An announcer got up and began saying apparently funny things in Korean and asking the audience questions. At first this was okay, but eventually this ended in lots of embarrassment for me, which you’ll hear about in my next blog!

New people at healthcare conference

In the last post, I talked about spending some time doing something meaningful other than my research. Last week, I arranged a visit with an oncologist that I have worked under before. I went to his clinic, where I shadowed him for a few hours when he checked up on his patients. His name, once again, is Yun Yen. Dr. Yen doesn’t see that many cancer patients nowadays. I suppose it is due to his aging and his research. The man is a MD/PhD, who leads a whole lab at a cancer research hospital in LA. If you want to read more about my experience and my thoughts, you can go to the previous post.

This post is about attending a healthcare conference and touring the University of Southern California (USC)! This event actually happened last Saturday, July 16^th, in Tutor’s Ballroom at USC. A group called Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) held the conference to raise awareness about Single-Payer Healthcare. So why am I going to this conference on healthcare? Well, this is a long story. It all started about a year ago when I went to a conference about healthcare hosted by PNHP’s daughter organization, CaHPSA (California Health Professional Student Alliance). The conference was an introduction to the single-payer healthcare system. It was very comprehensive and logical. I enjoyed attending it and learning about the beliefs of some physicians regarding health care.

After that conference, I followed closely with CaHPSA and became active. This summer conference held by PNHP is one of the main annual events for PNHP and CaHPSA. Curious as to what this conference could teach me, I signed up for it. As it turned out, a day at USC listening to physicians talking about politics and meeting fellow young scholars who are interested in medicine or public health was exciting and enjoyable.

A lot of what was mentioned and talked about during the conference was either information mentioned in the conference I attended last year or strategies to persuade others for the single-payer cause. I was a little disappointed, not at the speakers but by the fact that I did not learn too much new development. The speakers were great. There was constant laughter, nods, and applause among the audience, which demonstrates the competence and humor of the speakers. I was thoroughly entertained by the words of a lady speaker comparing single-payer versus the current US health care system. Her sentences were rich with metaphors and her jokes filled with meaning. Through most of the day, I was engaged and focused on the speakers.

Meeting other youth at the conference was also exciting. There were about ten young adults there, mostly college students and medical students. We are all somehow involved in CaHPSA and interested in single-payer. I was not shy about breaking the ice. When I first got the conference, I introduced myself to a group of youths and started conversations. Among all the youths there, I spent most of my time in a group with three others. The first three people I met there are Roy, Kelly, and Kelly’s friend. Roy is an incoming junior at UCLA. Kelly just graduated from UC Berkeley and is taking a year off. Kelly’s friend is going to attend Harvard Law this fall. I was very impressed by the level of education of the CaHPSA members and felt honored by being interested in their cause. In just one day, I felt I have made friends with these three. I would want to talk about touring the USC campus if I had more time.

The lesson is to go out there and meet new people!

Mud Festival

On last Saturday, July 23, Kelly, Sylvia, and I went to the opening day of the week long annual Mud Festival in Boryeong City by Daecheon Beach with several of the GIST undergraduates and another foreign graduate student. None of us had ever been there before, nor did we know very much about it, so it was an exciting adventure for all of us.

We needed to take a 2.5 hour bus ride from Gwanju to Boryeong City, but when we arrived at the terminal, there were not enough seats on the bus for everyone in line. Our choices were to either wait an hour for the next bus, or to sit on the floor! Fortunately, it had not rained that day, so the floor wasn’t wet and muddy. There were a lot of foreigners on the bus. I met an English teacher from Texas who was very nice and shared his breakfast with me. In fact, the vast majority of Americans and Canadians in Korea are English teachers. It seems like a great opportunity to me. The ones I have spoken to have had their housing provided for free while they are here, plus their salary. They need to work during the week, but they have the time and money to travel and see Korea on the weekends.

We had to get up early that morning to catch the bus, so we tried to sleep on the floor by leaning against one another, but it was quite difficult! Two and a half bumpy hours later, we arrived at the Mud Festival. I hadn’t seen so many white people since I left the states! There were so many ethnicities there that we felt like we were in California, not Korea. I heard that a lot of the foreigners are US military, stationed in Korea.

We were able to rent some lockers on the beach, and then we went and got covered in mud! Buckets of mud were provided along with paintbrushes. For 5000 won (US$4.76), we got to ride big blow up slides covered in mud and run through mud covered obstacle courses. These were fun, but perhaps not worth the long wait in line.

 

While we were waiting, the Korean students taught us a game to pass the time. We stood in a circle and made fist with both hands with the thumbs together on top. If you kept both thumbs down, that meant “0”. One thumb=”1”, two thumbs=”2”. We took turns saying a number between 1 and 10 and then everyone chose a thumb position. If the thumb number was different than the chosen number, we continued around the circle. If the number was the same, the person who chose the number got to punish everyone else by slapping their forearms with two fingers. If you did it right, it made a loud slapping noise, but I could not get the hang of it. Seungbo, one of the undergraduates, said that I “had no skill” for it!

There was also an area where you could paint designs on yourself with colored mud. Unfortunately, the line was too long for us to paint ourselves, but here are some pictures of other people.

We swam in the ocean when we wanted to wash off. There were so many people there! It was super crowded.

At least half of the people were foreigners. I know that every time I look in a mirror I see a white person, but I was still surprised by all the foreigners at the beach. Anyway, there were a lot of cool shells at the beach, too. When we first arrived at the festival, it was sunny and hot, but while we were at the beach it poured rain, and then it was sunny again in the afternoon. It is rainy season here, but the Koreans said that that was still pretty weird weather.

For lunch, we had the Korean version of fair food. I had a Korean corndog. They called it a hot dog, but it was basically a corndog with a strange breading. I also had some boneless fried chicken. The batter was more like tempura than American fried chicken batter.

We spent the afternoon exploring the area around the festival and playing in the mud and the ocean. It was so fun! What I thought was also interesting is that a lot of Koreans do not wear swimsuits when they go to the sea. Instead, they usually wear a t-shirt and shorts. The GIST students tell me that while Koreans will wear bikinis and swim trunks to water parks, only a few will wear such outfits to the beach.

Afterwards, we paid 2,000 won (US$1.90) to use the public showers they had at the beach. They were disgusting. First of all, the entryway was also the changing area and the exit, so mud covered people were trying to squeeze past clean people in a very small space. The shower itself was just a large empty room with showerheads attached to the walls, no stalls or curtains. They were the type of shower heads that you can move around on a hose, and the water was cold. The floor was also pretty dirty, and the drains were covered in garbage.  For a buck ninety, I expect either lukewarm water or a garbage free floor…

At dinner time, a lot of the restraints near the festival were temporary ones were full of foreigners. Fortunately, we had Koreans in our group. They found a Korean place for us to go to for dinner. The other diners there were the local workers from the festival, so we knew it was legit. The meal was a spicy stew of various meats, noodles, and veggies. Seungbo said that this dish originated during WWII when many Koreans did not have much food, so they would just throw whatever food they could find together to make this dish.

That night there was a free concert on the festival grounds. Now, I usually don’t like concerts that much, but this one was really fun! It began with some speeches by the mayor of the city and some other government officials and then a comedian, which were a little boring to me since I didn’t know enough Korean to understand the speeches or the jokes. After that there were at least ten performances by different singers. If it was a group, they would dress in coordinating outfits and dance while they sang. What I thought was interesting is that in America, I would say showing cleavage is more acceptable than showing a lot of leg, but here it was the opposite. The girls would often wear super short skirts or shorts and sometimes belly shirts, but they never showed cleavage or anything close.

The concert was punctuated with fireworks, smoke and laser shows, bursts of flame, bubbles, and confetti! It was very, very cool. I liked the music a lot too. Most of it was Kpop, but there were some English songs, too. One girl sang a Korean version of “I Will Survive.”

After the concert, there was a really brilliant fireworks show set to music. The whole experience was really fun. I wish I could have gotten better pictures of the performers. The fireworks photo is courtesy of Ahbi, a postdoc researcher in the same lab as me. He has a very nice camera and is really into photography.

After this it was too late to catch a bus back to Gwangju, so we stayed at a Korean public bathhouse (Jjimjilbang) instead. Normally the price to use the bathhouse is 4000 won, but for 7000 won you can spend the night. At the front counter, you are given two small towels and a pair of shorts and a tshirts. Girls wore blue, boys wore orange, and children get yellow. After the front desk, girls and boys separate. First you leave your shoes in a little locker and take the key. It comes on an ankle bracelet so you can keep hold of it in the bath. After the shoe lockers, we reached a big locker room where we changed into the clothes we were issued and left our things in a big locker that matched the number and key of our shoe locker. We were too tired to shower that night, so we went straight into the common room where boys and girls mingled again. It was so cool! There was a snack counter where you could buy drinks and food, and there were also various sauna-like rooms you could go into. The first was a cold room. I’m not sure how cold it was, but the pipes on the wall were covered with ice crystals!

The next room was 40 C. It had a tiled floor and really beautiful walls. There were wooden blocks to use for pillows so you would sleep in there if you wanted.

The second hot room was between 50 and 60 C. This was my favorite. I don’t have a picture of this room because there was a woman sleeping in here, and I thought it would be rude and a little weird to take a picture with her in it. Anyway, the floor was covered in white rocks the size of marbles. There were also sackcloth mats to lay on, and rakes to shape the ground with.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The hottest room was shaped like a huge chimney or pizza oven. I do not know what temperature this room was, but it was way too hot! We had to hop from foot to foot because the floor was too hot to stand on. Abhi stayed in there for over 30 seconds, and we were all very impressed.

I tried to take pictures of the inside, but they turned out blurry since I was jumping up and down.

Oohoh, one of the GIST undergraduates, showed us girls how to make one of our towels into a cute hat that looked like bear ears. See me modeling it below:

For sleeping arrangements, there was a separate girls only room that we could have slept in, but we ended up sleeping in the big coed room together. We obtained thin pads and hard rectangular pillows from a pile in the corner and slept on those. I think there were blankets available, too, but I didn’t bother looking for one. I wish I had, because though the room was warm at first, when the air conditioning was on (and blowing right at me!) it got a little cold, which made it difficult to sleep. Overall, I thought it was really fun. It was like a giant sleepover, and it actually got pretty crowded.

The next morning we got up early and used the bathing room. Girls and boys were separate again. The bathing room consisted of several standing showers, a lot of seated bathing stations, two saunas of different temperatures, a cold pool, and three hot tub-sized pools of increasing temperature. We showered and lounged in the bath-temperature pool. I tried getting in the cold pool and it really woke me up. I was glad that I have been on swimming and water polo teams for 6 years because that means my modesty and self-consciousness is pretty much gone. This was useful because the whole bathing room was completely open, with no stalls or curtains, and everyone was naked.

After we finished, we took two trains back to Gwanju and then a bus from the train station to GIST. Though we caught our first train a little after 9am, we did not get back to campus until after 1 pm. We were so tired, but the trip was definitely worth it. If you are interested, below I’ve included a price breakdown of the trip. It was more than I expected, but still not too bad for a weekend.

Cost:

Bus…………………..1200 won

Bus………………...13000 won

Festival…………….5000 won

Lunch……………….7000 won

Locker………………2000 won

Shower……………..2000 won

Dinner………………7000 won

Bus…………………..1200 won

Bath…………………7000 won

Train………………11000 won

Bread……………….3000 won

Bus…………………..1200 won

 

TOTAL…………...60,600 won, or US$57.69

 

The reason this blog is late is because I have been away from the internet for the last five days. Tell you all about it in the next blog!

 

Grüezi from Switzerland!

Hello again!!

If you've been keeping up with the Caltech blogs over some period of time, you might remember me from the Caltech Y Science Policy trip to Washington D.C. about two years ago. Has it really been that long?? Time flies! I can't believe I just graduated a month ago - yes, four years went by fast.

photo cred: Larissa Yee :)

Kids, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and you will get there soon too. At least sooner than you think - I used to feel the days dragging by, but senior year went by like a whirlwind because of 1. grad school applications, 2. visiting grad schools and thus never being on campus during winter term, and 3. trying to get my fill of LA in terms of places and food before I left. Also took a fabulous beach trip to San Diego for a few days after finals week! Side note: I REALLY MISS CALIFORNIA....

Around spring break I thought about what I wanted to do for the summer; though home is nice, I wanted to explore a bit and/or take some rest. Turns out that I have done plenty of the former and hardly any of the latter... I was basically set to rotate in a lab for the summer at Weill Cornell, where I'm currently enrolled in their neuroscience PhD program. I fell in love with New York City (yes, their biomedical and translational life sciences campus is in NYC on the Upper East Side... and not the main campus in Ithaca!) and the people/program when I visited, and now this California girl is moving to the east coast! Anyways, so I had plans to move over there around the beginning of July, settle in and get acquainted with the city, and pick up some more lab skills so I could familiarize myself before school started.

On a whim, I applied to a research fellowship in Switzerland - I'd never been to Europe before, and thought that it was worth a shot in a dark. Actually, the process went somewhat like this: 'Hi Harry!!! (my advisor). I found a scholarship to do research in Switzerland, except we have to find a professor to work for (part of the application was for the PI to write you a letter accepting you to the unversity/lab group). Do you know anyone over there?'

Harry replies, 'Here's Jay! (and cc's his colleague in the email) He's the head of the Organic Chemistry Institute at the University of Zurich, get in touch!' After a few rounds of emails, I was set... and though I wasn't a chemist by any means, Dr. Siegel told me to come on over anyways! I suppose now I can add chemist to the resume. It's really interesting how far a general science degree can take you from Caltech. I did a SURF on campus my freshman summer in biochemistry, continued a bit of protein work at UC Berkeley the year after that, and last summer Amgen funded my SRTP at UCSF in anesthesia/ultrasound/fluid dynamics work. When I got the ''Congratulations! You have been accepted..'' email in late April, I was floored. I never imagined that I would actually be overseas for the summer! I had to scramble to find housing near Zurich, email the Weill professors my apologies for not coming over the summer (and got a recommendation to go to Lucerne for a trip), book my flight, figure out how to pack in order to move to Switzerland and then straight to New York... it was a terribly hectic time.

My family came for my commencement ceremony and we packed up/drove home immediately afterwards. The following Tuesday, we were on a plane to New York and saw relatives/went sightseeing for a day before I was on a plane from JFK to Zurich. Crazy story: I almost missed my flight due to horrendous Manhattan traffic and a wrong turn out of the Lincoln tunnel. I had to check my second suitcase because they told me it was too heavy, after I had run to the ticketing counter. A girl who came up five minute after me wasn't allowed on the plane because she hadn't checked in the night before. I sprinted through the airport and security, and literally ran onto the plane before they closed the doors. Talk about frazzled! I also hadn't eaten dinner, but SwissAir is wonderful and fed us. But that wasn't the worst of it. I landed in Zurich not knowing an ounce of Swiss-German. I had found a sublet from a student in a dorm in a town that was about a 20 minute train ride from the center of the city, but I had no idea how to get there (I also was too confused to find a tourist information center, it seemed). Someone bought a train ticket for me after I tried to explain where I needed to go, and I managed to get on a train heading in the right direction. But in Europe, there are train inspectors who can randomly just come onto any train and ask for your ticket.. which of course, they did to me - and told me that because I had the wrong ticket (the ticket was bought with a half-fare card, which the person who bought it had, but I didn't) then I had to pay them a 100 CHF fine (about $120 with the exchange rate). I freaked out and basically sobbed that I was a student coming to Europe for the first time, I didn't know where I was going, etc, and they let me off with a 20 CHF fine and showed me the right track to the town.

Then there was actually finding the dorm, and then discovering my charger or phone didn't work; had to buy a new phone and SIM card and adaptor, plus groceries and other miscellanous items. Switzerland is expensive! Rent and food is about double of what it is in the states. There are trains that run everywhere, hardly anyone drives (and when they do, they are rather nice cars like Audis, BMWs, and Mercedes, but cars are so much smaller here). Though I've been here a month, I haven't picked up on Swiss-German very well; it's more of a dialect here because High German is the original language. Things have settled down quite a bit, now that I've gotten used to the commute to work and what to do around the city. To come later: more about research in Switzerland, Zurich, a trip to Lucerne, a fellowship retreat to Bern and the Alps... and I'm off to Milan tomorrow afternoon for the weekend!

A teaser of my pictures for now (yes, Switzerland is THAT beautiful):

Welcome to Australia!

On my first day in Australia, I stepped off the plane, got my passport stamped, and headed outside where an airport pickup service from the University of Melbourne was waiting for me. I made my first American mistake by beginning to walk towards the right side of the car before I realized it was the driver’s side. It was also a car of a make I didn’t know with a lion as its logo. The man who drove me to my new home was named Michael. We talked about driving in Australia, sports, and, most importantly, Aussie rules football. This is a game unique to Australia that to me sounded like rugby, although I can’t say I know much about rugby anyways. I’ll be sure to check out a few games while I’m here.

Now that I’ve been in Melbourne for a few days, and I’ve drawn a few conclusions:

1. Australians drive on the left side of the road. I know what you’re thinking, “Well, no duh. We all knew that.” Certainly, but there’s a world of difference (namely not getting run over) between knowing that they do and having the instinct to look right and left when crossing the street instead of left and right. The solution? Don’t walk by yourself, walk with some of the European exchange students. This also means that when you’re walking straight at someone, they will veer to their left to avoid you. This is a big problem for somebody who at the age of 20 finally taught herself to veer right to avoid running into people.
2. Australians walk everywhere.  And many of them like to do it in Converses. We walked by a shoe store and their Converse selection was a lot bigger than that of many American shoe stores. I probably only noticed this because I acquired a couple of pairs of Converses for pretty cheap before I left home.
3. The Walmart equivalent is called Big W.
4. The Catholic churches (that I’ve visited) here have already started following the form of the mass that American churches will be instituting later this year. I think they made the change in May or June. There are big laminated cards available so people know all the new responses.
5. You know how you learned in driver’s ed that pedestrians always have the right of way? Does not apply here. Trams always have the right of way. There are actually several posters around that have a drawing of a rhino on a skateboard. “If a rhino was coming at you on a skateboard, would you jump out of the way? A tram weighs the equivalent of 30 rhinos…” There are crosswalks and pedestrian crossing lights, which people follow, but many of them know that they can start walking a whole thirty seconds before the lights turn green or just any time the coast is clear. I’m sure a native of Melbourne in California would be outraged by the idea of being ticketed for jaywalking.
6. British girls sign their text messages with kisses. xx

RMIT Village, where I'll be living this semester, is similar in setup to a house at Caltech, except much, much bigger (around 400 people). It is also comprised of students from a few different universities, including RMIT, which it's named after, and the University of Melbourne, where I will be attending. I’m sharing an apartment on the first floor (which I think of as the second floor, since the 'first' is considered the ground floor) with Louisa, a girl from Singapore studying business. My room is a little bigger than a single in Fleming at Caltech. After a few days I had put up a ton of pictures that I had brought from home.

 

I arrived on Bastille Day, which the Village RA’s were celebrating by having a barbecue of French toast and pancakes in the courtyard. Since most students were away for winter break before classes resumed (southern hemisphere!), most of the people there were study abroad or exchange students like myself. A few girls who had also recently arrived were looking into going shopping for very necessary cell phones and clothes hangers. Like my friend Ankita said, “It’s nice that girls from all over the world can bond over phones and clothes.”

It is with this group of girls (plus a few others) that I’ve been hanging out with: Sarah, Natalie, and Fiona from England, Mia from Canada, Maria from Colombia, Caroline from Scotland, and Meg, one of the first Australians I met. On our first night out we saw Harry Potter in 3D after having dinner at a great burger place called Grill’d. It was at this dinner that somebody pointed out that all of us, except Meg, were studying science or engineering. Being from Caltech where this is the norm, I definitely hadn’t noticed. My last conclusion is that geeks attract each other.

 

Just a Little Bit Closer to Space

Hello! :)

Did you know that there are more than 300 summer interns at JPL this summer? Over half of those (188 to be exact) are Caltech affiliates. The Caltech Student Faculty Programs Office administers eight undergraduate research programs, one of which is SURF.



Yep, 188 (!!) of these 700 Caltech Summer Students (from all over the world) are working at JPL.

Four of those programs give you the opportunity to work closely with incredible scientists and engineers at a NASA center (SURF is limited to JPL, but with Space Grant, NASA USRP and NASA PGGURP, you can work at whichever participating NASA center you're interested in). How much better can it get?! Caltech is the place to be if you're interested in space exploration. :)

So as you can tell from the number of students on the JPL campus this summer, JPL is very active in educational outreach and aims to encourage students to pursue math, science, and engineering.  So in this post, I’d like to tell you guys about one of the cool things that JPL organizes for its summer students. Every Thursday, a JPL scientist-engineer (or just “JPLer”) takes time out of his/her day to tell us about an interesting project or mission on which they’ve worked or on which they are currently working. And almost all of these presentations touch on what is going on in the space industry today.

For example, during the second week of SURF, we got to hear about the Dawn Mission. We learned about the awesome new ion propulsion technology that the probe is using (no, not this kind xD) and found out about what sorts of studies the spacecraft would be conducting once it reached and inserted itself into the orbit of the massive asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. It was during that talk (only my 7th day at JPL!) that it “dawn”ed on me (haha, get it? I’m so punny ;)) how amazing it was to be at JPL. We were at the place where this spacecraft was designed...constructed...tested. And where it was going to be controlled and operated from. Suddenly, all of NASA’s Earth and Space Science missions that I had only heard and read about became much more real. I felt closer to it all. I think I’ll have this “closer” feeling pretty often this summer…I’ll be sure to mention it every time I experience it. It’s a great feeling to realize that maybe you aren’t that far from the vastness of outer space after all! :D

This Thursday, we had another one of these talks. For this one, we had a JPLer come and talk to us about the future of Mars exploration. Even though the presentation didn’t include any discussion of the manned exploration of Mars, it was still very exciting! :) We got to learn about the research and development going on right now at JPL and in Europe (with the ESA) for a potential Mars Sample Return mission. We found out how complex the process would be and about how the technology for the mission is slowly (but surely) being developed. We have three more of these talks left, and I can’t wait to hear them all!

In addition to holding these awesome talks, JPL also lets its summer students tour its really cool, high-tech, fancy facilities. On Friday, I’m going to get to check out the Lunar Surface Operation Testbed (LSOT), which is what JPLers have been using to test their prototypes of the gi-normous ATHLETE Rover. I’m sure this tour will give me the “closer” feeling too. I can’t wait! I’ll tell you all about it in my next post, so stay tuned! :)

Orienteering

What in the world is orienteering?!? I vaguely remember my HS gym teacher being really into it, but beyond that, I didn't really know what I was getting into when one of my friends and I (she had gone before :)) signed up to go orienteering this weekend.

 

I got into something really beautiful (and the smell was AMAZING - the pine had such a great, strong scent, I could finally smell forest again!) and I also got pretty lost. Orienteering is a sport (http://laorienteering.org/) where you get a map and a compass and three hours (or less, if you're good at it). Each orienteering event has a bunch of different trails you can take, that vary in distance and difficulty.

 

We were orienteering at Mount Pintos (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=mt+Pinos+ca&hl=en&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=33.626896,56.337891&z=14) which is this AMAZINGingly gorgeous place in the Los Padres National Forest. None of my pictures really show it (we were racing, and it was very bright, so I didn't exactly have a ton of time to work with my iso ect. - a good reason to head back and go camping there!). There are a ton of pine trees, and gorgeous pine cones to go with it. There were also many, many wildflowers! And this blue bird which looked amazing that we saw twice - not long enough to take a picture though! But long enough to enjoy!

 

So, when you're orienteering, the goal is to get to all the checkpoints in your course as fast as possible. My friend was like, I think I'll try the orange trail, I'm out of shape, and I was like, that's fine. Then we got there, and I saw that the orange trail was only 4 km long. WHAT?!! I can totally do more than 4 measly little km in three hours! Right?!?! So, I kind of decided with her permission (never having done orienteering before) that we were going to do red - the hardest course offered at 5.5 km and apparently difficult. So what? I came to Caltech for a challenge. If it's easy, it's just not worth doing! Of course. So, after getting asked several times, and then laughed at, and then told well we better be back in three hours, and having someone explain to us how to read the clues on the map, we headed off. We found the first and second marker, no problem. But where was number three?

 

Three was not our lucky digit. We got so terribly lost. We were lost for about one and a half hours looking for three. We couldn't even figure out where on our map we were for the longest time. We decided that getting to three would be our goal - on a course with 15 markers, 20 percent and a gorgeous hike / job is totally still a win! [We definitely went more than 5 km.]

 
Finally, though - VICTORY! We made it to the third marker with fourty-five minutes to spare. After regaining our confidence in our navigational skills (I am quite convinced that had we not originally gotten lost looking for three, and then again trying to backtrack to two, we would have potentially been able to finish the course or at least get close!) we decided to try to get to four - and then even to five! It was pretty awesome! We were on a role, but there is a rule that you have to (try to) be back in three hours, just for safety - since you are kind of out on your own or in groups of two, if you don't come back soon after that, they starting looking for you. I really wanted to finish, but I also didn't want to make anyone worried!

 

The path between four and five was really interesting. We kind of could see what we were getting into, but basically, we were pushing our way through dense trees and brushes and prickly things the entire way while slidding along a slope [wearing long pants while orienteering is recommended and often mandatory]. I totally misread the clue and thought it meant that our thing was on the top of a hill, but luckily, my friend noticed my mistake and found the fifth marker! Which means we finished a grand 33 percent of the course -- leaving 67 for next year! [where I plan on, if I go, finishing all of red!!!].

 

When we got back, another kid from our group was in charge of the finish line. He had done the entire red course - in 1:27!!! Some other people had done the course in 1:10. (Perfect) Practice makes perfect :) Maybe one day :) But first, I want to go read more chemistry :)!! My friend and I were thinking about bringing our sets up to that campground during term and doing our work under the pine trees one weekend... fantasies, fantasies... [there are trips like this that don't include sets too, for example the beach trip most houses have in the spring or the ski trip in the winter ect. :)] Yay!

 

Doc Visit!

What is new in everyone’s life? It is the middle of July. Everyone is occupied, whether it is working or going on vacation. The middle of the summer is dead quiet with very little going on.

For me, there is not really that much going on within the past week. It seems like that when someone is deeply involved in doing research, time just pass by much slower and events fewer in number. The cells that I am growing in the lab have become my precious children. My priority is to make sure my experiments run smoothly and successfully.

Sometimes, I become deeply involved in lab work that time just flies by. I need to spend a portion of my time on some of my other interests; so I did. This weekend, I checked off two events I would like to attend this summer that is not research related: visiting a physician and attending a health related conference.

In this post, I will focus on my visit to a physician. After contacting a research physician Dr. Yen at a nearby cancer research hospital previously and receiving an opportunity to visiting his clinic, I arrived at his office Friday morning. The research physician’s name is Yen. Dr. Yen is an MD/PhD who is the primary investigator of the Molecular Pharmacology Department at the hospital. He also is an oncologist with many cancer patients. I have known Dr. Yen since last summer, when I carried out two projects in his lab. I have known that he is a great mentor and supporter to his lab members. The man works extremely hard and rarely takes vacations. Sometimes, he jokes that his job have taken all his black hair and turned it white. Even though we all laugh, we all know it is true. He is a role model for me and I have the greatest respect for him.

It has been a year since last time I was in the lab. To be honest, I was quite anxious about meeting the man that I respected so much. His presence erased my uneasiness immediately. He still looks like Dr. Yen from a year ago: relaxed, warm, and rotund. He greeted me with enthusiasm and inquired about my schoolwork. I affirmed him that I am doing well and is having a lot of fun during the process. He smiled and we walked into the cancer hospital, ready to check up on people whose lives were harassed by cancer.

To say that the shadowing was worth my morning would be an understatement. In less than three hours, Dr. Yen finished checking on all his patients, approximately ten patients. Every one of those people had some kind of cancer: prostate, breast, liver, and lung cancer. Some have multiple cancers; some have cancer that metastasized; some had cancer that runs in the family. Despite their issues, I saw appreciation and courage in their eyes. I was amazed by how much hope they have. All their strength must have been the work of Dr. Yen. To inspire such hope in people despite the severe situation they are in shall command applause and respect. I hope one day I could, like Dr. Yen, help people in pain. After I thanked Dr. Yen for the visit, I drove to work jolly and energized.

Revisited: What do Techers do for fun on campus over the summer?

Note: These opportunities are available to all Caltech students!

There are many answers to the question "What do Techers do for fun over the summer?" For instance, some of us experience new cuisines and culture in foreign countries. Others don't travel as far but still travel off campus, perhaps, to the east coast to places such as MIT. So, what do the people on campus do?

That's right! Some of us choose to develop our natural talents. Shown here is Marvin, a rising junior in Ruddock/Avery house. What makes this guy unique is that he has an affinity towards baking, which is not the type of thing you usually see guys do. He also loves whipped cream as you can tell here.

It's common to see Techers cooking together over the summer. When Caltech Dining Services (CDS) doesn't serve you food, you have to get it yourself. Of course eating out is easy, but it can't compare with the fun you can have with friends by cooking together. 

Some Techers decide to be productive in other ways. Here are two Rudds who are counselors of the LEAD program:

"Building upon the institute's mission to benefit society through research integrated with education, Caltech is opening its doors to 23 diverse and gifted high school sophomores and juniors this summer. The LEAD Summer Engineering Institute, held on campus July 6–27, gives students the opportunity to explore Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (or STEM) careers."

This means they are get to take the high school students to places around Pasadena and other parts of California during the weekends. It's a one of the few jobs on campus where you get paid to have fun.

Of course you can also be an admissions student tour guide!

Not feeling productive but still want to have fun? Some Techers do that too. For instance, with the recent free release of TF2 (Team Fortress 2), there have been an increase in the TF2 population at Caltech. In fact, I even installed the game myself: 

And... haven't played it since July 1st!

On the other hand, some houses make Rotation videos for the incoming Freshmen and for our time-honored tradition known as Rotation, which you can find more about here: http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/07/local/me-caltech7

Of course, what's the fun unless you participate in making the rotation video yourself? In fact, that is exactly what some of our Techers do. Below you will see a sneak preview of what might be on one of the house's Rotation videos. The prank itself is inspired by this incredibly funny youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaoLU6zKaws

We first perform the prank at Caltech! Here is a guy serenading Nina in Avery with a saxophone. Then, we do it elsewhere, but first, let's meet from left to right, Lucia, Megan, and Elise! All three of them are in my year and all three are Rudds! =D

It turns out that Elise's parents decided to come visit her over the summer and because they are really nice, they invited the three of us to dinner with them. We went to Newport Seafood Restaurant, which actually serves a lot of Asian food as well as seafood. The food was delicious, which reminds me... we eat mouth-watering treats for fun! =D

Now back to the house video. So, it wouldn't be fun to prank people just on campus. You have to do it off campus as well because it is much more fun to see the reactions of strangers, so we did just that! Here is a guy serenading random people at Anthroplogie using a saxophone. Awesome but even more so, hilarious! Note that the woman is totally astonished to see this event happen, which makes it even more amusing.

Back to more fun! Another game with an increasing player base at Caltech is League of Legends, which is a free-to-play online massive real time strategy game much like DotA and HoN:

So, there is a vast archive of information still available on the Caltech blogs website. This store of information I am referring to is of course are old blogs written by Techers, who have already graduated or are still at Caltech. Go read them for more information!

So, we all know that playing games tends to be a sedentary recreation. That's why at Caltech, we have other games to play, which allows us to get in a little bit of exercise. For those not into sports, we have DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) and also a DDR room in the SAC (student activity center). This game is super fun to play and you get to exercise and listen to music at the same time. Awesome!

And of course, let's not forget that picnics can be fun too! Here is the yearly BBQ for summer research students and their mentors at Tournament Park, just south of the track at Caltech!

===Next Time===

Saxophones, Research, Amgen Symposium and more activities!