Caltech

Formal Dinner and my Busy Week

Hi there.

I have a pretty busy week. It hasn't really kicked in yet, but I have a bunch of stuff due Monday/Tuesday so the weekend is going to be pretty busy. I'm also trying to squeeze in a couple of tutoring sessions on Saturday, so that's four hours or so. And hopefully I can go to A New H(OPI), Ruddock's Star Wars-themed Interhouse. 

Last night I went to Fleming formal dinner, which was smaller than usual. Dinner was tasty, though, and I had a good time. My date had to leave early. He's really slammed this week and had to go to lab. That's kinda what they get for scheduling it on a Wednesday.

Tonight I'm going to finish my set for ACM 95, a class in differential equations and complex math. Then hopefully I'll have time to start collecting evidence for my paper on Civil War budget logistics for my paper due Monday. Once again, I must remind you that my class on US budgetary politics is way more interesting than it sounds. 

On Friday I'm going to spend several hours writing up my proposal for the San Pietro Travel Scholarship, which is due Tuesday. Over the weekend I'm going to struggle with an optical setup to make a real-time PCR machine for a lab that's also due Tuesday. Ideally, I will also have time to write my 7-8 page paper due Monday. 

After Tuesday I only have 5 more assignments due for the rest of term (3 problem sets, 1 lab, 1 essay). So I get to look forward to that. Once I'm done with the term I'm going with the Caltech Y to Peru, which I'm really excited about. I'll try to do daily updates but they might happen when I get back. Just ten or so posts, one per day, starting after touchdown in California. There are a few parties coming up at the end of term - OPI, Ravery, Bubbly, P/F Party - that should be really fun. We also have a Page formal dinner next Friday.

Wish me luck! Next time I'll update on all the things that are due Monday/Tuesday and brag about how easy my life is.

Until next time,

Suzy

 

Graduate Admissions Reflections

Well, it was a tough application season for me. I think I probably spread myself too thin, but let me give you the rundown before I launch into an analysis that may be useful for future 'uns.

• Accepted: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cornell
• Waitlisted: UC Berkeley, UChicago
• Rejected: Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Stanford

A lot of my friends got into their top choices, but at first glance neither of UIUC nor Cornell were my top choices, which makes this a fairly disappointing apps season. I'm glad that I took my job offer with Blend, which I always wanted to go to as you might recall but was hoping I would have a strong followup after. But now, I have a lot more things to consider: do I want to reapply next year, maybe after some more results and code development showing my capacity? Do I want to take one of my lower choices, find a project that will still be indubitably interesting and try to graduate early? There are many options going forward.

 

First though, I think it would be helpful to think about why this happened. Cornell and UIUC are definitely not sham schools, and indeed both have strong physics and astrophysics programs, but based on my overall qualifications I think I could have been a bit more competitive than a 25% acceptance rate. There are a few reasons for this I can immediately identify:

1. I applied to astrophysics programs with a single astro research experience under my belt and a single astronomy course, taken abroad in France. Why I wanted to change fields from physics to astronomy was pretty unclear in my statement of purpose, which dealt more with my enjoyment of problem solving as a whole. Given that I wanted to transfer fields like this, particularly into astronomy programs which generally seem to be somewhat on the smaller end of programs (as opposed to say the influx of people to applied physics and quantitative biology), I really should have better addressed my interests.
2. I spent far too little time on the apps themselves. You may remember my blog posts from last term, where I expressed a terrible feeling of burning out. I don't know if I've quite ever been able to push myself that hard again, the weeks of <5 hours of sleep when I usually get 7-8. This term has been much of the same, but with many more breaks. But as a result, I was unable to put the time into the apps themselves. My statements of purpose started just shy of a week before the deadlines, and were read over by a total of maybe 2-3 people, none faculty. The process should have iterated so many more times. The statement of purpose is the one place to address questions the faculty may have about you, and I was only able to talk more of the same about myself (e.g. research, passions) rather than preempt any concerns they may have had about my intents.
3. I did not contact professors of interest during the admissions process. This was a fatal mistake. Everybody I've told this to has been greatly confused by my "decision." It is imperative to reach out to professors of interest, to demonstrate interest in the school's programs. Yet I did not do this. I kept procrastinating by doing other work, and I paid a terrible price. Perhaps it's the nature of these flexible commitments, where every extra effort you put in receives a return but no effort is mandatory, but I simply wasn't able to bring myself to do this. Do not fall into this trap: looking back on the process and realizing you did not do your best is a gut-wrenching regret.
4. I'm spread too thin. I look at friends' course listings, their experiences and the classes they've taken, and I come to realize that I'm spread horribly thin. I have hardly taken any classes that grad schools might be interested in, having dedicated a third of my total schedule here at Caltech to CS classes that a researcher would hardly ever need and also having missed many key classes that simply cannot find their way into my schedule.

I'm somewhat bitter about the last point. It's always been my pride and joy that I take classes that interest me rather than those that will propel me towards some meaningless goal, and I did think that my interests would align well enough with apps, but I suppose some balance must be had when I'm spread so thin: pursuing interests indiscriminately should be blended with an eye towards future endeavors, and I was perhaps too myopic in my pursuits.

So many things to learn, yet so few chances to mess up on issues like this. It's painful to know I did not apply to my fullest capacity/preparation, and I hope the next time a matter of such importance comes down the pipe again I will have learned a few lessons by then.

 

Lazy Sunday

Hi there,

I accomplished nothing this weekend. Well, not nothing. No homework. I didn't have to do homework because that's just how my scheduling worked out.

On Friday I napped on and off from 2pm-midnight. At midnight I woke up, had breakfast and coffee, and set off for a hike with some friends.

I've always enjoyed hiking, and I've always been a morning person. Sunrise hikes are great. This hike was down a local mountain. We got to the top of the mountain at 2am.

We got back to campus around 8 and had a big breakfast. I helped clean up breakfast and then crashed HARD.

I was supposed to go horseback riding that afternoon, but it got cancelled due to car troubles. So I slept. I watched TV. I went out to dinner and watched Beauty and the Beast with my boyfriend. I did no work and it was amazing.

On Sunday I woke up and went to coffee with my travel scholarship application partner. That was really fun. I love planning things I'm excited about. We got a Lonely Planet guide to our destination and planned out our 2.5-week itinerary. I didn't take pictures so you're denied the pleasure of admiring my coffee and notebook.

That was all I did on Sunday. I crashed and watched Modern Family around 10. A note on that show: Alex is not an accurate representation of our school. Neither are the guys on the Big Bang Theory. We are a diverse and engaging population with lots of different interests and occupations. If you want to know what Caltech is like you should visit or get in touch with admissions.

Today I woke up and mailed a care package to my sister. She goes to UCSD and doesn't have fridge access in her freshman dorm, so I rush-shipped her cheese and an ice pack. I also sent her some branded swag from our career fair (Oracle to-go cup, Playstation backup battery, etc.). Then I went to class, prepped our next batch of cold-brew coffee, ate noodles and a banana, and then wrote this blog post. I'll probably take a shot at accomplishing things this afternoon, but I don't really have to.

Until next time,

Suzy

Valentine's Day and President's Day

    In addition to Wine and Candlelight, I also celebrated Valentine's Day with my close friends and boyfriend! My close friends and I had a blast making chocolate covered strawberries for our friends. We bought candy melts, lollipop sticks, and sprinkles and decorated about thirty strawberries together. We then wrapped them nicely in cellophane with pink and red ribbons and gave them out to people. We also ate the ugly ones. ;)

    On Sunday (Valentine's Day) night, I went to one of my favorite sushi restaurants with my boyfriend, my friend, and her boyfriend. It's called Yoshida. It's in San Marino, which is adjacent to Pasadena. After dinner, the restaurant gave us cute Valentine's Day petite fours and flowers for the girls. We went to Mother Moo Creamery for dessert, which is one of my favorite ice cream places. It's a little farther from Caltech though. 

    We had the next day off thanks to President's Day. I saw the movie Deadpool (another double date) and got ramen at Modan Artisanal Ramen afterwards. Deadpool was amazing!! No spoilers though. :) The ramen was pretty good too. After that, I had a ton of work to catch up on so I worked for the rest of the night. Overall, it was a fantastic three day weekend. I hope you guys had great long weekends as well!

A Fleming Valentine's Day (Wine and Candlelight)

    Every year, everyone in Fleming House works together to make special notes for the other members of Fleming. These valentines are delivered to each person's room with either chocolates or roses. It's always fun seeing other people's messages! Fleming also has a Wine and Candlelight dinner every Valentine's day weekend. It's a great event if you like to dress up because people wear formal clothes and enjoy a fancy three-course dinner. Students can help cook at Tom Mannion's (the Director of Student Affairs), or they can wait the dinner for a free meal. There's a bartender who serves wine to students who are over 21. The dinner begins with a 30 minute reception in the lounge, where students can sample a cheese plate and take pictures. Following the reception, students filter into the dining hall where carefully laid out tables are set with name cards. The waiters then bring the food out course by course.

    This year, the appetizer was a tomato tartar with haricot verts and the dessert was an individual Fleming chocolate raspberry cake with fresh berries. There were five options for the entrees (see below). I had the duck breast, but also tried my friends' scallops, ribeye steak, and risotto. My favorite was probably the duck, but everything was delicious! Wine and Candlelight definitely beats the formal dinners provided once a term by CDS.

1. Pan seared duck breast with blueberry sauce , bamboo rice and haricot verts

2. Pan Seared diver scallops and salmon fillet with mashed potatoes and haricot verts

3. Salmon three ways (pan seared, sashimi, and poached) with mashed potatoes and haricot verts

4. Ribeye steak with mashed potaoes and haricot verts

5. Wild mushroom and asparagus risotto with haricot verts

 

 

The Last of the Midterm Blues

Hello there,

I just finished a short but stressful week. I had two assignments due Thursday, a midterm 7-10pm on Tuesday, and no time on Wednesday to work on anything. I ended up having only 4 hours for work on Wednesday (which thank goodness, just sufficed for debugging a circuit and one unusually short written assignment). I spent 3 hours on Wednesday in the health center, learning to bandage heads, fingers, and impaled objects. Here's one of my "patients":

Today I woke up early for no particular reason. I'm all ready for my Thursday - I have 4.5 hours of class, then I'm going for a run, then making dinner. After dinner I'm tutoring for EE/CS 52, a project class where student build oscilloscopes. I'm looking forward to that. I like tutoring, and I especially like tutoring for that class. I'm also looking forward to cooking. That should be really nice. I'm making soup today.

I hope you're all having a short and stress-free week. For us this is Week 7, so I've only got 3 weeks left in term and all my classes feel pretty manageable at this point. I'll keep posting right until your admissions decisions come out (in about a month, yes?). 

Until next time,

Suzy

Avery House's Fake Ditch Day vs. LIGO?

A while back, the Avery seniors decided to host a fake ditch day on Thursday 2/11. It seemed like the perfect sort of day, just after midterms were due but before too many other sets came up, and it left more room in the year in case we wanted to run another ditch day. We began our planning, divvied up roles...

And LIGO decided to make their press conference on the 11th. I was in charge of organizing this ditch day this time, and I had an extremely difficult decision to make: did I want to go to one of Caltech's crowning achievements during my time here? Or did I want to see an event I helped orchestrate come to fruition?

Needless to say, my inner geek won out and I attended the LIGO seminar. However, this did not mean I wouldn't help with the ditch day events. We set up three events centered around a Disney theme:

1. Character cards -- Underclassmen sat around with character cards taped to their heads and everybody else had to help them try to guess who they were. However, since we wanted to tie this back to a Disney theme, everybody was a Disney character. But that would be too easy to guess, so we forced them to pantomime their hints. Moreover, we gave one poor soul Donald Trump for his character card; it was very funny seeing him try to figure out that he wasn't a Disney character!
2. Minigames -- We had the students split into two teams and compete against each other in the name of "learning cooperation" with their fellow team members in silly games such as "junk in the trunk" also known as "shake your butt and get ping pong balls out of a tissue box tied around your waist." Hilarity ensued as everybody embarrassed themselves.
3. Ice game thing -- This was the minigame that I helped prepare. The two sides were split up, trying to rescue Elsa from Maleficent, the dragon. People would play a small minigame, trying to flip a cup over the edge of a table and have it land after a 180 rotation. The winner would take two cups with frozen colored ice, the loser take one cup, and they would find quarters inside (or duds, which contained other coins). These quarters were then taken to a shooting range, where they aimed at little targets that represented health bars for Elsa and Maleficent respectively, whom the two teams were trying to assist in their epic battle.

I wasn't present for the competition, but please find below a picture of the colorful preparation!

The colors are very homogeneous because we only bought 2 packs of 4 colors of food coloring for 3 people, and I was the odd one out that got stuck with only two colors :( Quarters to be deposited.

I was absent of course for no reason other than the fact that I went to the LIGO presentation! Some people may think that the discovery was no big deal, that it was no theoretical milestone, but it was a great leap for mankind nonetheless. The moon landing was insignificant scientifically, it was but an arbitrary marker. We discovered little new from the fact that we'd landed on the moon.

But the moon landing gave us so much more. It spurred space exploration, it allowed us to analyze composition of other bodies in the solar system and it most importantly drove mankind's imagination ever farther into the sky. LIGO's detection is of similar magnitude. Perhaps we already expected gravitational waves, perhaps we've already granted a Nobel for their indirect detection, but LIGO's significance lies so far beyond this. It's a new way to see things, a new frontier that remains to be explored, radically different from anything mankind has ever attempted. I walked away from the talk that day with a new spring in my step, and campus took on a wholly different light. I was proud to be here, proud to be on site for one of the most significant days in astrophysics.

The dawn of an era...

Busier can be funner!

The week that just passed was yet again one of the busiest on record. I may sound like a broken record by now, but this week was different in that I spent a lot of time on things I was excited to do, rather than merely a backbreaking workload.

The week started really on Sunday. I had spent most of Friday and Saturday being unproductive and relaxing, but suddenly I was faced with a formidable workload. I spent most of the day working on my machine learning project, which I had decided to contribute heavily to simply because it was a project that excited me. At the same time though, I knew I was heavily behind on my research work, and I knew that the rest of my week would be spent in misery, so I kicked into high gear involuntarily. Many people underperform when stressed, but somehow I instead begin to work much harder. It must be an effect similar to the Yerkes-Dodson Law, where people overperform on familiar tasks but underperform on unfamiliar tasks in the presence of stressors. My schedule for the day began at 7AM, stopped from 12-5 for tutoring, and continued into the evening to about 2AM, continuous work on one of two CS projects for my machine learning/networks class, work on my thesis and a set for my biomolecular computation class. Such was how I spent my Chinese New Year...

The next day I completely failed my meeting with my thesis adviser, since I'd gotten stuck, but I continued to work on my machine learning project as well as start grading for the class I was TAing. Grading is actually a pretty irregular obligation, since the sets are due on a 10-day schedule so every week my grading falls on a different day. In the meantime, I was continually corresponding with my network project group and running occasional tests where I could find time. But I also found the time and interest to write a simulator for my biomolecular computation class since I didn't want to use their software. Finally, I also had to organize and set up another fake ditch day (more in the next post). The combination of all these obligations made for one heckuva week:

1. Monday: Research meeting
2. Tuesday: CS155 project
3. Wednesday: ACM95 grading, ACM95 office hours
4. Thursday: Bi191 set, Fake ditch day, CS155 project writeup
5. Friday: CS144 project, 8 mile run

None of these commitments could be trivialized, each day had 10+ hour commitments in total, and I had to ensure I got adequate sleep for my final run. This resulted in 21 hours of sleep over 5 nights, finally terminating in 9 hours on Thursday for my run. It was a lot of fun all week though, always doing fun things, whether class related or for fake ditch day or the sort, but it was certainly my most tiring week in a really long time. I estimated afterwards that in the span of 130 hours, I slept for 21 and must have worked for at least 90 if not 100...

On the other hand, I got to do a lot of coding this week, whether for my simulator or for my machine learning project, and it was definitely a long missed feeling, to develop software in a rigorous, well-documented fashion to solve problems that I'm very excited about. I love physics out of my mind, but sometimes getting a bit of good coding in feels nice as well :)

Want to know what happened for our fake ditch day? Or hear a budding astrophysicist's thoughts on the LIGO announcement this past Thursday? One last post coming in, thanks for bearing with me!

 

 

Pool Day and In-N-Out

    If you haven't heard, Southern California weather has been amazing this past week - and by amazing I mean high 80's and sunny! My friends and I decided to take advantage of this and go work out (but really tan) at the Caltech pool. The Caltech pool is open to Caltech students and members of the Caltech gym. The hours are available on the Caltech Athletics website. I used to swim on the Caltech swim team, so being back in the water was really nice for me. We spent a few hours at the pool and on the pool deck. It was super relaxing and a lot of fun.

    Later that day, Facebook sponsored an informal session at Caltech with their recruiters and past interns who currently go to Caltech. There was a ton of cool swag (water bottles, t shirts, earbud holders, notebooks, etc.) but the real catch was the insane amount of In-N-Out provided - courtesy of Facebook! It was cool hearing about past interns' experiences and hanging out with other students interested in Facebook. 

Fun and games 2

 

Hi all! Long time no see again. Let's just go through the laundry list of all the fun things I've been up to, then I'll tell you a bit more about my life here at the good ol' California Institute of Technology.

First, a friend heard about some DineLA deal, so we decided to pick one of the available restaurants which was this Korean place, and check it out. It was supposed to be relatively discounted fine dining, so we were all pretty excited to see what it was all about, as well as leave campus and all. 

A very blurry picture of a rare sighting of me off campus! :o

It was a pretty fun experience, leaving campus and all, but the food itself was a bit...unconventional. For instance, please behold a $14 dessert:

Yes, that's fruity pebbles, mochi and ice.

They say you get what you pay for, but I'm quite certain I've stumbled across yet another exception! I guess you're paying in part for the decor as well as the Koreatown experience. 

The funny part of the story starts here. I had a chamber concert immediately after the dinner, but I did some rough calculations and figured I could make it so I decided to go to the dinner. We first left late, then the dinner took longer than expected, then I had some difficulties with the Uber driver, but it ended up that I got on my ride home from Koreatown at 7:50PM when the concert started at 8PM!! Moreover, I was the third group to play, and I had no idea whether I would be able to get back by whenever those two groups would finish. Finally, I hadn't yet changed.

The ensuing series of events could actually have made an action movie. I hopped off the Uber at 8:17, sprinted upstairs, was out the door again by something like 8:19 if not 8:20 (impressive since I was changing into a suit!), biked across to the concert hall, sprinted to the warmup room backstage to hear that the group before me was wrapping up. Having arrived before the start of my program, I decided to use the restroom like my bladder had been planning for the past hour, and heard applause right as I left the restroom, and onto the stage I went. My margin of error was no more than 90 seconds, yet I made it on stage. Honestly, I had one of the best performances relative to my preparedness of my performing life, probably because I was still panicking about the time to be nervous about performing! The aftermath, after 10 minutes of the third movement of the Mozart Kegelstatt trio:

10 minutes after 3 to-be heart attacks.

Finally, on the next day, I had the privilege of hearing Yefim Bronfman play the Beethoven 1st piano concerto along with the LA Phil's rendition of Mahler's first symphony. It was great, despite it being a rainy day, and there were a few cute moments (like the pianist intentionally playing the final bombastic cadence of the first movement at a whisper, drawing laughter). I definitely enjoyed yet another concert at the LA Phil and will be on the lookout for even more concerts both to listen to and to write to you guys about!

The full strength of the orchestra required to play Mahler's first 'Titan' Symphony.

 

That's all for this post! I'm a bit backlogged on things to say, so I'll be coming out with a few in quick succession here, bear with me :)