Caltech

Nevada: Where Snow Meets Sand

My favorite part of every term is Geology (Ge) 136. Ge 136 is a field trip based class open any undergraduate or graduate students at the institute. Each student in the class chooses a topic, writes a brief report, and then presents on it in the field. Mostly members of the Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS, another classic Caltech pun) enroll, meaning the class is always filled with people ready to answer any questions about colorful rocks, weird extremophile microbes... Read more →

I Don’t Think You Understand the *Gravity* of the Situation

Another week, another bad pun! As you may have inferred by now this is a post about gravity! Or as my high school physics teacher described it, the mysterious invisible tentacles that come up from the Earth and pull stuff down. Specifically, though this is about my Ge11d (intro to geophysics) field trip! We went… TO THE ROSE BOWL! Funny, I know. It’s almost like I was just there last weekend running. We travelled along the race course for a... Read more →

Finals Week (in DC!!!!)

I know in the past we’ve talked about my poor life choices and so it only makes sense that I’d one up all of those by spending finals week in Washington, DC. Actually, more properly I spent it in Edgewater, MD with my ex-roommate’s parents (who by the way are the best and opened their home to a practically complete stranger) and then drove in to DC (they also lent me my ex-roommate’s car? Seriously the kindest people). What was... Read more →

A Geology Meme a Day…

Keeps your bad grades away! (hopefully – just took the final, did not go well). Hello from Maryland! As you can probably tell, I’m a couple days behind with my blog posts. I’m currently staying with the parents of my roommate from last year while I’m at the American Geophysical Union conference in Washingotn, DC. But more on that later (they’re my new favorite people!). This is a bit of a reflection on a class and how I’ve spent this... Read more →

Building a PCR

For the Medical Engineering class I am taking (BE189a), our final project involved building a PCR from scratch. If you are unfamiliar with PCRs, it stands for polymerase chain reaction and its used to make many copies of a specific DNA segment. I have only used commercial PCRs with fancy interfaces before in biology labs, so I found the project slightly daunting. Fortunately, we were not tasked with building a commercial device, instead a bare-bones system that gets the job... Read more →

Making an LED from Scratch

One of the coolest things I got to do this term was to build a LED from scratch. I never thought much about how lengthy of a process it is to fabricate a single LED, but after going through it in APh109 Microfabrication, I can really appreciate the technology. To be fair, the experimental procedures we used for class are antiquated because they are not efficient. However, at some point in time, this process was considered revolutionary. We started out... Read more →

Huntington Trip #2!

I’m beginning to get the suspicion that every Caltech humanities class tries to find some excuse to go visit the Huntington. I’m not complaining though. I love the gardens. It gives me an excuse to get off campus and be surrounded by lush foliage like I was living in a different world. Even if only for a moment. This Huntington trip was a bit different, and sponsored by English 128, the contemporary Irish literature course I’m taking taught by Dean... Read more →

Crow-bar None (Ge 11a Part 2)

Ok now for the FUN! Geology post. And the post where I talk a bit about the logistics of going on a 3.5-day Caltech GPS trip. The trip started on a Thursday night. I spent most of the 4-ish hour car ride working on my CS midterm. We ate in Barstow. 3/5 for the Barstow burger place, it was kinda funky. My friend Molly and I actually packed most of our food for the trip besides the planned dinners out.... Read more →

Making Medical Devices

As a junior, I haven't actually taken that many lab classes since most of my frosh and smore years were spent taking core. Of the lab classes I have taken, all of them were EE except chem 3a which is required, and I felt ambivalent towards every single one of them. Before, I simply completed the assignments and felt proud of the final products if they worked and felt frustrated if they did not. I was never really excited about... Read more →

School Rocks!

Just kidding. Aha, actually I love school, but it’s been a long week. Work at Tech is often something that comes in waves and when it’s high tide it’s all too easy to become washed away. My math homework took an absurd amount of time last week and more or less ruined my entire sleep schedule, but we complained to the professor, he’s making the sets more reasonably difficult – which basically means that he isn’t going to throttle us... Read more →