Our senior trip was to Las Vegas. The whole thing cost each person about $20. Lodging, transportation and a dinner show were all included in this fee, thanks to generous subsidies.
Nobody told us that even after we’ve passed all our exams, we would still have to survive one more thing: the scorching 2.5 hours of the commencement ceremony. This year’s graduation events look like this:
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.
Every year, the seniors take an organized school trip somewhere for a night after senior finals week, which in 3rd term is a week earlier than everyone else’s finals. Last year they went to Catalina. This year we went to Vegas.
I finally finished writing up my CS 123 (projects in databases) project from this term. I’ve posted about it a few times, but I wanted to share with you the entire thing!
The weather being so nice out lately, my roommate and I began to think of having a picnic one of these days. So we gathered some of our friends in the alley and planned a potluck for a Sunday lunch right before finals week, as an energy booster and a last hurrah before graduation (though I was the only senior).
As you might remember, I took golf at Caltech this past term. It was super fun and I would highly recommend it. As a culmination of all that we had done and learned, we took a field trip to the Alhambra Golf course to play a few holes. I brought my own clubs, but Caltech has several school clubs, bags, balls, and other supplies for students to use.
At around 4 in the afternoon we went to check in to our Airbnb, then went to Balboa Park, SoCal’s analog of Golden Gate Park. It is similar yet completely different–much more cozy-feeling and warm than Golden Gate, in my opinion.
The week after Ditch Day, a few of my close friends in my year and I took an overnight trip to my hometown, San Diego. We left at 10:30 in the morning and arrived in Old Town San Diego sometime into the noon hour. We had lunch at a classy Mexican restaurant, Cafe Guadalajara–I’d forgotten how much more Mexican food there is in SD than LA.
In this post I’m going to highlight a couple of great experiences I had this past week. Both are located in Pasadena and are pretty close to campus, so if you think you will ever be in the mood for a relaxing massage or some serious martial arts kickboxing, read on! $25 massages at HM Warm Spa on Green St: HM Warm Spa is clean and spacious. The $25 “foot massage” is actually a full body massage. This massage is done with the clients’ clothes left on. They start by soaking your feet in a tub of warm water. They then proceed to massage your face, head, shoulders, arms, legs, and feet. Then they flip you over to massage your upper and lower back. The entire procedure lasts for an hour and is performed in a dark room. They bring you a cup of water after the massage. They do a great job for an awesome price. Don’t forget to tip - I would recommend at least a $10 tip.
For those who don’t know, Ditch Day is an annual campus-wide tradition. The seniors plan it for all of the underclassmen (juniors included), and nobody except for the seniors knows when it is until the day of. On Ditch Day, the seniors will run around the houses waking everybody up at 8 am. All classes are cancelled and no homework is due! Underclassmen sign up for “stacks” which are collections of fun puzzles and activities centered around a theme. Houses generally have at least two stacks, so underclassmen can choose their stack. The stack lasts for the whole day.
The Sunday of Ditch Day weekend, my alumni friends and I decided to take a day trip to Joshua Tree National Park, located a few hours south in the Mojave Desert.
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 campsites in our area to hear while I fumbled through my backpack to silence it. After savoring a few more moments in our cozy sleeping bags, we climbed out of the tent and craned our necks upward. There, a faint stripe ran from the horizon up across the sky—the Milky Way. The rest of our group emerged from their various tents, and we crowded around the physics majors, who identified constellations in whispers.
It’s common for the new seniors (who are technically juniors) to set up a fake Ditch Day stack after the real Ditch Day. For Page House, our “Day After” fake stack happened a week after. At 8 am, the house was woken up to a battle between Twix bunny and the Frosted Flakes tiger.
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, my aunt was working beside me, bestowing frequent advice: don’t spread the rice all the way to the end of the sheet, or it’ll splurt out when you roll it; put the spinach and radish in this order to make it look prettier.
My cough and allergies were hitting hardcore on May 25th, the night before Ditch Day, but there was still a lot of work to be done and limited time in which to do it. Before dinner, Anjali, Bolton and I went shopping for last-minute supplies, such as sugar and butter for baking, wrapping and construction paper to build the arch after the jello idea failed, and yarn for weaving wristbands and bracelets such as the one shown below after stained glass proved to be too pricey:
Caltech alumni generally come back to help out on their friends’ stacks for Ditch Day. We had invited 8 people for our stack, and they were all going to be actors in the Town Market section, as the merchants. I came up with the idea of using cardboard trifolds, like the type one sees at high school science fairs, for stalls. While the other members of my group took care of the other stations, I spent a lot of my time for the past 7 weeks of this term shut in the library painting. Here is how each of the trifolds turned out:
One of the things I will miss most about southern California is its beaches. The week of commencement is going to be super packed, so I figured the weekend right before that would be a good time to take a solo adventure to Santa Monica.
When I mentioned in my previous post that for the underclassmen stackees, Ditch Day began at 7:45 a.m. on May 26, 2017, I left out the other half of the story: that for the senior stackers, Ditch Day began a long time ago. Technically, my friend Anjali and I knew we wanted to do an original theme sometime in our junior year. By the beginning of winter break, we had assembled our team, and by the beginning of third term this year, preparations were already on their way.
Our class got a lot of weird looks that day we demo-ed our bike projects for E88 Critical Making. We were led by our guest lecturersJen Hofer and Rob Ray, who are artists in the LA area.
For Drawing and Painting class, the instructor Jim Barry took the class to Art Center College of Design for a field trip. Part of the gallery involves an area reserved for a professional artist. It was closed when we arrived at around 7:30 pm, but we had a security guard open it for us. The artiston exhibition right now is Yoshio Ikezaki, a professor at Art Center. His works with different kinds of inks and papers are put on show, including folded paper sculptures.
There are a ton of amazing art museums in the Los Angeles area. If you don’t have a car, many of them are difficult to visit from campus. My freshman year, I had the luck of being able to visit the Getty Museum twice! The Getty is a private art museum which holds tons of classical and contemporary art. The same family which built the Getty also built the Getty Villa, a museum in Malibu, CA which houses exclusively classical antiquities (think ancient Greek and Roman art). I didn’t get the chance to visit the Getty Villa until just last week!
Two weeks ago, the CMS (Computing and Mathematical Sciences) department held their annual Meeting of the Minds mini-conference. This event is held every year during alumni weekend as a kind of showcase of student work for the visiting alumni (some local tech companies attended this year as well). The event begins with a keynote talk, which is followed by a two-hour poster session of student research and projects.
For one of the car-themed games for our Fast and Furious Ditch Day activities, we made a giant version of theboard game “Rush Hour”. The point of the game is to slide blocks around until a designated block makes its way across the grid.
Seniors plan elaborate Ditch Day activities for the underclassmen each year, often sleeping very little the night before. There is a midnight curfew till 8 am, the only time seniors have free reign over the campus without the chance of underclassmen might walk by and ruin the surprise.
Leaving the museum, we ran into a self-serve boba truck and got decently priced beverages (with all the topping you could ever want!) that came with a cute glass bottle.
A few weeks ago, the Caltech Feminist Club hosted our third annual Take Back the Night event. Take Back the Night exists to support victims of sexual violence. It is held around the country every year, and often involves a rally, a candle lit vigil, and a march. Our event was a little smaller than usual, with about 30 people in attendance, so we didn’t hold a march. Instead, we organized a night where students and other Caltech community members can share their stories of encountering sexual violence and listen to those of others.
This past week I played hooky from Caltech. I skipped an entire week of classes and flew to the east coast for two major events: my boyfriend’s graduation from his university, and our new apartment search in New York!
I flew out on a Tuesday night and we took a train from Philadelphia to NYC the next morning. We checked into our Airbnb apartment early Wednesday afternoon and explored the Brooklyn neighborhood we were staying in. Around 3pm, we met up with a realtor to search our favorite neighborhood for apartments. And we found one on the first day!
I was shocked that we found a place so quickly. We are both worked fairly close together, so we knew the general radius of neighborhoods around our workplaces that we wanted to live in, in order to keep our commutes as short as possible. I also wanted to be near a park so that it would be easy to run before work, so that helped us narrow down our neighborhood search to one or two. We found a place in the first group of seven apartments we saw, and we got our application in the first day. Since we found an apartment on the first day, we spent the next two days of our trip to NYC doing more fun things! We were able to go to the Biennial at the Whitney Museum of Art, and try a few amazing restaurants (and bakeries, of course).
Enticed by images of water filled caves and promises of an adventure, Jennifer and I decided to go hiking to Dawn Mines in Altadena, in Angeles National Forest. We got dropped off at Millard Camp Ground (20 min and $10 Uber from Caltech). We chose the Millard Falls trailhead over the Sunset Ridge one (which was a few hundred feet away) because we heard it was faster though it’ll involve some climbing.
It was a fun Sunday evening. First, there was dessert. Then there was dancing.
Meal planning, among many other things, is difficult when you’re indecisive. It’s even more so when you have a big book of four-hundred recipes out of America’s Test Kitchen.
For E88 Critical Making, we embarked on the balloon mapping unit. Balloon mapping is a grassroots technique for gathering aerial photographs. Examples of uses might be for mapping refugee camps which are often grayed out of maps for the general public, or for gathering images documenting the extent of oil spills. We had a guest lecturer who is working closely with Public Lab, a DIY citizen science collaboration, with balloon mapping.
It’s somewhat of an annual tradition to have a special Chandler dinner for Cinco de Mayo at Caltech. This year, it was a triple threat, with Guardians of the Galaxy decorations and special guests: firefighters!
My friend Jagriti and I decided to make paneer tikka masala the other day. Paneer is an Indian cottage cheese-like type of protein. Jagriti and I have cooked together since freshman year, but we’ve never made Indian food up till now, in part because it can be a very involved process but also because I’m fonder of cooking than Jagriti is and all I know is what my mom makes, which is mostly Taiwanese food.
As one of the UCCs (Upperclass Counselors) of my House at Caltech, I take my alley (hallway) off campus once in a while for edible excursions. On Saturday I decided to do a dim sum trip to Full House Seafood Restaurant in Arcadia, California. Our little group of 6 that could make it had dim sum experiences ranging from none (Karim) to “first and only time last summer” (Sarah) to “have been 3 times in the last 3 months with various groups of people” (me). It would be a lunch outing ripe with adventure and shared experiences.
At the end of my last post, I was riding the bus towards camp and dinner. That night, after a hearty pasta dinner, we explored the camp. Behind our cabin was a hill, which looked like it’dhavea really nice view of the mountains behind, so after eating, we set out for the top. It was nearing dark, but the distance looked mild. I had no doubt we’d make it up in fifteen minutes.
Page Cocktail Party is an annual affair. Everyone in Page (who are all calledPageboys, regardless of gender) get fancy paper invitations and can bring guests. Page Cocktail Party is always held at a nice location on campus and features a bartender (who checks ID), a live band, a photobooth, delicious finger foods, and fun games! The drinks are traditionally named after Pageboys. The food this year included smoked salmon, various sausages, and a wide assortment of cheeses and crackers. The dress code is formal attire, and there is no fee to attend.
The advantage of having friends with cars, who are foodies, is the near-unlimited opportunities that arise forpursuing delicious eats and drinks. In Southern California, this means good Asian places around the Monterey Park area in terms of food, and a plethora of boba tea shops in terms of drink. My current car-owning friends are mostly vegetarian so it isn’t often that I can bribe them to take me out for meat-heavy Chinese food, but every time the recently-graduated alumni return to visit, we go out to our favorite haunts.A time-withstood favorite of ours is this place called Spicy City in San Gabriel, California.
There’s been a video circulating around Facebook recently on making “aquarium cookies.”
Page House’s annual beach trip is a 3 hour drive southwards to Carlsbad. I noticed a field of yellow flowers right off the side of the road. I tried walking into the prickly field and all I found was more and more of the yellow flowers. This probably has something to do the with superbloom in California after we finally got out of the drought.
It’s been over three months since my trip to the Galapagos, and I am still thinking about it. For seven days, we all woke up at 5:30 am on the boat, ate breakfast together, and went out as the sun was rising on our morning hike to catch frigatebirds mating or iguanas spewing salt from their nostrils. Our days were spent snorkeling with turtles, sea lions, and schools of fish, and our nights were spent sitting on the bow of the ship, talking all together under the stars. It was truly a spring break I will never forget.
Caltech may be a small campus, but it has a large variety of food options. There are three main dining locations on campus — The Lee F. Browne Dining Hall, the Hameetman Center (which houses our beloved Red Door Cafe), and the Broad Café.
Midterms kept up its unrelenting attack on my sanity this week – at least a little bit. And how did I solve this? Two words.
Although there are a lot of smaller things, such as midterm smoothies and milkshakes (Blacker does something similar to this) and some larger things like Faculty Dessert Night, the soc team usually agrees that beach trip is the most work.