Blogs

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Graffiti

While at UCL I’ve been doing a lot more walking than I ever do at Caltech. To keep myself entertained on these walks I listen to music and people watch, but my favorite pass time is to spot graffiti. Frequently it’s very obvious (like in the picture below), but there are lots of little pieces higher up on buildings that are easy to miss if you’re not looking for it specifically. London and Paris are both covered in graffiti and some of it is actually very good. Easy to recognize pieces are those by Bansky, Shepard Fairey (of President Obama poster fame), and Space Invader.

By Katie Brennan November 16, 2011

clubs

Fall Break in Paris!

On a short fall break from class those of us from Caltech studying at UCL (Megan, Annie, Lei, and I) spent a few days in Paris! It was simply too temptingly close to London to pass up the opportunity! Getting to Paris was simply a matter of a couple hour train ride.

By Katie Brennan November 14, 2011

research

Bellevue in Brief

Hello! Today I just made my way back from the NYU Langone School of Medicine, located in theeast side of Manhattan overlooking the East River. My host’s apartment was at 1st and 26th, which basically means there’s plenty to do no matter which direction you turn. Not to mention the medical school and associated hospitals (including the famous Bellevue Hospital) are just a few blocks away: definitely a plus in the midst of an East Coast blizzard!

By November 9, 2011

research

Biologists have more fun

Lucky for this biology major, on my walk to class everyday I pass the Grant Museum of Zoology, home to 67,000 animal specimens. It’s a curious, curious place. I popped in the other day and this is what I saw:

By Katie Brennan November 4, 2011

research

A Meeting in My Mind or

In high school, the formats of my both my science and humanities classes were pretty similar (which says something about both). For the most part—in all of them—I read some information and regurgitated it back. It was a pretty simple, if a not-necessarily-all-that-great way to learn.

By Nerissa Hoglen November 4, 2011

research

Academic style

For those of you curious about the academic experience of UCL, this entry will compare and contrast work at UCL with work at Caltech. While schoolwork should add up to the same number of hours (roughly, each class should require nine hours of work per week), the way those hours are spent at Caltech versus UCL is demonstrably different: Sets vs. no sets: At Caltech most of my classes assign a weekly set or quiz. The sets are usually very difficult, requiring most of the time allotted to them and frequently more. But the weekly assignments are all well and good because it means the course material is being applied. At UCL I don’t have weekly sets, quizzes, or even midterm exams! With the exception of one essay due this week, I only have final exams and essays. The lack of weekly deadlines really takes the pressure and urgency out of school. Without those sets, I spend most of my time reading. To keep focused during all that reading I need to listen to a lot of music and move every couple of hours from library to coffee shop to library to coffee shop. The reading is a is less stressful than weekly assignments and a very welcome change. Of course, there is always the temptation to put off the reading because it’s a really sunny day and Regent’s Park is only a ten minute walk away…but then I just remember that it’s impossible to cram a term into the night before a final and, suddenly, my feet are leading me up the library steps! Collaboration vs. solo work (and it’s social implications): When I work on a set at Tech part of that time is spent with classmates. We collaborate most on the hardest questions, but even for less difficult questions it’s good to have a sounding board for answers in progress. Collaboration on sets is rarely strictly business. Get a group of college students together in a room together for six hours and you are bound to get goofiness, especially as you approach 3AM. Collaboration is a very simple way for academic life to become social life. At UCL, however, my social life is stricly my social life. Conversations with friends here are rarely academic in nature. It’s certainly a change from the social dynamic at Tech, but it’s an enjoyable kind of change.

By Katie Brennan November 3, 2011

culture

The Safety Net

So, what exactly does it take to get through 3 (almost 4!) years of Tech?

By November 1, 2011

culture

Spring Break. Destination

After two months of classes we had mid-semester break. For some people at UniMelb this means catching up on work. For others, it means travelling! My destination? Six days in the beautiful island of Tasmania! [Disclaimer: I don’t feel like I can do Tasmania justice with words, so text wise this might seem a bit short, but I hope you like the pictures!] I couldn’t believe the sight as I flew into Hobart.

By October 31, 2011

culture

Nostalgia Strikes

A senior who’s wistfully remembering her younger years? Gosh, call the stereotype police! Still, I still can’t believe at times that I’ve gone through (survived?) three years at Caltech. And in just a few months, barring any unforeseen catastrophe, I’ll be walking up to receive my diploma! One thing I especially can’t wait for is the Lloyd presence during the ceremony. It’s tradition to don your obnoxiously gold shirt and gong out the new alumni with great enthusiasm. I’ve been on scene first thing every year! A Calendar of Cacophony (2008-2011)

By October 29, 2011

research

Inside the Black Box

My research project has been a blast. Like I said before, my graduate student mentor, Brian, has already done most of the hard work of building an ion mobility spectrometer. I walked in just in time for the final touches and testing! Here’s a diagram I made of it…

By October 29, 2011

global

Row Row Row Your Boat

Cambridge is famous for being the best place in England to punt.

By Yifei Huang October 27, 2011

global

Ancient Egypt in London

I’m taking “Ancient Egypt in London” as a course this term. It is certainly a class I wouldn’t be able to take at Caltech. It is a reading intensive course that aims to strip away long held misconceptions about Egypt. Amazingly, lecture is in the British Museum! The opportunity to have lectures in the Egyptian galleries is such a treat. We spent the first lecture in a room dedicated to pre-dynastic Egypt (roughly 4000-3100 BC) looking at burials, pottery, cosmetic palettes, and tools. In pre-dynastic Egypt there were no mummies, no sarcophagi, mostly just bodies buried in the sand with a small number of clay or stone pots containing goods. The graves are very sparse compared to the later extravagant tombs of pharaohs.

By Katie Brennan October 27, 2011

clubs

Sport, the British way

Then, on the train back to London, I learned of a few more UCL traditions. For each game, the team votes a “man” and a “wanker.” The man is essentially the game’s MVP, while the wanker is either the clumsiest, ditzy-est or LeastVP. It seemed too mean to vote someone wanker, so I nominated myself. Luckily, though I did not get it! Otherwise I would be required to wash the whole team’s smelly uniforms! Gross.

By Katie Brennan October 25, 2011

global

Primatology, what's that?

If you were to throw a party and you could only invite people from one major, which major would you pick? Correct answer: biology.

By Katie Brennan October 22, 2011

culture

Living—and Eating—Off-Campus

The house system is one of the coolest non-academic things about Caltech (by popular opinion, at least), but I do not live in one of them. I live in an apartment off-campus, and have been since the beginning of the summer. Last year, I lived in Caltech off-campus housing, and I realized that it was a huge improvement over living in a dorm. When it came time to find housing for this school year, I realized I didn’t want to be locked into the Caltech housing system, especially since there was a good chance I’d be in one of the non-“house” dorms. After a frustrating and then suddenly-successful apartment hunt, I found an option that was pretty much ideal. Now I live, in common tech parlance, off-off (campus), which indicates that I live neither in a dorm nor in Caltech-owned off-campus housing.

By Nerissa Hoglen October 20, 2011

culture

How To Get To Cambridge

Everybody says that Cambridge is like Hogwarts, but the similarities were apparent even before I arrived. If you’ve read the Harry Potter stories, you pretty much know how to get to Cambridge too! If you don’t, follow these simple instructions:

Go to London’s** King’s Cross Station**. It will look something like this:
Find Platform 9 and 3/4. There were some renovations going on for London 2012, so they relocated the platform from its usual spot.

By Yifei Huang October 19, 2011

culture

End of Rotation

The first week at Caltech can be best described as a whirlwind of new faces, exciting campus events, spontaneous fun activities, late-night chats, problem set-induced stress, and of course free food! It seems like only yesterday that all of the freshmen arrived at Caltech with a question more urgent than problems in math or physics: What house were they going to live in? Well the week of Rotation is almost over and the answer to this question will be revealed tomorrow! Hooray! Although I enjoyed mingling with the pre-frosh and meeting about forty new people every day, I must admit by the end of the week not only was I exhausted but I was running out of interesting questions to ask the pre-frosh! Starting tomorrow, I can finally relax and catch up on the TV shows I missed. Oh wait…that is, once I finish the stack of problem sets on my desk. That is alright. It is all worth it to get the pre-frosh acclimated to Caltech, through all the houses, and finally into their proper House.

By October 15, 2011

research

Last Day in Korea

This will be my final post, concerning our last day in Korea. Kelly and I had the same flight leaving Tuesday evening, so we planned our day carefully. Kelly needed to pick up a tea set in Insadong, so we returned there for the last time and bought our last few souvenirs. We did not want to be sweaty and disgusting for the long plane ride, so we decided to spend our afternoon inside the National Museum of Korea. However, we already felt sweaty just walking back and forth between the museum and the subway!

By Carly Bond October 12, 2011

culture

3, 2, 1. . . First Interview!

Hello again everyone! Last Sunday, I set out on a 7am flight to the site of my first medical school interview. . . St. Louis, MO! The Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine (whew! what a mouthful) consists of over17 city blocks in the area known as the Central West End. It also borders Forest Park, a 1293-acre behemoth of a park with free attractions such as the St. Louis Zoo, the St. Louis Science Center, and the St. Louis Art Museum.

By October 12, 2011

research

The Art of Aging Gracefully

Hello everyone! It’s post-Rotation week, and everything is slightly less crazycakes as a result. Now seems as good a time as any to start blogging!

By October 10, 2011

research

Going out on a school night?!

(https://www.lunch.com/reviews/product/UserReview-The_Lion_King_musical_-1394517-11121-The_Lion_Roars_On_Broadway.html)

By Katie Brennan October 10, 2011

research

Sunday in Seoul; So Much Walking! :)

After grabbing breakfast, Sylvia headed off to the airport to catch her plane while Kelly, Jaeeun, and I went to Myeongdong, another shopping district. While Insadong was more focused on street food and traditional Korean/souvenir type stuff, Myeongdong has more chain stores and focused more on clothes. While we wandered, we saw a Samsung clothing store! Kelly and I exclaimed, “Samsung has a clothing line?!” and Jaeeun replied, “Of course,” and her expression said, “Why wouldn’t they?” I asked her if there was anything Samsung didn’t do, and she couldn’t think of an answer off the top of her head!

By Carly Bond October 5, 2011

global

Day trips around London

Classes at UCL begin in earnest on Monday. Before then my fellow study abroad students and I have been doing seriously fun sightseeing around London! Thus far, the biggest perk of living in London, a city with amazing public transportation, is the ability to quickly and easily travel all around! In the last week Megan, a junior, and I have had the opportunity to travel to Oxford University, Windsor Castle, Eton College, and Camden Market! The day trip we took to Oxford was so enjoyable we’ve made plans to repeat the trip! I was impressed by the age and beauty of London, but that’s because I hadn’t yet seen Oxford.

By Katie Brennan October 3, 2011

clubs

Exploring the Other Side of Seoul, or Walking, Walking, Walking

On Monday we rode the subway a lot. It was pretty cheap, about a dollar to go anywhere in the city. I had not used public transport very much before I came to Korea, so it was interesting to me.

By Carly Bond September 30, 2011

global

Arriving in London

Traveling the world is so important to me that as a high school senior I applied only to colleges with study abroad programs. Four years later, I’m finally taking advantage of Caltech’s awesome study abroad opportunities! I’m spending this term at University College London (UCL), “London’s Global University.” I’ve been in London a week now and both the city and the university are amazing! If you’re at all interested in potentially studying abroad in college, Caltech is a great place to make it happen. The Study Abroad office, https://fasa.caltech.edu/StudyAbroad.shtml, is staffed by people who are very accessible, helpful, and encouraging.

By Katie Brennan September 30, 2011

research

Our Energy, Our Power

A long, long time ago, I blogged about a really cool event the sustainability office sponsored on campus where they a lot of the people who deal with Caltech waste / energy / water speak and answer questions. I still didn’t know too much about Pasadena’s energy, though, and Caltech does use a bunch of it.

By Account Deleted September 29, 2011

research

Last Week

Suddenly it was our last week at GIST and we had many invitations to many delicious meals. First the dean took all of us Caltech students out to lunch. We ate many different delicious dishes. At the end of dinner we had a very interesting porridge. Rice is traditionally cooked in big wide iron pots (from before rice cookers) but some of the rice would adhere to the sides of the pot. In order to clean the pot and to not waste rice, they would pour water into the pot and scrape off the rice to make a porridge. The rice for our meal was served out of a hot iron pot, so they made us a little porridge at the end of the meal. It didn’t have a lot of flavor, but I liked it anyway. It was nice to have something plain and simple after all that spicy food.

By Carly Bond September 29, 2011

culture

Rotation! (or figuring out where you're going to live at Caltech)

Your first room at Caltech is randomly assigned to you. If you have a roommate, the only consideration taken into that choice is gender. Gulp.

By Account Deleted September 28, 2011

culture

Temple Stay

I noticed this post had a lot of text so I decided to add in pictures of the temple area to break up the text sometimes.

By Carly Bond September 27, 2011

clubs

Pre-Frosh, Fighter Jets, the Navy Patrol, and Stingrays

The Caltech Y organizes a bunch of events, and I’ve led a few. When I signed up to take a bunch of pre-frosh on a kayaking / beach orientation trip with Ted (another smore), I didn’t expect it to be eventful. You know, we’ll go kayaking for two hours, eat lunch, head to the beach, and drive back. That’s similar to my orientation trip - I did the community service trip, so we headed to a gibbon center, helped them make a fire barrier, and then got a tour of the center and drove back. The Dean’s office was taking care of lunches and transportation, so what would I have to do? That’s kind of, but not quite, how it turned out! Organizing the trip was easy. When we got there, the place we rented kayaks from was very chill and everyone got on the boats fast. It was a beautiful place to kayak!!!

By Account Deleted September 27, 2011

research

Scary Etiquettes and Icky Food

I’m slightly obsessed with what I put in my body. For me, humans, life, and basically everything just boils down to a bunch of chemistry (yup, philosophy and all that stuff is just electrochem and … more reactions! in our brain / nervous system / somewhere in our body. I saw a paper today that was talking about discovering these proteins with strong absorbance at 450 nm (yups, that’s my protein - read on) and it just goes to reinforce that just because we don’t understand something or even possibly know it exists, there is some explination for it in the chemical world). Humans are just particularily interesting and super-well partitioned chemical systems, but in the end, that’s really all I think we are. So, I care about what I’m putting into my reaction - ME! - a lot. Small impurities (like rattle snake venom, or just some icky chemicals in our food) might not make a lot of difference, or they might make all the difference in the world, so I try to keep them out. [Of course, it all depends on what you are trying to do - tiny amounts of oxygen aren’t so great in my flash-quench experiments where it acts as a quencher I don’t know the concentration of, but the protein I use in these flash-quench experiments needs molecular oxygen in our body to catalyze the great C-H bond activation rxn. It’s a really cool protein!] But since I’d like to keep all my proteins functioning until I get really old (indeed, my particular protein, cytochrome P450, is associated with aging) I try not to put in anything in my beaker that is going to do facinating chemistry - and then make it really hard for me to spend a good old life think about it:) [as to P450 - I prefer not bombarding my mitochondrial DNA with ROS, reactive oxygen species. And as a matter of fact, though I don’t know of a connection between food and ROS, P450 IS very sensitive to what we eat - it catalyzes three fourths of the reactions in our liver!!! It can get induced and inhibited by certain chemicals (from our food, obviously, or pills or anything else that makes it down there). FYI, “my protein” isn’t just encoded in 57 genes in my body (and yours!), but it is in all superkingdoms of life and has been studied a ton, in part because it is a superfamily of many different proteins that do similar things and have a heme active site and absorb strongly at 460 nm.]

By Account Deleted September 26, 2011

research

Blisters, Hamstrings, and Oranges

This is my last post about sports, I promise. (I really promise, because it is my second to last post!)

By Account Deleted September 24, 2011

research

Stupid Dinosaurs!

Welcome.

By Account Deleted September 23, 2011

culture

Temples, Houseboats, and Kalaripayattu [ITB 6]

When you’re designing products for a different place, you have to understand that place - socially, economically, culturally. We got some sense of the society in getting to know the students, and we spent a bunch of time talking about the economy in the area and visiting industries. So, of course, we also got to see some of Kerala’s culture. We saw that at the wedding, in visiting family’s homes, and in talking to students, but on a less sophisticated level, we also got the “tourist culture”: the temples, houseboats, and kalaripayattu.

By Account Deleted September 21, 2011

culture

Making Friends [ITB 5]

One of my favorite parts of this trip has been getting to know the SAINTGITS students.

By Account Deleted September 20, 2011

global

2011 Gyeongju World Culture Expo

After we caught the train to Gyeongju, we took a bus to the fair ground. While we rode the bus, some Korean high school students were laughing at me being a foreigner. This is the only time I was treated less than well for being a foreigner. I think they maybe wanted to practice their English with me because when I stumbled one of them asked if I was okay, so maybe they were just excited to see a foreigner.

By Carly Bond September 20, 2011

research

Educated Unemployment and Labor Shorages [India Trip Blog 4]

In An 22, the intro to socio-cultural anthropology class I took last term, we talked about emic and etic perspectives. The emic perspective is the native point of view, and the etic perspective is the outsider’s point of view and the conclusion about what is going on. This almost seems to apply to the labor shortage we kept hearing about in Kerala through many of our other industry visits. (A really good paper about this is here, though it is a bit outdated.)

By Account Deleted September 19, 2011

research

Three Principles [India Trip Blog 3]

The Art Center students do market research before every project, so they gave us a few tips before we got to our first field site.

By Account Deleted September 18, 2011

research

Many Firsts [India Trip Blog 2]

I was so tired last night after landing that I can’t even remember getting to the hotel / falling asleep. I woke up at 7, thinking much more clearly than the evening before, and went to eat breakfast. My first Indian food in India!

By Account Deleted September 17, 2011

clubs

Yay for International Caltech Alums!

On Sunday August 14, Kelly and I took a bus to Daegu, a city several hours east of Gwangju, to visit a Caltech alum. Kyung Ha Lee graduated just last year and taught a year-long Korean class which Kelly had taken. For a snack on our long bus ride, we bought some triangle kimbap from one of the many convenience stores in the bus station. Traditional kimbap is rolled like a sushi roll, but with spam or other cooked meat and vegetables rather than raw fish. The triangle kimbap is cheap, only 800 won (US$0.75) and is actually really tasty even though it is convenience store food. I’ll miss it when I get back to the USA.

By Carly Bond September 16, 2011

research

Flashback

The latter half of the Amgen symposium was comprised of a lot of fun activities including late night Jenga at the student game lounge with an espresso station, where one can get as much coffee as one wants. Normally this would be good, but I don’t drink coffee. However, it was still really fun relaxing after a long weekend with friends.

By September 16, 2011

research

19 Hours [India Trip Blog 1]

Greetings from SINGAPORE!! I’m sitting in the airport waiting to board my next flight to Kochi, and totally pumped / exhausted from our 19 hour stopover in Singapore.

By Account Deleted September 16, 2011

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