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Flashback

AMGEN

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global

Doing the tourist thing

A few weeks ago some of the girls and I managed to wake up early on a Saturday. Crazy, right? The city was hosting Melbourne Open House, a chance to unlock the city for a weekend and explore dozens of buildings for free. Our tour guide for the day was Mia, who spared us having to think much about the day since she had already planned a route that took us through all the coolest buildings.

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Getting the Drift

One of the things I’ve been looking forward to the most at The University of Melbourne is working on a brand new research project. The past few years I worked in the Agapie Group at Caltech in inorganic chemistry. I absolutely loved my project and learned more than I could have imagined. My hope was that while I am here I can jump into an entirely different kind of chemistry. And once again, I got exactly what I wished for. After reading 26 pages worth of project descriptions for the Research Project class I’m enrolled in, I picked my top four labs and submitted all my paperwork. I was assigned to work under Evan Bieske, whose research mainly focuses on using laser spectroscopy to investigate the properties of charged molecules, complexes, clusters, and nanoparticles in the gas phase. That means there’s lots of lasers in his lab, and no bubbling reactions or beakers or Erlenmeyer flasks full of the colorful and dangerous chemicals people usually associate with chemistry. Coming straight out that kind of lab, this was a really big and definitely exciting change. Here I am in my new lab next to the laser I’ll be working with.

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clubs

I ate it while it was still alive!

To continue… After lunch, Jaeeun bought some orange chocolates here that Jeju is famed for. I think they are really delicious and you can find variations sold all over the island. They also have a lot of tangerine trees here. The administrators bought some tangerines for us. They were very sweet and delicious.

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Chipping away on CHIP

Meet Chip:

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Beach Trip

I went to the beach again! SURFSAC, a student group that organizes lots of social / fun events over the summer, organized the trip. We had a (coach!) bus from Caltech right to the beach. In Santa Monica, we were able to do / go wherever we wanted so long as we would all be back at the bus at 4:50, but most people formed a pretty big group around the food! It was pretty cold / cloudy when we got there, so we wrapped up in our towels, but then – SUN! Garms (her blog is at https://www.caltech.typepad.com/ - Summer at NASA!) and I went into the waves for a while (during which I, of course, managed to get really sunburnt!). THEY WERE HUGE! Waves are so cool. The undertow was really strong, so we kept getting pulled closer to shore / farther from shore.

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The Golden Ticket (or rather

I never did a lot of stuff before coming to Caltech - research, eating mangos, and seeing a rattlesnake [don’t worry, it was a three hour drive from campus] - and that now includes going to a fancy schmancy movie theater (to be honest, I didn’t even know there was one in Pasadena!). I already blogged about my summer jobs, but as a quick refresher, in addition to SURFing this summer [I’ll be posting about that again soon!], I’m working eight hours a week as a House Assistant.Housing super-kindly agreed to fund an HA (House Assistants) “team-bonding” event! We decided to go to the Gold Class Theater. Only one of us had been there before (there’s this other really good $2 movie theater with, apparently, $1 hotdogs that are really good even closer to campus) and we were quite impressed as we rushed in, slighly late [luckily these things have a ton of advertisements at the beginning].

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To Infinity & Beyond! (but don't forget about Earth!)

So I’ve mentioned before how JPL lets us tour some of its really cool facilities. I’ve gotten to see the Lunar Surface Operations Testbed (LSOT) and the clean room where MSL was being packed. Well, last Friday, I got to see some more cool things! I actually got to go on two lab tours. The first was the Planetary Robotics Lab (PRL), which is where I saw that funny Godzilla sign that I showed you in my last post.

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Back Again!

Hey everyone! I am finally back again after my unintended 2 week hiatus from blogging. Anyway, there’s a lot to blog about, but first, let’s talk about the weekend. Have you had a good weekend? I hope so! I had a great one as well and I learned two things as well.

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The Rest of the Trip (Part 2)

So, to continue… Even though it was very late, we went to a street famous for its many Ddeokbokki (a type of spicy rice cake dish) shops and had another meal. It was yummy, but I had to drink a lot of water because it was so spicy.

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culture

Birthday Celebrations!

I had the pleasure of celebrating my 21st birthday in Australia a couple of weeks ago. It coincided with the “Under the Sea” party that was part of O-Week in the Village. The girls and I had agreed to meet up in Sarah and Mia’s room to get ready at 6:15. I received a couple of text messages that kept pushing the time back, since apparently Sarah and Mia were still cooking dinner. Forty five minutes later I had reached the conclusion that they had either burned their kitchen down or else were making a really splendid meal.

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An Egg, A Crater & A Launch

Last Friday (August 5th) was a very busy day for me. Let me tell you all about it! :)

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Rural Korea, or More Strange Things That I Have Eaten

We drove down a dirt road to Wonil’s family’s house. It was way out in the countryside, and surrounded by fields of green Korean onions.

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We've got spirit, yes we do! We've got spirit, how about you?

So last time, I talked about Opportunity, the Mars Rover launched in 2004 that was supposed to last only 90 Martian Days (called sols). Well, it’s still on Mars; it’s still functional; and it’s still returning lots of cool data. Unfortunately, Opportunity’s twin (Spirit, which had the same purpose/intended lifetime) recently passed away. It’s still on Mars, but NASA is unable to communicate with it…JPL had its last contact with Spirit just last year. :(

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Acronyms Galore & A Little Bit of "Opportunity"

On the first day of my time here at JPL, during the orientation talks, I was introduced to an alternative full-form of the acronym “NASA”: National Acronym Slingers Association. :) And well, this expression is pretty accurate! I’ve heard so many acronyms while at JPL that it’s hard to keep track of them all! In my last post I mentioned “ATHLETE.” That stands for “All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer.” How did they come up with that one?!

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SURF Party!

Each Friday, the SURFs in my group (aka Professor Gray’s group) and his Solar Army team meet for an hour and present on what we’ve been up to!

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More Interesting Food

After we finished the hike, we went to the beach for an hour. There was a typhoon on its way in, so the beach was roped off, literally. There was yellow caution tape strung along the shoreline. We stood behind the tape, but we could still get our feet wet as the bigger waves came in. One wave was much bigger than we expected, so we got splashed up to our waists!

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Giant Martian Rovers, Oh My!

As I mentioned briefly at the end of my last post, I got to tour the Lunar Surface Operation Testbed (LSOT), which is the facility that JPL uses to simulate low gravity and test the large ATHLETE Rover.

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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.

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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.

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Just a Little Bit Closer to Space

Hello! :)

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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.

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Revisited

**Note: These opportunities are available to all Caltech students! **

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Catch up week!

The past few days have been pretty busy for me both in and out of the lab, so I didn't get too much time to blog. The good news is I didn't forget about blogging! Note that I created an entry for this blog 8 days ago! I just didn't finish writing it until today =S

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global

Mudungsan Mountain

Hey everyone! I’m sorry this post took so long to finish, but work really picked up this week, I began taking a beginning Korean class, and I have finally made some more Korean friends outside the office, which means I do more in the evenings than work and sit in my room. Good for me, but less good for this blog.

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culture

Waterfalls and Fireworks

The LA National Forest sits right behind Pasadena, so I’ve been doing a lot of hiking lately. On Sunday, I went hiking with a friend and her family. We went to Switzer falls, a waterfall in the mountains. It was a great hike, especially since it was shady and followed a river (it was pretty hot!).

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For Prospective Caltech Pre-meds (and everyone else)

June 25: The Awesomeness of Internet and Email

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Tea, Giant Bugs, and Stinky Fish

This last weekend was really cool. The dean of GIST, the GIST-Caltech coordinator here, and the president of student affairs drove us four techers and a couple of GIST undergraduates out on a trip. However, when we were first climbing into the van, we saw a gigantic centipede crawling on the ceiling. It was four inches long with a maroon body, red head, and bright orange legs. I had no idea bugs could even be that big! Once that was out of the way, we drove off to the Boseong tea farm. Boseong is a famous area for growing tea. There was a typhoon on its way in from over the sea, so it was very cloudy and rainy. The tea farms in this area cover hills with rows and rows of hedges of tea plants. We hiked up a couple of these hills, but it was so foggy we couldn’t see more than 30 feet in front of our faces. Below is a picture of what the hills look like in the sunlight, compared with the foggy views we had.

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The La B()ea(ch) Tar Pits

Those of you familiar with the area might get my reference to the natural La Brea Tar Pits next to the LAC Museum of Art. It turns out, the tar doesn’t just naturally occur on land. It’s also on the beaches. I was not a happy beach-goer when I found out about this. Tar contains carcinogens! That’s not really something I want to be running around in!

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Lab and more fun

**I am starting this post with an aside. If you want to skip it, just scroll past the **

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Hiking + Beach(ing?)

I always thought New Hampshire, my home state, was really cool for having mountains, beaches, and Canada within day-trip distance. There’s only one problem: CA does too. In fact, I’m pretty sure the mountains and ocean are closer to each othere here than in NH. I made it a weekend trip: on Saturday, I hiked Mount Wilson with a bunch of other Techers and summer students (here for SURF or Caltech’s JPL programs) and on Sunday, my roommate and I took the metro to Santa Monica.

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Fin, Part II

Now… Time to write about the start of my SURF and tour guide training!

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First Impressions

Hi everyone. My name is Carly Bond, and I am a rising junior studying chemical engineering at Caltech. I have been in Gwanju, South Korea for a little over a week. My first impression was that it is very bright. I arrived in Gwanju around midnight, and as we drove to the Gwanju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), I noticed that a lot of the buildings had big neon signs in many colors.

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107 Days of Summer Break at Caltech!

**June 21, 2011: Summer Solstice**

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Hello There!

Hello!

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38 Days Until Graduation

I got a call from the bookstore today informing me that my diploma frame had arrived. Here it is:

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Food Fest!!! Culture Fair!!!

Last week was World Fest. That’s a week of events put on by the Caltech Y, the International Student Program, the Diversity Center and a bunch of other groups.

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clubs

Hollywood Hike

Hi Everyone! I hope those of you who came enjoyed pre-frosh weekend! I enjoyed meeting my pre-frosh and showing her around campus!

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culture

Wake Up Frosh, It's (Fake) Ditch Day!

As you may know, Caltech has a Ditch Day tradition that is unlike any other school’s. While at most places the seniors just leave campus and nothing else happens, at Caltech the seniors leave all sorts of fun activities and puzzles for the underclassmen. Each group of seniors who participates in Ditch Day creates what is known as a “stack,” which is a series of fun activities, puzzles or games for the undeclassmen to do. Each stack has a different theme.

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Caltech Y Friend's Dinner

I’m taking Bi1 right now. Bi1 is one of the ways to fulfil our biology requirement if we don’t want to major in biology and aren’t terribly enthusiastic about getting all thedrybio basics. I didn’t think I was going to like Bi1, but I’m actually enjoying the class a lot. The focus of the class is HIV and other viruses. We’re learning about proteins and the mechanisms of the central dogma right now (replication, transcription, translation), but the focus is definitely on giving us useful concepts rather than making us memorize stuff. Everything is open book, so we really don’t have to memorize everything. Rather, Professor Bjorkman is giving us a general view of how viruses work with a focus on HIV / AIDs.It’s really interesting so far, because it has a ton of chemistry invovled! If you have a chance, you should watch this clip from TedXCaltech. It’s Professor Bjorkman talking about a potential cure for AIDS, and it’s COOL! https://tedxcaltech.com/speakers/pamela-bj%C3%B6rkman Here’s another link we watched for one of our homework sets, and I just really liked it: https://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/nathan_wolfe_hunts_for_the_next_aids.html So, you’re probably wondering why I labeled this post as a Caltech Y event and just wrote so much about my biology class. The Y Friend’s dinners are a perk for those involved with the Y. Basically, there is one each term. It is the Y’s way of thanking our board members. It’s at the ath, which has really good food, and there’s always a really cool speaker. This time, our speaker was Jim Kolker (https://www.caltechy.org/support/events/friends/). He has beenChief of the HIV/AIDS Section at UNICEF’s New York headquarters since 2007. Prior to joining UNICEF, heserved as Deputy Global AIDS Coordinator in the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC), which leads implementation of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). He also had a diplomatic career with the US Department of State, as ambassador to Uganda, Burkina Baso, Deputy Chief of Mission in Denmark and Botswana.

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ARC Retreat! *

So one of the really neat things about Caltech is that it is small enough that it’s very easy to get involved in different activities. Obviously if you don’t plan well it can overwhelm you (but that’s true anywhere), but needless to say there are plenty of opportunities. So, when house elections came around, I decided to run for ARC representative for Page House. The ARC (Academics and Research Committee) is a student’s main link to dealing with problems that occur in classes; however, it also runs some really cool programs to encourage student-professor interactions such as student-faculty lunches (where once a month a group of students who sign up get a free lunch catered by the Athenaum (the nicest, members-only facility on campus), and get to talk to a prof). In addition, the ARC publishes a guide to academics for freshmen. In recent years, newer programs have also started through the ARC, including course capturing, so it’s now possible to re-watch certain classes’ lectures if you feel you may have missed something. All in all, it seemed like an opportunity to stretch myself and work to make Caltech an even better place. Unfortunately, I did not win the election :(. However, the next week, I received an email asking people to apply for ARC Rep-at-Large positions and, as I talked about last term, I applied and received one of the openings. However, by the time this happened, it was near the end of term so my first ARC meeting was on ARC Retreat.

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MAD Day

One of the biggest Caltech Y events each year is MAD Day. Make a Difference Day takes group of 5 to 15students and sends them on a service project somewhere in our community. Projects this year included Beach Cleanup, Rosemary’s Children Services, Chancellor’s Place (a retirement home), the Santa Monica trails, two canyon clean-up trips, Lifeline for Pets, the Gibbons Center, Trash for Teachers and a bunch more. About 200 people participated!

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Spotlight


academics

My Trip to the Galapagos!

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.

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culture

Caltech Food Tour

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.

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Some Late-Night Stress-Saving Food Runs

Midterms kept up its unrelenting attack on my sanity this week – at least a little bit. And how did I solve this? Two words.

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global local culture

Quick Trip to the Beach

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.

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