California Cruisin' and The Week in Review
At school we have a service called Zipcar, which some of you might have heard of. The way it works is once you sign up, you are given a card that grants you access to one of the two Zipcars on campus (we have a Prius and a Matrix, nice cars). Then you can go online and make your reservation for any time slot that you need to use the car (for a small charge per hour). So after a long wait, I finally got my card and I took the Matrix out for a ride with some friends to our local Target. We got a lot of grocery shopping done, and I got the chance to buy anti-viral tissues for my cold.
Thursdays are grill nights, which means yesterday was grill night. Every house has its own grill, and the student-waiters cook whatever meats we are given for the week – yesterday we had steak and chicken breast. Basically, grill night guarantees that we have at least one deliciously satisfying dinner per week. I’m attaching a picture of the beast in our courtyard:
This morning I woke up at 8:00 to the blasting of The Ride of the Valkyries on our library’s speakers. Apparently Dabney tried to initiate the call for a fake Ditch Day. It was a funny sight though, as I observed Moles (members of Blacker) trying to climb into the library through the windows as they were hit by water balloons from the Darbs.
In review, this first week has been great. We turned in our first chemistry and physics sets. In physics we are currently working on electric fields; in chemistry we are doing an introduction to organic chem; and in math we are doing pivot operations on matrices. Right now, I just came from a lunch meeting at the Caltech Center for Diversity where we learned some tips and guidelines for finding a SURF this summer. SURF stands for Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, and it is a program for Caltech students that allows them to get a firsthand experience of the world of research. For frosh it can be somewhat intimidating to approach faculty and ask them if they are willing to take them for a SURF, as we don’t know many faculty at this point. But I’m confident and hopeful that a math professor will recognize my charm and intellect and I’ll get a SURF for this coming summer. I’m off to work on that.
Cheers
