As a follow up to a previous blog,I'm sorry to write that we lost our soccer game on Thursday. It was a great game though; high intensity throughout the entire game, SOKA scored in the second to last minute, breaking the tie and ending the game with a 3-2 lead. You can get the full story here:https://www.gocaltech.com/sports/msoc/2012-13/releases/20121101kkkdd1.
Halloween was more of a win. Dabney House hosted a pumpkin drop where they dipped pumpkins in liquid nitrogen and rolled them off the top of our nine-story Millikan Library starting at midnight. The show was even choreographed with music that was fitting for Halloween. The pumpkins made a loud noise when they hit the ground because they had been frozen. Some had lights duct taped to them to make it more interesting. I tried to get some photos of the pumpkins falling but they were too fast. Try and picture a small dot accelerating then smashing into the ground from the top of this:
The atmosphere was festive and a lot of people came out even though midterms are around this time. And after everything, it sure smelled like a lot of pumpkin.
As most frosh, I had two midterms this weekend. Frosh generally have less pressure than upper classmen because all our classes are pass-fail, but midterms were taken seriously by all years.The math midterm was a four hour, open-book test consisting of four problems. And for chem we had two parts each two hours, one open and the other closed-book. Apart from those, the weekend was mostly fun.
Page had their Interhouse this Friday; every year each house hosts a party for the rest of the school. It averages out to about one every month. The members of Page House built a Zombieland themed setup in their courtyard, and a lot of us dressed up in Halloween costumes. I decided to be a pirate mummy because I happened to have an eye patch and had always wanted to wrap myself in toilet paper as a costume. Without looking in the mirror after being wrapped, I was really into the costume. After some time the toilet paper ripped and I didn't like seeing with only one eye. When the pictures came up on facebook I realized it was probably a good thing the costume fell apart. Turns out being a pirate mummy is not the most flattering. As a whole Page Interhouse was a lot of fun and I look forward to Big I. It's basically Interhouse at a much bigger scale that only happens every other year.
The Social Team organized a pumpkin carving contest with dinner in honor of Halloween and midterms. We aren't served meals on the weekends with board, so geting food on campus was nice. The whole event was pretty mellow and destressed people from taking midterms. We now also have some elaborately carved pumpkins in our courtyard!
One was also made to resemble a certain someone which turned out hilariously.
The first Sunday of every month, a flea market is held at PCC, the nearby community college. We walked over and saw the entertaining items people had to sell. Also, I bought a plant! I have a weirdly high interest in plants, sometimes stopping to look at them walking back from class.
Right now the orchid is living under my bunked bed on the shoe shelf. It's supposed to grow best in the shade, and hopefully I can keep it alive for a while.
Just last week, on an unassuming Thursday, the astro(physics) community got served two humongous cakes at once. Both the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) and the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (IceCube) have ground-breaking scientific findings to share with the class!
A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the mountains are beautiful, and mysterious sounds echo between our walls while we don’t even pretend to sleep.
This summer I had the incredible opportunity to do a 10-week internship at Gilead Sciences in Foster City, CA. For those unfamiliar, Gilead Sciences, Inc. is a research-based biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development, and commercialization of innovative medicines.
