Before living in California, I believed that it was always sunny and warm all the time here. It has definitely gotten cooler, especially during the night: sweater weather! Rain has become a usual occurrence, and some leaves have been changing colors and falling. Only some trees shed their leaves though, and I guess the other plants just keep growing all year. This is way different from back home (Colorado) where everything minus the evergreens seem dead. There's also snow a lot in Colorado which kinda kills plants.
Big I (short for Big Interhouse) was tons of fun. A bunch of people from outside Caltech and grad students showed up as well. Fleming House worked with Venerable House to transform our courtyard and lounge into dance party material. Everything is student built, and must pass a safety inspection before the dance. Here are some photos of the courtyard, with the first one taken about one month ago:
We had a tarp hanging over the courtyard that night; it kept us dry from the rain and looked cool with the flashing lights.
Completely unrelated, we alsohad three weeks of official offseason tennis practice that just ended. Practice was from four to six on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. We had one hour of conditioning with one hour of hitting, usually playing a set against a teammate. Our official practice hours were restricted by NCAA rules, but come January we will be in season and practicing everyday. The nice thing though is that on our own, we can practice or not practice as much as we want.
Tennis is a lot different from soccer. I'm much more comfortable on the tennis court , but it's also not as challenging as soccer. I've been playing tennis for a lot longer and now I compete with, well, not guys. Caltech has both a women's and men's tennis team, and sometimes we practice together but compete separately. I really like both sports and plan on playing on both teams for the rest of my time here.
Recently, I've been thinking about what I want in the future. Less broadly, what kind of job I want to have, whether I should go to grad school, and what I need to do now to reach those goals. Caltech doesn't really cut off any options, which is goodbecause students can do an array of interesting things,and badbecause now I have so many options to choose from! I came in wanting to end up working with prosthetics, but the problem with that is I don't know whether I actually would like doing that because I haven't taken a prosthetic specific class. What's nice though is I talked to some upperclassmen, and they still don't know exactly what they want to do. They told me that I should feel okay with not knowing, and so that's what I'm going to do until something comes to me.As of know, I am signed up for the mechanical engineering route, with emphasis on neural systems, but I guess we'll see if it sticks.
It was the Friday night of midterms during my first year at Caltech, and I was alone in the library. That weekend (week five of term, if you’re keeping count) also happens to coincide with Halloween. But as a bright-eyed frosh trudging my way through Ma 1a lecture notes, I was just baffled that no one else was studying alongside me. Spoiler alert: not all Caltech students spend Friday night—or every night—studying or grinding sets, even during midterms. And especially on Halloween weekend.
In order to get a good sense of the Caltech community, there is no better way than to talk to the students themselves. To give a little bit of an inside perspective of Caltech, I asked some students a variety of questions. Questions ranged from conspiracy theories to Caltech-specific takes and other random topics.
I’d like to think that I keep a tidy desk, but hey— entropy prevails for everyone. Here’s a breakdown of all the items you could find on my desk, circa February 2023.
My grandma always says that it rains whenever Dragonssuperior zodiac sign
travel, and sure enough, it was raining when I landed at LAX for my last calendar year at Caltech. It’s officially my graduation year—but between leaving campus just before spring term in my freshman year and returning, twenty-one years old, as a junior, it really does feel like my time here has flown by.
