It'll Come Back to Bite You In The Ass

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 11:46 PM
So I just threw in the towel on doing my quantum physics homework. Seriously right? Quantum Physics? I'm a mechanical engineer. I last took an introduction to quantum physics in my junior year, as a requirement for my materials science degree (dual major). Man was that class tough. Towards the end, I was just struggling to finish it up so that I could leave it in the past and forget about it. Hell no I was not gonna remember anything from that class. Hell yes I was glad to be done and over with it.

And now it's back.

I didn't finish this week's homework, due in a few hours, which I'll attribute to not starting it until the day before it was due. BAD IDEA. To be fair, I was busy over the weekend (visited my cousin in Hartford), so I didn't get to start my two homeworks until Monday. I did manage to finish the first homework, at least.

Lesson learned: I HAVE to start quantum physics on the weekend, and it would be even better if I could read a bit towards the end of the week. I'll start tomorrow.

Coming to MIT: Lesson 1

Sunday, September 27, 2009 at 8:23 PM
So I just got on the bus back to Boston from Hartford, after visiting my cousin for the weekend. I had a pretty fun time there, and got to see Dan too. I met a bunch of engineers working at UTC too.

I’m going to take this time to try right a bit about my experience at MIT. I learned a lot since arriving here, and have been meaning to record it, but never had the will or time to do it. I’ll start with my initial feelings about when I just arrived.

To many, MIT is the ivory tower of academic learning. In my mind, it was the most revered and prestigious school of learning, as far as science and technology goes. Obviously, we all learn as we grow up that the school you go to isn’t the only important thing. I remember in highschool, as one by one we all got rejected from incredibly prestigious Ivy schools like Yale or Harvard (guess some of did get into that one), we started saying, “hey, what do rankings mean anyway right?” Well it’s true that rankings don’t tell the whole story, and for four years while I went to University of Michigan, that was my belief. That perspective changed as soon as I got into MIT.

After getting in, there was the predictable feeling of euphoria and achievement, but it was a few months after (June or July of this summer, ’09), that my original impression of MIT from above hit met. It went something like this:
Holy shit…what did I get myself in to…

I had a big case of the panic attack. I just completely got caught up with the MIT stereotypes, and thought I was completely out of my league. Maybe people will find out that I actually don’t belong there. After all, admissions departments make mistakes. In addition, I had gotten in only after being rejected, because I was offered a fellowship (S.M.A.R.T. Fellowship by the Department of Defense). For almost three months, there was a gnawing worry in the back of my mind about how I would deal with MIT.

This didn’t really change after I arrived on campus. For the first week, I had to go through orientation session after session, in which the speakers intoned that we didn’t have to worry about not fitting in, or not making it here. They kept telling us how great we were, and we would go on to do great things at MIT. This did not help at all, as I continued to think it was the other people who were the great ones. I certainly was not one of them.
Eventually, this feeling of inadequacy passed. I do not feel like I’m any better than I was before. It’s just that, the other people seemed less overwhelming. More normal, albeit with a geeky streak. In particular, two things helped me to change this. One, my classes were hard, but I found that other people were struggling just as much as me, or even more in some cases. Two, another person in my group (lab group), was feeling much more depressed than I was. Thomas, a new international student, had and still has a sense of disorientation. He seems like a bright guy, but just found everything really intense, and was struggling to keep his spirits up. For me, I realized that even if smart people can feel this daunted, then perhaps we are all just experiencing the same challenges.

The moral of the story: MIT is not really the ivory tower I once thought of it as. It is a challenging school, but as a famous professor here said, “Getting an education from MIT is like trying to take a drink from a fire hydrtant.” Everyone here feels just as overwhelmed as I do. And it’s ok.

Funny things my MIT Professor does..

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 8:46 AM
Prof. Hagelstein does Darth Vader: *Whooooo-shhhhhhhhhhhh.....Whoooo-shhhhhhhhhhhh.....Whoooo-shhhhhhhhhhhh*, *I AM DISAPPOINTED IN YOUR LACK OF PHYSICAL INTUITION*
(In this quote, he asks us for our intuition as to what will happen to a wave packet with a parabolic dispersion relation. Apparently, the appropriate response would be to say, "the packet will spread over time".)

Clarice the TA: "The professor says that doing integrals by hand builds character"
(However, even she professes to use Mathematica to solve big integrals.)

More later.

Quantum Homework

Monday, September 14, 2009 at 11:11 PM
Sometime soon, I need to make these posts more substantial. I've just been a little busy with classes and homework. Tonight, I spent about 3 hours stumped on this quantum physics (6.728) homework. Thankfully, I started getting it towards the end. Also, I switched to EM (6.630), which was a lot easier, so I can end tonight on a more positive note. Will be working on this tomorrow again.

Fire Alarm

Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 10:53 AM
Just had a fire alarm. I'm sitting here in my pajamas, thinking "uh oh, what to bring." Good thing it was all resolved rather quickly. I think someone was probably cooking, and set off an alarm. We were all back in less than half an hour.

Also, I climbed 16 flights of stairs. Good work out.

Edit: Turns out that later that day, we had another fire alarm. This time I think it was a faulty system error.

!!!!!

Edit 2: This morning (Monday), I get an email from the hall director. Tang Hall is undergoing fire drills this week, and we should be ready.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Reflecting on First Few Days as a Grad Student

Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 9:24 PM
I will start this now, and probably finish the rest tomorrow, since it is late.

Screw it. Time for bed.

Edit 1: Boston water tastes pretty damn good. At least, the MIT tap water in building 35 does. More later.

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