Howitzer

It seems like everyday that I see a group of asian tourists at MIT. This place is really popular.

Feeling extremely stiff today. I had a tough work out last night, where I was actually sweating. I usually don't sweat very much when lifting. Anyways, I had a ton to eat last night and I'm starving now, so hopefully that's a sign that my body is burning up that fuel for building muscles. I may have to skip out on Thursday basketball because of this.

Ok crap, this homework IS really long. Luckily, my EM homework went pretty fast. I just had to show you what this quantum homework looked like though. Here's part of the answer for part a) of problem 1: Unfortunately, until I figure out how to load bigger pictures to blogger, you'll have to click on the image to view it properly.

The gods must be smiling on me, oh thank the gods. Both of my classes have homework sets with only 4 questions. Now you might say, well those problems are probably harder. I say, I don't care, 4 questions is still less than 6, and it makes me feel much better.

Apologies for anyone who doesn't know me personally. This is another rant-type post.

I'm having a lot of difficulty concentrating today. I think I'm feeling better though, but it's hard to tell when emotions inevitably flucutate. I have two homeworks due Wednesday, so I have a feeling I will be up late again on tomorrow night.

The good thing about all this stress is that it motivates me to exercise a lot more. I suppose it's a physical release from my mental pressure. I can report that lifting is producing a lot of results for me. Also, my basketball skills have been steadily increasing. Last week, I made many shots, although I feel like this week I will have a regression in my shot making. Oh well, I suppose that progress is never steady.


I'll try to come up with something to say here for everyone. I guess if it's one thing I learned, it's that hard times will always come. Life is never smooth sailing; the rough seas inevitably show up. Like a cycle, we are always forced to navigate through treacherous waters. I suppose, the knowledge that hard times will always appear helps us focus on dealing with our problems, rather than trying to get rid of them. Once the tough times are dealt with, you have to enjoy the easy times while they last. And of course, always keep in mind that easy times always follow the tough times.

-Howitzer

Graduate students and free food. If you've ever read the comic PhDComics, written by some people at Stanford, you'll understand the relationship. I guess I'm not as big on free food, but I definitely have a friend who is the epitomy of Mike with free food. I think as much as half of his diet is based on free food. What a guy. Imagine when I introduced him to MMS back at Michigan: free lunch every Friday.

Things are at their lowest point between us right now. Neither of us is really sure what is going on anymore, but we are just sad all the time when we talk to each other. I'm having a hard time dealing with her being in Spain, having tons of fun, while I'm working here at school. At this point, I just want her to be happy. I'm so tired of hearing my baby crying, I don't even care about why I was mad at her in the first place. The only, ONLY thing I want now is just for her and I to make it through this year together. I can't express how much it is that I want things to just be "ok" between the two of us. We're both so willing to make this work, yet it just seems to get harder and harder. I think we really need to just STOP. Just STOP, and remember the things that are important: we still care about each other. I need to figure out myself and just...chill out.

Scarlett Johansson wtf? Penn State football game coming up this weekend! Fuck that, GO BLUE!

Here's a few tidbits for any Wolverines that remember.

2006 - Alan Branch ripping Anthony Morelli a new one. Ouch. Looks like Morelli forgot to dig the grave here. And look at Alan Branch strolling happily away, very satisfied with his work.

Not sure who/when this was, but it's Daryll Clark getting sacked/fumbled.

Why is it so hard to find the 1 second touchdown by Mario Manningham? This will have to suffice.

Per Dan's suggestion, I will be posting something other than MIT-related stuff. For today, I'll put up pictures of Scarlett Johansson. Why? I think the reason is implicit.

So the title of this post should actually be a lot more downbeat. I actually did terrible on my exams, and am in the lowest quartile in both of my classes. Sigh. I'll need to put more work into my classes. I'm also not doing that much research at the moment either. This all adds up to be BAD.

I done with my first round of exams at MIT. They took up a lot of my time and focus, but overall, I don't feel like they were too much harder than any other exam I've taken. I have to say, the EM exam today was super easy. Not to brag, but I think I got something right that two other guys got wrong. Ok, I am gloating a little. Also, people complained about the exam from quantum physics, so we are getting a take-home re-do of the test, to be turned in tomorrow. I'll have to get on that tonight, though I feel pretty good about my work last week.

I'm trying to build one, but efforts have so far revolved around UM football. I find myself increasingly searching for cheap thrills in the form of internet webpages and video games. I think this is rather the wrong path to go down, as it is really just a distraction from the things that would really make me satisfied. If I don't change, I may soon be unfulfilled with both school and non-school parts of my life.

The first thing I need to do is to make some better friends, real people to talk to. Right now, I've met a lot of people, but haven't really formed any connections with. That half of my group speaks chinese does not help me(though it does allow me to practice my chinese). The friend making process may take awhile, especially in this environment. After all, I did just arrive recently; good friendships are hard to find and take time to build.

The good thing is that I've identified parts of my behavior that arise because of deeper causes. I'll try to reduce the amount of time wasting that I do on the internet, in order to direct more of my efforts to doing other things. Hopefully this will change a few things for me, and make life better here. Let me brainstorm some things that can occupy my time: food, working out, sports with labmates, tennis, labmates living in Tang Hall. It seems like I still need to find something more significant. Happy Hour with lab mates a start? MIT does have its own pub. I shall think on this some more.

Two people to target: Sejoon-roommate and labmate-girl ZT. Sejoon plays tennis, which I had a lot of fun trying out the other day. The labmate-girl is also lonely and missing friends. Misery loves company no? Also, I don't feel like I get along with J. that well yet. He's a cool guy, but I think it's just like Dan and I talked about. You have to "get" a person, have a feel for what they are thinking, in order to connect with someone. It's just not happening with me and J., or many other people here yet.

I think an important skill to have no matter what you are doing is proper time management. I'm struggling with my time management a bit right now. As a first year graduate student, I am supposed to be working half the time, and focusing on classes the other half. In reality, I am doing 80+% of my time on classes. I spend all of Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday working on homework and learning material for classes. Wednesday night is then dedicated to recharging. And that leaves Thursday and Friday when I don't have classes or seminars or whatever to try to do some research. If I have an exam, they are usually on Thursday or Friday. This semester, it looks like my exams are staggered with one another, ie. one exam each week, rather than together. This past week, I spent all of Thursday and Friday on my exam. This all adds up to very little time for me to spend on research.

I'll have to work on being more disciplined in my schedule. I'm also experimenting with going into the office on the weekend to dedicate some time to reading on research related topics. I will monitor this to see how it goes. Hopefully my time management problems are due to adjustment issues here at MIT. I found that another member in my group barely got anything done his first semester here. I think I can get something done this semester, such as at least getting something set up for experiments.

So. I'll start by describing things that I heard over and over this Friday night, after a stressful week. Then, you'll guess what it was that I was doing.

Quotes:
"I'm gonna BANG you!"

"No you can't, he's too far away. Bang her instead!"

"You can only bang one person at a time"

"Don't make me punch your balls"

"My balls aren't where you think they are"







Interestingly, this was a card game I played with some fellow ME students, called BANG!, a country western card game. You shoot each other by using BANG! cards, and really everyone is just shooting each other all game. Me and Jonathon were the two newbies at this game, so I guess I was the only laughing at everyone saying, "I'm gonna BANG YOU". Over. And over. Oh and there was this one girl who was really butch, threatening to punch people in the face and balls. What a bizarre night in some ways, yet really fun at the same time. I think I was laughing the whole time, which was good after working hard on my homework and studying for my quantum physics exam.

I did ok in my quantum test today. It was pretty damn tough though. As I was going through the problems, I felt like I didn't know how to do any of them. I had to really think deeply, and apply the concepts in different ways to get a solution. This was definitely not one of those tests where it's like a cookie cutter: you can not apply a specific method to determine an answer.

I just hope I did as well as everyone else. I heard from someone else today that the professor only gives A-, A, and A+ grades. That would be pretty sweet to get an A+ at MIT huh? Who knew you had a 1/3 chance to do it.

Tomorrow is my first exam at MIT. I'm pretty sure I'm about to be spanked. I'm taking a quantum physics course which is...pretty hard. It's an abstract topic to learn, and to really understand it intuitively takes some time. Until then, I'm just learning formulas and equations and more math than I ever wanted to. I think my preparation has been ok, though another day or so would be optimal. I'm going to turn in now, so that I can rest my brain. Really, if I could just remember everything that I've learned, and be able to use them tomorrow, I'd be ok. It definitely would help me more than studying some more.

Frustrating night for me. I think I will call in quits early and just get some sleep.

So, next in my series, I will talk about the pressures of getting started in research as a new graduate student.

When I found out I was going to MIT, my first priority was to find a professor to PAY ME mentor me in my research. That was pretty stressful. Having spent four years being mostly supported by my parents, I was not looking forward to spending the next four in the same way. On top of that, I wasn't entirely sure on what I wanted to do in grad school, which you really need to know when going to grad school.