I'm going to be a senior?

My life is still mostly class projects (even more so now that MechSolids projects are about to start), though the weather is finally warming up, so I've also been spending time at Babson's baseball games. There are only three weeks of classes left, and registration was at the end of last week. It's a little weird to think that I'm already registering for senior year. Here's what I'll be up to this summer and next fall:

Summer

-- Research in Industrial Projects for Students. This is a math research program run by the Institute of Pure and Applied Math at UCLA in which teams of four students are matched to projects sponsored by companies/organizations. I'll be on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory team, and here are all this year's sponsors. I'm hoping to get a sense for how interested I am in doing industrial math, and it should be cool to take my Olin experience with team projects and use it to work on a math problem.

-- New England Annual Conference. I'm my church's lay delegate to Annual Conference this year, and I'm both nervous and excited about that. I watched the livestream of huge portions of NEAC last year, so I know what to expect, but actually being there as a voting member will be really different.

Next Fall

-- SCOPE. A year long engineering capstone is a graduation requirement, and the two options for capstone project courses are SCOPE, which has projects sponsored by companies, and Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship (ADE), which is more focused on communities and social problems. I'm taking SCOPE. The sponsoring companies for next year aren't entirely set yet (much less the projects), so I still have no idea what I'll be doing.

-- Mechanical Design. This is a Mechanical Engineering graduation requirement, and it will be very CAD heavy. It's the class I'm least excited about taking, and I'm very glad that I've had to do some CAD in MechSolids, MechAero, and PoE this semester. I hadn't really touched Solidworks since Design Nature, which wouldn't have been good going into MechDesign.

-- Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. One of the worst parts of this semester, especially at the beginning, was going from taking five math courses to not taking any, so I was really excited to see that Olin is offering Chaos. (Wellesley advanced math classes all meet on Wednesdays, and SCOPE is all day on Wednesday, so cross-registering for math wasn't going to be an option.) Even better, Aaron is teaching it, and while I've NINJAed for him every semester that I've been at Olin except my first fall, I haven't taken a class with him since PDEs.

-- Transport in Biological Systems. I've taken Transport Phenomena, so I'll be familiar with most of the physics and math in this class. However, this will be a small, project-based class, so I'll have a lot of control over what I learn, and the different context means I'll get to do some interesting modeling (and maybe computational fluid dynamics)!

-- Graph Theory Research, NINJAing, and Art of Problem Solving TAing. We're in the middle of several problems in the research group, and while we hope to finish some of them before the fall, we still have a lot of directions to explore next year. I'll be a NINJA for Discrete Math again, and I plan to assist several AoPS courses.