Math Prize for Girls, Part 2

After the awards ceremony, the group of Mathcampers went back to Random for a while, and on the walk there, I had the chance to talk to Stephen Wolfram. His daughter was competing, and she’s MC12, so he was trying to figure out when we were doing what and where we were going to be. We talked a little bit about Olin (evidently he was on campus a couple of years ago), which was really cool. Once we got to Random, GW, who lives there and was MC ’09, ’10, ’12 and RSI ’11, gave a tour to the people who hadn’t spent much time in Random. I sat in the kitchen with Brigitte on her floor and did some Art of Problem Solving grading.

We met in Lobby 7 at 5:45 and gathered a group of around 30 Mathcampers to go to Bertucci’s, a pizza place. I got to talk to some people I haven’t seen for a while, and I had a really good calzone. We definitely made good use of the Round Table Theorem (if there are n people seated around a table, there is always room for an n+1^st person).

Math Prize for Girls, Part 1

This weekend was the fourth annual Math Prize for Girls competition, which is a math competition for middle and high school girls. Students qualify for the competition based on AMC scores from the previous year. I participated in the first three years of the competition, and this year I was very excited that the competition was held at MIT because I was able to volunteer!

There are several ways to get into Boston from Olin. The easiest way is to drive, but then you have to park, which isn’t as simple. Most people take either the T (Boston’s subway system) or the commuter rail. Olin isn’t conveniently located for any of the stations, though. It’s between a mile and a half and two miles from four different commuter rail stations, and there’s a T station about five miles away. I walked to one of the commuter rail stations. It’s also pretty normal for emails to go out on a list called helpme asking for rides.

I left Olin on Friday afternoon and walked to the Wellesley Hills commuter rail station, which is a twenty or twenty-five minute walk from the West Hall dorms. I took the train all the way to its last stop – South Station. I’m really familiar with South Station because the silver line from the airport runs there. When I got off the train and walked into South Station, I had to try really hard to contain my excitement. It was so familiar and comfortable, and I was that much closer to Cambridge.

I spent the summer of 2011 doing research in Cambridge , which is across the Charles River from Boston and is home to both MIT and Harvard. This was through a camp called Research Science Institute, or RSI. I lived on the MIT campus, so I know it and the area surrounding it very well. Even though I had no interest in MIT, I have lots of friends there, there are certain spots on campus that I love, and I have favorite restaurants and stores throughout Cambridge. Going back to Cambridge for the first time since last February felt like going home.

Empanadas, Medical Interpreters, and Design

My past two Anthropology classes have been longer than normal -- three hours on Friday and nearly four hours on Monday. Long classes are often long and annoying, but these weren't.

These were field trips!

On Friday we went into the Jamaica Plain area of Boston and spent two hours walking around a mainly Spanish-speaking neighborhood. It's historically Dominican, but a lot of the people with whom we interacted were Cuban. We split into groups, but various people went into stores and looked around, found community playgrounds and gardens, got haircuts, and ate yummy food. I did several of those, but by far the most exciting was the yummy food.

We ate at El Oriental de Cuba, which is a pretty well known restaurant in the area. One of the few customers in the restaurant when we were there -- we were in the restaurant between eleven and noon, before most people eat lunch -- told us that she and her friends go there a lot for both the food and the community. I really like Cuban food, so I was pretty excited. Well, okay, my experience with Cuban food in general is pretty limited, but I'm a big fan of empanadas.

Una Conversación Oblonga

I've thought since my first year of Mathcamp that mealtime conversations are some of the best indicators of how I fit in a group of people. At Mathcamp and my high school, I loved the interesting (and often highly amusing) conversations at lunch and supper, and my mealtime conversations with people at Candidates' Weekend gave me a better feel for the Olin community and for the other potential members of my class than almost anything else. In the end, the sense of the Olin people that I got while sitting in the dining hall was a big factor in my decision to come to Olin. They seemed like my kind of people.

My expectations for mealtime conversations have been completely met, and starting this past Tuesday, the conversations have grown even more entertaining, at least three times a week. Tuesday was the first meeting of Por Supuesto, the Spanish conversation co-curricular.

Co-curriculars are student activities at Olin that are organized by faculty, and they count for non-degree credit. (That means they don't help students graduate, but they are on transcripts.) They don't have to have any academic nature, though some do, and many repeat year after year. Por Supuesto is one of the oldest co-curriculars, occurring every fall, and it is currently run by Oscar, a Puerto Rican electrical engineering professor who is also one of my ModCon teachers.

Por Supuesto lends itself to being the kind of activity that students do year after year. It doesn't get boring or repetitive because it's talking to and hanging out with people. That means that lots of students do Por Supuesto during all four years of Olin, so the Por Supuesto members really get to know each other, and there's definitely a Por Supuesto culture of sorts. This year, half of the students are seniors, there are no juniors, and then there are some sophomores and six freshmen. Not everyone comes to every meal -- I don't know how we'd seat that many people -- but people come when they can to eat, speak Spanish, and laugh. 

Felt Instead of Heard

"Dancing is a language that is felt instead of heard."
-- Prince Eric in the Disney musical The Little Mermaid

Today was the second part of my audition for the Babson Dance Ensemble.

 One of my friends has what I consider to be the perfect audition blog post. It's general enough to have applied to multiple auditions for her, but it also says everything that really needs to be said. So, I'll get to the details later, but here's the most important part, with thanks to Rach:

"My line wasn’t the best, I wasn’t always with the music, I didn’t have the best technique, my extensions weren’t the highest, I didn’t stay on relevé the longest, my turns weren’t the cleanest... But I worked as hard as I could. And furthermore, I had fun with it, because I love to dance. And hopefully the way I danced at that audition conveyed that to the judges."

A Hopping Deficiency

 The first project in Design Nature is to build a hopping toy based on an insect. There are lots of insects that jump with astonishing acceleration, resulting in very high jumps. The insects that most Olin students choose to use as models are click beetles and froghoppers. I'm going the froghopper route.

Our assignment due Monday at midnight is to come up with five design ideas. This has, to this point, been deeply frustrating for me. I'm having trouble coming up with ideas, and then I wonder if my ideas are different enough to count as different ideas. Was my design goal too ambitious? How do I actually achieve something like the mechanism I claim to be imitating? Are my designs too simple? What if I'm not including enough detail? What more detail can there be?

In short, I'm panicking a little about this, but I'm also trying very hard to figure it out on my own -- maybe to too great an extent. It might have helped me to go talk to one of the Design Nature NINJAs. I currently have two designs drawn, and I have another one that I'm going to draw tonight. That still leaves two more. I'm lacking in ideas for hoppers.

So far, ModSim has been largely programming and difference equations, and I'm familiar with both of those. I wrote an entire post about ModCon and Electric Circuits. I've never studied anthropology before, but none of the ideas have particularly surprised me, and I'm used to writing about readings. That makes Design Nature my hardest class.

Clubs!

Friday afternoon was club fair! What this means at Olin is that all the clubs set up tables around the center of campus (the Oval), and the freshmen wander from table to table, talking to upperclassmen, eating food, trying things out, and signing up for more and more mailing lists.

I didn't come off too badly (by which I mean that my email won't be horridly flooded on a daily basis). I had already joined Olin Dance Project, the contra dance group, and WHACK (the weapons club, and they had foils at their table and it made the foilist in me very happy), but at the club fair I also signed up for Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Olin Christian Fellowship (OCF), Midnight Mathematicians, Fiber Arts, Stage Combat, Franklin W. Olin Players (FWOP, that's theater), and then I was convinced to join the Olin Opera Organization! We'll see how that goes. I'm also planning on going to TARDIS -- that's the Doctor Who club -- events, but I'll know when all of those are from Carine.

The club events continued after the fair, though. SWE had a meeting last night, complete with lots and lots of cheesecake. They talked about what kinds of events they do, tried to convince us all to go to the national conference -- why are engineering conferences so much more expensive than math conferences? -- and what fundraisers they do. And we ate cheesecake. Lots of fun. Today was the second TARDIS meeting, though the first I've been able to attend, and we all crowded into a dorm room and ate food, drank Coke, and watched today's Doctor Who episode. "Dinosaurs. In a spaceship!" That basically expresses all the awesomeness.

Everything is Math. Right?

At least, almost everything is math, according to my advising family.

Olin tries to provide a lot of support for students through a variety of channels. Perhaps the most obvious academic support is through advisors. Each advisor has between ten and a dozen advisees, and the advisor and advisees form an advising family. My advisor is a math professor, Aaron. This is only his third year here, and one's first few groups of advisees tend to larger than normal, so this -- combined with the fact that some of the very math-y people have transferred into Aaron's advising family -- means that there was only one slot in the family for a freshman.

A week and a half ago during orientation, the freshmen had lunch with their advisors. I had a good conversation with Aaron, but being his only first-year advisee then felt pretty weird. Today was the first advising family meeting, and it was awesome. The upperclassmen had a dynamic with each other and with Aaron, and I could just slide into that and find my place. Even better -- and I'm not sure if this was the Office of Student Life being awesome or if it's largely thanks to transfers -- Aaron has a very math-y advising family, to the point that he said we should discuss all the non-math business first then get to the math discussions. A group of people in which math is all on its own as an important topic of conversation? Oh, yes, I'll take that.

No Model Is Right, But Some Models Are Useful

In other words, I love ModSim.

Today, we started in the auditorium, but then we went to the studios where we were assigned to groups for our first project. The groups are of four people each, and the ModSim instructors (and probably NINJAs) assembled the groups using the surveys we turned in about our experience in various areas. I'm in a group with three guys: Roland, Guillaume, and Geoffroy. (Yes, that's how it's spelled in French, at least traditionally. Promise.)

There were four ideas that the instructors had given us for our projects, and my group chose the suggestion about education. We're looking at the percent of children in Uganda who finish primary school and how social inertia impacts that. In other words, we're going to make and analyze a lot of graphs involving percent of children finishing primary school, number of educated adults, drop-out rate, and time. Today we were just sketching out our ideas -- where do we want to go, what's a basic stock and flow diagram, and what sorts of graphs do we expect will be on our poster?

The general advice for modeling is to start simple. It's hard to know what the right balance is. How simple is too simple to actually do useful work? But a model can also be too complicated to even really begin to get something with which to do useful work. I think our group encountered those problems today. What needed to be a stock? What could just be a source or sink? Upon what did all of these flows depend? What factors did we want to consider? What data did we have -- because after all, if there's no data, we can't really build the factor into our model?

At the end of class, we were talking with one of the other groups who had chosen the education topic. We had a lot of the same ideas, but their proposed model was rather different from ours. That was interesting and, I thought, pretty cool. It also led to Roland stating the quote in the title.

I Can't Believe I'm Writing This

Today was my first Modeling and Control (ModCon) lab. It wasn't a hard lab, but there was lots that could go wrong, and it seemed like everything did. There were also lots of students who hadn't worked with circuits before, which complicated things. (One of my friends from high school would have scolded me for helping other people before doing my own work.)

I not only had Electricity and Magnetism in high school but also a circuits class (EC, for Electric Circuits), and today reminded me of the EC labs. As I thought more about it, though, I realized that the ModCon lab today had very little in common with EC labs, other than the material and the circuit debugging. Eventually I realized that it wasn't so much that ModCon was reminding me of EC -- it was making me miss EC.

Anyone who spent much time with me during spring semester of my senior year will know that EC was my most frustrating class. Modern Physics 2 was my hardest, but EC was the one that took by far the most time. I had trouble with the labs and was a bit behind, then missed something like eight hours of lab while on a college visit. For weeks I was the first person into the lab on Monday afternoons, and I started going in on Tuesday mornings as well. The work outside of lab wasn't as frustrating, but there was plenty of it. I complained about EC more than any of my other courses.

I never thought I would hear myself say that I miss EC. It would have seemed absurd, but I'm also not as surprised as I should be.

Brave

In thirty minutes, two things which, for me at least, constitute being brave.

First, I went to a field to sketch insects. Next, I asked someone if she'd like to go see the Boston Ballet with me.

Neither one of those seems like particularly hard things, right? But I'm pretty squeamish about insects, and I'm shy.

Weekend Adventures

Last night, there were two important events. There was a party at 9:00 Wellesley to which Olin students were invited. However, also at 9:00 was the premiere of the new season of Doctor Who. Olin's TARDIS club was watching the Doctor Who premiere. Bunches of freshmen were going to Wellesley.

What to do, what to do...

Phoenix Blue

Last night, I noticed two men walking past one of the outer parking lots at Olin. It looked like they were just out on a nightly walk through the area -- lots of people walk near campus -- and I had to wonder what they thought.

You see, in that parking lot, there were Oliners dancing with fire.

Last night was the first Burn of the year. One of Olin's most distinctive groups is OFAC, Olin Fire Arts Club. The shortest possible description is that they dance with fire. In more detail, OFAC members have various apparatus that can be lit on fire in certain locations, and they swing and spin these apparatus around in the air in time to music.

OFAC Burns are astonishing, captivating, and nothing short of beautiful.

When the performers spin fire -- whether the fire is on spheres at the end of chains or on a hula hoop or on the ends of a stick or a pole -- you see the bright, flaring yellow of the gold, and it's like the fire itself is dancing. The idea is not the shapes the apparatus make but rather the shapes the fire makes. It is not the fire on its own or the people on their own; it's truly people dancing with fire. Partners, giving weight, circling together as I would in a contra dance balance and swing.

My favorite part, though, is the blue.