I did a lot of non-academic things this year, so here's a bit about the most exciting ones!
Passionate Pursuit
In the spring, I did a Passionate Pursuit in Soviet ballet. I watched a lot of videos of old ballets: The Red Poppy, The Stone Flower, two versions of Romeo and Juliet, two versions of Spartacus, and short made-for-TV versions of Swan Lake, Flames of Paris, and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. I also watched Children of Theatre Street, which is about the Vaganova school, and the ballet parts of the Sochi Olympics opening and closing ceremonies. I reread relevant parts of Apollo's Angels, a ballet history book, and read Swans of the Kremlin, which is about Soviet ballet from the beginning of the Soviet Union to about 1968. I also watched a lot of short videos and read a variety of things that my mom or I found online. All of this was a lot of fun.
I'd said when I applied for credit that I would write a paper and present at Expo. I decided to write and present about which ballet of the of the seven mentioned above is the most Soviet ballet - which one best represents Soviet ballet as a whole. I cheated a little and gave two answers, Romeo and Juliet and Spartacus. Presenting a non-technical poster at Expo was really interesting. I'd only ever presented modeling or math projects before, and I talked to an entirely different group of people than normal. Some of the people who came by my poster were a lot of parents, some middle school girls who dance, the computer networks professor, the head of the machine shop, and people from Olin's department of family and alumni relations. Like normal, I still came up with a short description of what I'd done, but I had more in-depth conversations than I have when I present my graph theory research.
Church, Disciple, and OCF
Both at Christ Church and in Olin Christian Fellowship (OCF) this year, I've been involved in a lot of discussions about the future. I was on the Strategic Team at Christ Church, talking about selling the church building vs. not and what our options would be in either case. We lead an all church service/meeting in February, and people prefer the visions of a future in which we do sell the building, so right now we're exploring options from there. As for OCF, the leadership team this year was essentially all seniors. The current leadership and the future leadership had meetings once a week starting just before spring break. The future leadership is two rising sophomores, Michel and Sonia, and me. Michel and Sonia are co-presidents for next year. The big decision that came out of all of those meetings was the choice to no longer be associated with Cru and, through that, be more welcoming to all Christians on campus.
In the fall, I led group prayer, but due to low attendance (err, the fact that we were holding it at 8am), we didn't do group prayer in the spring. I wasn't able to go to Large Group Bible Study (which was combined with Praise and Worship) because of teaching for AoPS, and in the fall I couldn't go to girls' life group, but I could in the spring!
Some other exciting things happened at Christ Church this year! There are now a lot of college students. Another sophomore from Wellesley started attending, and there are three Wellesley first years coming as well. That means there are now eight of us, which has been so exciting. Also, our pastor had a daughter who was baptized on Mother's Day.
I also did a 34 week Bible study, Disciple. (Well, it's still going. We're in the middle of Paul's letters.) It's online, and the group is a handful of women with a lot of variety in background. I've really enjoyed our discussions, and it's been interesting to see where the online format is helpful and where it makes the study harder.
SWE
The main Society of Women Engineers event during the fall semester was the national conference in Baltimore. I wrote a little bit about that here, but I didn't talk much about what I did at the conference. I spent some time at Olin's table, selling t-shirts, stickers, and pens. I went to some sessions, though there weren't nearly as many as there are at math conferences, and far more of them were focused on career related topics than on engineering or research topics, which I also hadn't expected before looking at the program. The sessions I went to were mostly about working abroad or the oil and gas industry. The coolest part of the sessions for me was probably hearing one speaker talk about his job at Schlumberger Doll Research. He said that he was an engineer with a group of mathematicians and geophysicists, and given that I'm much more mathematically inclined than the average Oliner, that sounds like a fantastic job to me. I spent the rest of my time at the career fair. I didn't talk to that many companies, but I grew much more comfortable as I went, which was exciting.
Everything leading up to and just after the conference was a little stressful. As treasurer, I was in charge of getting hotel rooms for Oliners going to the conference, which was an adventure, and after the conference, I had to turn in reimbursement forms for gas and tolls and such. (There were dozens of receipts.)
Other than the conference, we took over part of the Interesting Conversations program, which brings speakers into the dorms to talk to students on Thursday nights.We wanted to be more active in the spring, but other than holding a couple of study breaks, that didn't really happen. Our board for next year is really excited, though, and we now have an outreach coordinator on the board, so hopefully next year will be better! I'll be president next spring, which will definitely be interesting!
Splash!
Splash is an event at MIT for high school students. People (mostly college students) teach a huge variety of classes, and high schoolers take them. I taught Intro Azerbaijani. I'd never taught a language class before, so this was definitely an experiment. I didn't structure the flow terribly well. I knew I wanted to cover the basics of what would help people navigate Baku if they just showed up there, but I didn't really know what a good order for the material would be, so I just tried something. I would do better if I were to teach the class again, at least in terms of confidence, but it would still probably be an experiment.
Por Supuesto
Por Supuesto was a little odd this year. Oscar was gone a lot. He's been doing a lot of outreach work for Olin, and he missed a lot of spring semester for family reasons. As a result, Por Supuesto was really inconsistent, especially in the spring. We got a good group of first years, though, which was really exciting!
Babson Baseball
I went to at least part of almost every home game that didn't conflict with UOCD. The team was a lot younger than it was last year, and given that, I thought they had a good season. They made the NEWMAC playoffs as the fourth seed, and they forced the top seed (and nationally ranked) Wheaton to an if game. The parents and I sat behind home plate a lot this year, which was surprisingly different from sitting along the third base line. Also, I finally met a couple of the players!
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