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.