A Few Days in the Life

Hey all!

Hope you’re well :). This is going to be a short post, mostly because I just came off of that six-day conference and thus missed a lot of classes :P. I can’t even imagine what trouble I’d have been in last semester (last semester was crazy. That’s all I remember about it. Crazy.). I’m not actually terribly behind this semester, but what with catching up and the usual testing-before-spring-break and I’m a bit crammed for time :).

My classes are awesome this semester, have I mentioned that? I feel like starting last year, I embarked on a second major entitled “Computational Neuroscience.” (This is apart from my first major, which I guess would be… experimental behavioral/neuroimaging neuroscience? Neuroscience is big.) And only now are some things starting to make sense. At CoSyNe (the computational systems neuroscience conference I attended last week), the speakers were throwing around terms that I only just recognize. For example, in response to questions– “we added a regression term to prevent overfitting,” or “oh, we just used stochastic gradient descent.” And I’m just now covering these topics in 6.036 Introduction to Machine Learning, which is drawing on my knowledge of Multivariable Calculus (Math 205), Math for the Sciences (Math 215; covers multivariable calc, linear algebra, and differential equations), and Linear Algebra (18.06, which I’m taking concurrently), and keeps on linking to things I’ve heard of in Computational Cognitive Science (9.66), Computations of Biological Vision (CS 332), Introduction to Computational Neuroscience (9.40). (Note—classes with #.## are MIT classes.) It is so unbelievably nice to have things start to come together. In the beginning of any major, you’re learning information for the sake of learning—you have no idea what the big picture is, and you’re memorizing things on faith that somehow it will be useful. I’m now at the point where I can actually see why concepts are useful. I was told this day would come: yes, parents, this is why I should care about the topics we cover in high school math! I feel as if I have reached the promise land. Sort of. Since it still doesn’t really make sense yet…but I have inklings!

I had Eduardo and Brynna film the lectures from the two classes that I missed, respectively. It’s actually remarkable how many resources we have at our disposal, if you’ll excuse a tangent into the minutia. The Wellesley College library lets us borrow cameras and camera holders for a week, so before the conference I reserved two, made sure they had 16-gig memory cards, brought to MIT, handed them off to Eduardo and Brynna, and then the night before every class I sent annoying Facebook reminders for them to film. I happen to have the same kind of camera that the Wellesley library lends out (they lend out several kinds, but I like the unbreakable Kodak ones, since I am very prone to breaking cameras specifically), so I could instruct my friends on how to use them, and then I could take my own camera to the CoSyNe conference. Upon returning to Boston on a red-eye after CoSyNe, I walked over to Hmart (a high-end Korean grocery store) in Cambridge, bought Pocky and tea for compensation, delivered these goods and retrieved the cameras from my friends, and went to class. Then that afternoon after taking the bus back to Wellesley I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to actually watch the movies since my hard drive was too full (when my computer was stolen this summer from one of the MIT dorms, I had to buy myself a new one, and I was NOT paying for extra storage), so then I ended up uploading all of my photos to Flickr in a non-straightforward way. I was mostly doing this while sitting around in the Wellesley Conway lab waiting for my turn to run a study by our lab technician concerning #TheDress. And then I had to email friends to come take the 20-minute study about #TheDress. And then I thought I should maybe also compensate my friends in bitcoin, since I am now a Wellesley Campus Representative for the company Circle (I recommend looking bitcoin up—it’s interesting!), so I had to figure out how to do that. And THEN I finally ended up watching the missed-class-movie-marathon that lasted two days and made me feel like a creeper sometimes because my friends were filming in a classroom where peoples’ heads were in the way. In short, an adventuresome day in the life of Monica, involving lots of planning, Googling, and wandering around. The best days :).

Hmmm :). I’ve been also working on my thesis, hanging out with friends and watching “Beautiful Mind” on iTunes, and studying for a test coming up for 6.036. I also signed up to host prospies for Spring Open Campus! Two of you should request to sleep on my floor— it’s clean now, since I finally got around to vacuuming my room. Except there is no vacuum in the whole of Stone-Davis (the hall I live in), even though there’s supposed to be a vacuum on every floor and there was last semester, so I ended up using sticky tape and “vacuuming” that way. It was a bit time-consuming, but useful! And I see I have digressed again—anyway, please come stay with me, especially if you’re interested in hearing my ooze about science and athletics and blogging and whatever else it is that I do/did in my four years here!

Yesterday the Sports Center had an Indoor Triathlon—swimming, biking, and running. I am sore from all of it, and still can’t believe how painful running is, but I had a great time. I got second, too, just .5 points behind Chui (pronounced “Chewy”—that’s her last name, and she’s awesome.) I stole some pictures from the Wellesley Recreation Facebook page.

Finally, next week is Spring Break, which we’re all psyched for :). Luckily, MIT’s and Wellesley’s Spring Break overlap mostly… though I didn’t realize the “mostly” and then had to reschedule my flight and pay $200 to United because MIT has class on Thursday and Friday while Wellesley doesn’t and I have a test on Thursday. Bad planning, Monica, arg. BUT on Saturday morning I will be belatedly be joining Gabby and Tiffany in San Jose, CA, where we are going to go hiking, covertly do homework, watch movies, and have a great time as seniors in college. Also, apparently Tiffany is going to bring a keyboard as carry-on because she has 20 pages of Beethoven to memorize and such are the trials of being a music minor. Also, she just joined the Organ Club (started a week ago) with some of her Carillon Club friends (big bells that you play—I’d also look that up, they’re awesome.) She was telling me this along with how her med school interview went last week. …I don’t even know what we’re all doing anymore, readers. Keyboard as carry-on, and alliteration aplenty.

All right, I need to head to class now. Wishing you the best week, including minor precipitation if you live around Boston!

Cheers,

Monica