What is this spring break thing all about?

Apparently all of the US is on spring break right now, as evidenced by a rush of tropical photographs appearing on my friends’ facebook pages. Here in Cambridge, the Easter vacation started two weeks ago, and lasts until the middle of April. There are exams coming up though, so a lot of people have chosen to stay for part of the vacation, taking advantage of the various libraries and the personal study space away from home.

The Cambridge schedule is a little unusual, so I’ll try to explain. There are two terms of lectures, Michaelmas (Oct-Dec) and Lent (Jan-Mar). The third term, Easter (Apr-Jun) is primarily exams, with a few lectures in some subjects and projects in Engineering. This means that for Engineers, exams are at the start of the Easter term, immediately preceded by….5 weeks of vacation! So “vacation” actually means “studying an entire year’s worth of material, deciphering that set of notes that didn’t really make sense back in November and was easier to ignore for a while, consolidating large piles of notes into smaller piles of notes that are less terrifying in size and more terrifying in information density, looking through past exams to see how scary they really are, and attempting to catch up on sleep, eating, haircuts, and anything else that has been neglected during the preceding 8 weeks.”
But that doesn’t start for another week, so in the meantime, my work is governed by what’s due each day, and when I have supervision. In another week, I’ll have to actually organise my time and decide how to tackle this studying.

The last time I had to study material from ~6 months earlier was for Advanced Placement exams, and I felt totally on top of that material all the way through the year (with the one exception of American History, but I don’t think any of us really knew what was going on in that class). This is an exciting new challenge, and one I hope to make the most of!

Essay time

This week is all about essays and lab write-ups. I have a huge craving right now for a nice straightforward computational problem set where I see a problem, write out the appropriate equations, look up all the parts I don’t know, fight with some algebra for an hour, and get a nice pretty numerical answer.
Instead of that I have an essay prompt and reading list for Philosophy of Science, an essay prompt and reading list for Biomaterials, five Excel spreadsheets worth of data that need analysing, explaining, re-analysing, and prettifying for my Engineering Area Activity in Bioengineering (Breadmaking), and then two more sets of lab notes and more data for two other lab write-ups. All of that due in the next five days.
That’s going to be a long week. Aside from choir practice and the Ash Wednesday service, my only non-academic commitment for the week is a date with my MIT best friend Wednesday night. We’re going out for vegan cheesecake and a bit of girl gossip.
Also, how on Earth is it week six already? I haven’t even told you what classes I’m taking this term! (ie for the remaining two and a half weeks)
Yes, Mom, it’s 2 in the morning. Life happens.

And back to the Philosophy Essay on this lovely topic:
What is the role of skill in science, and why should skill be an important issue for the sociology of scientific knowledge?

Snow!

The news reports say that this is the biggest snowfall in England in 15 years, and the coldest winter in just as long, so I guess I picked the right year to come to England!
The snow started as a flurry mid-afternoon yesterday, and got really heavy late in the evening. Not long after I got back from Emmanuel College at 10PM, I saw camera flashes going off outside my window. I looked out, and saw clusters of students standing in the snow, making snowballs, taking pictures of each other, and generally having a good time. So I got dressed, and met up with the rest of my stairwell in the lobby downstairs. And then we went and played in the snow.
There were snowball battles, a few snow angels (not many, since few Cambridge students have the necessary attire to comfortably lie down in the snow) and a variety of attempts at building a snowman. The snow is large flakes, damp and fluffy, so it’s hard to pack into a good ball. Fortunately, that means that snowballs are fairly harmless, and falling in the snow is like landing on a mattress. At first, there were only twenty or so people playing in the snow, but people gradually joined the fun, as they heard the shouting and got curious, or arrived home from other places. Well over a hundred frolicked in the snow and celebrated the real beginning of winter.
There’s been a series of large snowpeople appearing on the Paddock, and then falling over or getting rebuilt into larger snowpeople. The master has offered £20 to the best snow griffin, and a few groups have undertaken the challenge, but there are no serious contenders yet. And the snow keeps falling!
Pictures can be found here . Enjoy!!

Dublin: the day-trip

Well, I’m not very good about keeping my blog up to date, but rather than trying to catch up right now, I’m going to start with current things and maybe work my way backwards over the next few days. I’m also going to tell myself that I’ll post every Monday and Friday, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll actually write that often.
First off, I’m in Ireland! Cambridge has a 6-week break between terms, which is still three and a half weeks after you consider the extra week at each end that Downing provides standard housing. And rather than sit all alone in Cambridge (which gets very quiet and very lonely even when I tried it for three days) or fly all the way back across the Atlantic to my other Cambridge (which is expensive and stressful and defeats the point of experiencing another place and another culture) I decided to explore England and places near England for the vacation.
I’m staying with family friends in a quiet little part of Northern Ireland, about a half mile from the border with the Republic. Borders are invisible these days, since everything is part of the EU, and a number of shops and petrol stations in this region take either pounds or euros. I’m here from the 18th to the 27th, mostly just spending time with the family, avoiding the cold and rain, and enjoying time with small children. I had toddlers right next door all through high school, and was visiting or looking after them a few hours every week, so I’ve really missed that. But these boys are cousins to the boys back home, so I’m repeating some of my favorite parts of the high school years.
But I’ve got lots of other things to see and experience while I’m all the way over here on the East side of the pond. Today I took the train in to Dublin (all by myself!) and explored the city. The weather was warm and sunny (the first sunshine I’ve seen all week) and since it’s so close to Christmas, everyone was out shopping. If you’ve ever visited a foreign city with me, you know that I spend about half my time wandering around, looking at people and buildings and bodies of water, and taking pictures of the latter two. So that’s what I did, except I forgot to get a picture of the River Liffey. Remind me to do that next time.
The second half of my day I spent in a museum about mediaeval and Viking Dublin. Lots of history, and dioramas, some cool models of the city, and a room full of pot sherds and coins and belt buckles recovered from a construction site about 20 years ago when the excavation started breaking into the ancient wall that bounded the river. And I realised that we completely skipped Viking history in school: that whole section was all completely new to me.
The museum is connected to Christ Church Cathedral, which is even more exciting than the museum. It’s a cathedral of the “Church of Ireland, Episcopal-Anglican,” but feels nothing like an Episcopal church in the States. I guess it has a lot in common with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, but this one is actually completed, and much older. It has the expected and beautiful stained glass: scenes of the saints around the ground floor, and crests (either important people or local towns, I’m not sure) in the clerestory. Some of these were particularly unusual: people playing musical instruments, and the Flight from Egypt. I was a little startled by the presence of a Lady Chapel: a smaller chapel behind the High Altar, with an altar of its own, and two pews. They use it for Weekday Eucharist. I’ve never seen a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary in a non-Catholic church.
The Cathedral also includes the “Leaning Wall of Dublin,” the off-kilter upper wall on the south side. Part of the roof collapsed in the 1500s, and the wall has been out of whack ever since. By 18 inches (in a section of wall about 4 metres tall) (I’m allowed to use mixed units, I’m studying in England!) The only reason it’s not instantly obvious is that the lower portion of the wall (up to what would be the top of the second floor) is completely fine. If the bottom were as tilted as the upper wall, I think people would probably walk a little crooked.
The tilty wall is pretty cool, but the best part is the crypt, which sits below the /entire/ cathedral (not just one small room at the end). It’s full of massive columns of course, but it’s big and fairly open. There are memorial plaques in the walls, and an exhibit of church silver. If it didn’t have glass cases scattered about, it would be a great place to play hide and seek. The last exhibit in the crypt is the cat and rat. Yup. A mummified cat and rat recovered from an organ pipe a number of years ago. One chased t’other in, and they got stuck, and slowly died and dried out. James Joyce mentions this incident in “Finnegan’s Wake” (according to the sign: I haven’t read it).
Dublin is fun to walk around: small like Boston, with a similar mix of logical streets and completely random ones. More people smoke here than in the States, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the natives or the Italian tourists. Every few blocks there’s a statue commemorating a politician or a writer or a republican, and there are a ton of really beautiful bank building scattered throughout the older parts of the city. There’s also a huge spire in the middle of O’Connell Street: I’ll update this when I figure out if it has any significance. I’ll be back in a few months, with friends! (and I’ll be posting pictures on Facebook sometime this week)
PS- The other thing I do in foreign cities is find the Asian district, wander into a supermarket, and buy something that tastes like home. Aloe juice with lunch!

Study time

Yes, I’m at school, and while I’m all for having fun, meeting nice people, exploring unfamiliar places and experiencing a different culture, I’m also here to learn.  And learning sometimes means sitting at a desk for six hours, watching squirrels and birds run around in the sunshine, or attempting to make sense of a phase diagram or philosophical argument that were never intended to be easily understood.

I’m taking four modules in the Engineering department (a normal course-load would be five) plus a class that will count towards my HASS (humanities, arts and social sciences) requirement at MIT.  For the whole year, I’ll be earning roughly the same number of credits as if I were at MIT, so I can take a normal senior-year set of courses when I get back and still graduate on time.  If you’re my family, or have too much free time, or are curious what MechEs do at other schools, keep on reading to see what classes I’m taking!

3C1: Materials Processing and Design

This will count towards 2.008 (Design and Manufacturing 2) at MIT, but does not involve the canonical injection-molding yo-yo project.  It’s manufacturing engineering as an extension of material science, so I’ve had to do some catch-up work on materials: a lot of it looks familiar from Solid-State Chemistry freshman year, and I’m understanding all the material in lectures without much trouble.

3C7: Mechanics of Solids

In 2.001 we learn about Mechanics of Materials, simple beam theory, and how physics applies to solid objects.  Here, we realise that simple beam theory is a little too simple to describe real things accurately, and all the pretty little equations that had three variables in 2.001 suddenly have 5 or 6.  Halfway through the first lecture, Prof Burgoyne introduced a particular equation by saying “in the first year, you would solve this problem this way, but now we’re going to look at it a little differently,” and I nodded and though to myself, “Yes, that’s exactly how we did it in 2.001.  This new way looks pretty interesting.” I think that means I’m in the right class. 🙂

3G1: Introduction to Bioscience

Well, I took AP Biology, and then last spring I took Biochemistry, so I’ve seen almost all of this twice before, but it’s still nice to hear it again with an engineering perspective, and I like having one class where I don’t have to worry too much about making sense of everything: I need to review the material, and double-check that I know what it means, but this class won’t have me up all night puzzling out a derivation or frantically trying to memorise key vocabulary.

3G4: Medical Imaging and 3-D Computer Graphics

This is one of those cool engineering classes where everything is placed clearly in context, and so the material seems very real, rather than being some abstract equation eight degrees removed from the physical world.  In the first part of the course, we ran through the medical imaging techniques, how they work in a physical and mathematical sense, and what their specific advantages and applications are.  Right now we’re looking at how graphic imaging programs translate visual data into mathematical meshes, and how these are stored and manipulated.  I think the next topic is more general computer imaging.  With a couple more hours of Differential Equations review, I’ll be able to explain how a CT scanner draws cross-sectional pictures from a series of single-axis slices.

HPS IB: The History and Philosophy of Science.

This is sort of two subjects rolled into one, but they refer back and forth pretty often, and all the NatSci (Natural Sciences) students who choose this course take both.  We’ve looked at ancient Babylonian mathematics, Assyrian astrology, alchemy, and Hume’s writings on probability and causation, among other things.  This course is very popular with the MIT crowd, as it doesn’t conflict with other classes, and offers humanities credit without getting thrown in with a bunch of English majors.

The big change from MIT is that there aren’t any problem sets.  So rather than having three or four assignments due each week, and a test every two or three weeks, I don’t really have deadlines.  For HPS, we complete an essay each week, but it isn’t graded, and is primarily a way of organising our ideas so that we can have an effective conversation during supervision (more on that later).  For engineering courses, there are two examples papers each term, which are sheets of old exam problems, or small parts of exam problems thrown together into a quasi-Problem Set.  These likewise aren’t graded, but it’s a way for us to see what material we need to focus on, and what questions we need to ask in supervision in order to clarify whatever we didn’t quite understand from lecture and reading.  Engineering modules each have a two-hour lab, once during the term, so I’ll have to write four short lab reports, and one full technical report, to go along with those labs.  These are the only assignments I have this term that go towards my grade, so everything else is very much self-guided, and will be assessed only at the end of the year, in final exams.  Yikes!

Supervisions: another one of those Cambridge-y things that is unique to Cambridge (and Oxford, if I’m being totally honest).  These complement the two-hours-per-week action-packed lectures: the closest thing we have in the States are recitations (MIT), also knows as precepts or sections.  It’s the small-group arena where questions are encouraged, there’s no formal plan, and the content of the meeting will be governed by what the students want to talk about.  For HPS, I have a supervision with one other student, and either a professor (philosophy) or a graduate student (history).  Basically it means we sit and talk about the material, discuss the readings, and share what we said in our essays each week.  Engineering supervisions have three or four students, are based off of an example paper, and only take place two or three times each term.  I haven’t had one yet, so I can’t really say what they’re like, just what I’ve heard.
By the end of this week, I will have completed the last of my four Engineering labs, had my second Philosophy of Science supervision, and completed first-round examples papers in three courses. More importantly, the term will be half over. Remember how at MIT we get 5th-week flags, which are right after the first exam, and serve as the early warning that you really need to be spending a little more time on the problem sets? Cambridge students get 5th-week blues: the sense of panic at realising the term is half over, the depression that accumulates from four weeks of full-time lecture, reading, writing and thinking, and the general exhaustion as the days get shorter and colder and lecturers get more complicated. Having already suffered through second-week blues, and third-week panic, I’m hoping to avoid the 5th-week round. Wish me luck!

Matriculate

One of the distinct and unique traditions of Cambridge University life is the matriculation ceremony. This means that every fresher, during their first week in College, formally swears to uphold the traditions and regulations of the University and College, and then signs a register as a record of this oath. And being Cambridge, this of course requires dressing up and wearing academic gowns. As a new student of Downing College, I was a part of this ceremony, even though I will only be here for a year and will not be receiving a degree from Cambridge. We all gathered in our robes right after lunch for a group picture (made slightly more difficult by an intermittent drizzle and a gusty west wind) and then one at a time throughout the afternoon read out our promise to the Master and the Praelector of Downing college. The more important part, of course, was dinner afterwards.
We wore our robes, and sat at candle-lit tables in the dining hall:

Clara at dinner in the hall

This is a really bad picture, but it shows the fancy and bewildering table settings:

table setting and friends

The meal was three courses, so there were two sets of forks and knives (salad and entrée) next to the space for the plate. Also a bread plate and knife; cup, saucer and spoon for coffee; fork and spoon for dessert; and glasses for water, white wine, red wine and dessert wine. Yes, that’s right. Wine served at a student dinner. Since the drinking age in England is 18, a drink with dinner, or wine at a department reception, is perfectly ordinary. In fact, students are only admitted to Cambridge if they will be 18 when they arrive, since being of legal age is taken for granted in so many parts of College and University life.
The candlelight is another notable feature of formal hall. Once everyone had arrived and Grace was said, the room lights were lowered so that the candles were the primary source of illumination. Formal hall and chapel are also the only places were candles are allowed, since these buildings are old and wooden and fire is undesirable.
As a new member at Downing, while not really a first-year academically, I was assigned to a College family. Like the fraternity/sorority system of siblings, College families are a network of mentoring and friendship, and provide first-years with a source of wisdom, College advice, and unconditional love. Thus I have a new mother (a second-year in English) and a new father (a second-year in engineering), along with a sister and brother, first-years in English and Engineering. Perhaps academic fields are a heritable trait, or vice versa.
In our department-based dinner seating plan, I was surrounded by engineers (yay!) and seated next to my College brother:

Can’t you see the resemblance?

Pictures!

I have some more pictures of my College, and the town, that I’ve posted to Facebook (which is a lot simpler than posting them here).  And since some of you aren’t on Facebook, I’m putting links here.  Check back,  because I’ll update this post as I add photos!

Cambridge UK Album #1 (16 October)

Downing College (18 October)

Cambridge UK #2 (Autumn) (25-26 October)

Clara and Laura go to London: part one 5-7 December

Clara and Laura go to London: part N 5-8 December

Christmas in Ireland 18-27 December

England, Ireland, and France 24 December-8 January

Cambridge UK #3: Snow! (and a few other things) 1-2 February

Cambridge UK #4: Springtime?! (and Norwich)

Enjoy!

Go!

I’ve been here 24 hours, so my mind has almost caught up with my body, and I am now mostly conscious of where I physically am (although the reality of “I’m here for a whole year” probably won’t hit for a few more weeks).  There was a very long moment of confusion this morning when I awoke and saw this:

I thought for a moment that I’d fallen asleep in the wrong dorm room at MIT, or that I’d found some wood-panelled tower room at the city library.  And then some little locator conscience engaged and said “I’m in England” and everything made sense again.  The night was the perfect temperature for hiding under a nice duvet (polyfill, so you don’t have to worry about me sneezing, Mom!), and when it gets a little colder I’ll either close my window all the way, hope the heat gets turned up, or use a second duvet.
College is still quite empty, as most students arrive Saturday, so at 8:30 the view from my window was of a deserted quad and a few fallen leaves:

And if you’re wondering why the grass is so thick and beautiful (and yes, it is) it’s because people don’t walk on it.  Downing’s quad (the first three panels of grass in that view) is labelled “Please do not Walk on Grass,” which means only Fellows (professors and the like) are permitted to walk on it, and usually don’t anyway.  The fourth panel, with the soccer/football net, is called the Paddock, and is open to walking and running.  Good thing, too, since playing football without stepping on the turf is pretty tricky.

I got ten solid hours of sleep, and woke up a bit tired, but content with the idea that it was morning.  The jet-lag doesn’t seem to be a problem, but it’s going to take a few more long nights to re-energize.  I guess 2 hours of airplane nap doesn’t count as a full night’s sleep.

I’ll be posting again as soon as I have some more pictures to share!
[composed 2 Oct 2008]
[posted 4 Oct 2008, when the internet started working]

Ready?

It’s T-minus 18 days, and I’ve got almost everything I need!

I just got an email this morning from the New York consulate notifying me that my visa has been issued: it should come in the mail tomorrow.

I bought plane tickets back in June, so I won’t have to book any more trans-Atlantic flights until the spring (or real soon, if I decide to come back  to the States for Christmas)

I have luggage!  A lovely three-piece set of hard-shell red suitcases: I’m only bringing the two larger, but the small one will be great for short trips in the coming years.

That leaves some more paperwork, my required writing class (to get communications credit for lab classes I take in the UK), and a lot of goodbyes.  I guess the first of those goodbyes was a couple days ago: we bid farewell to the 1985 Jeep Cherokee (red, of course) that has been the family car since before I was born.  It’s the car that shuttled me home from the hospital, took me on summer trips, and let me learn how to drive a manual transmission.  And finally, after 23 years, it needed a replacement.  Actually, it needed replacing about ten years ago, but since functional manual-transmission Jeeps are a rarity in the used market, it took a few extra years to find a replacement, and come to terms with the increasing dysfunctionality of the old one.  The new car, yet to be named, is a 2001 Jeep Cherokee Sport, in black.  It’s zippier, twitchier, and, once we get accustomed to its fidgets and stop missing the old one, is a really nice car.  And it has all sorts of new-fangled (not really) things like power windows, power door locks, A/C, and an adjustable steering wheel.  It’s a little easier on the body, and definitely more comfortable at highway speeds.

I’m going to miss driving next year, but I’m not sure that trying to drive on the opposite side of the road, as an inexperienced driver busy with school, is really a great idea.  Maybe if I visit some friends in a nice isolated part of England, I can try it out on some quiet back road where I don’t have to worry about roundabouts and lots of traffic.  Which reminds me; item [##?] on the list of paperwork: get International Drivers’ Permit.