A long, long time ago, I blogged about a really cool event the sustainability office sponsored on campus where they a lot of the people who deal with Caltech waste / energy / water speak and answer questions. I still didn't know too much about Pasadena's energy, though, and Caltech…

Your first room at Caltech is randomly assigned to you. If you have a roommate, the only consideration taken into that choice is gender. Gulp. The bright side: you'll only live there two weeks! Caltech has this awesome thing (in my opinion) called Rotation. It gives incoming students a chance…

The Caltech Y organizes a bunch of events, and I've led a few. When I signed up to take a bunch of pre-frosh on a kayaking / beach orientation trip with Ted (another smore), I didn't expect it to be eventful. You know, we'll go kayaking for two hours, eat…

I'm slightly obsessed with what I put in my body. For me, humans, life, and basically everything just boils down to a bunch of chemistry (yup, philosophy and all that stuff is just electrochem and ... more reactions! in our brain / nervous system / somewhere in our body. I…

This is my last post about sports, I promise. (I really promise, because it is my second to last post!) We had my first real race of the season today! The rest of the team raced at Redlands already (an akward 4.5 k to start the season) but I was…

Welcome. That's all a convocation is. All the new students, post-docs, and faculty who want to be officially welcomed head to the wedding cake and listen to a bunch of speakers for about an hour: There's lots of opportunities to work on campus, and one of them is ushering. Anyone…

When you're designing products for a different place, you have to understand that place - socially, economically, culturally. We got some sense of the society in getting to know the students, and we spent a bunch of time talking about the economy in the area and visiting industries. So, of…

One of my favorite parts of this trip has been getting to know the SAINTGITS students. An akward first picture -- none of us really knew each other yet. We also didn't know to dress up... We are working with eight ME students and eight MBA students. The ME students…

In An 22, the intro to socio-cultural anthropology class I took last term, we talked about emic and etic perspectives. The emic perspective is the native point of view, and the etic perspective is the outsider's point of view and the conclusion about what is going on. This almost seems…

The Art Center students do market research before every project, so they gave us a few tips before we got to our first field site. We need to focus on understanding the problem, not thinking of solutions. When we visit a shop or factory, we have to work with three…

I was so tired last night after landing that I can’t even remember getting to the hotel / falling asleep. I woke up at 7, thinking much more clearly than the evening before, and went to eat breakfast. My first Indian food in India! It was actually only semi-Indian. They…

Greetings from SINGAPORE!! I’m sitting in the airport waiting to board my next flight to Kochi, and totally pumped / exhausted from our 19 hour stopover in Singapore. Long story short (the longer version is down a few posts): some Caltech and Art Center students from ME 105: Product Design…

Meet Chip: Chip is a solar, net-zero house: the Compact Hyper Insulated Prototype. It's also the house we're building for the Solar Decathalon at the Mall in Washington DC this fall!! Caltech and Sci-Arc, an architectural school in East LA, formed a team to build this house. You should definitely…

I went to the beach again! SURFSAC, a student group that organizes lots of social / fun events over the summer, organized the trip. We had a (coach!) bus from Caltech right to the beach. In Santa Monica, we were able to do / go wherever we wanted so long…

I never did a lot of stuff before coming to Caltech - research, eating mangos, and seeing a rattlesnake [don't worry, it was a three hour drive from campus] - and that now includes going to a fancy schmancy movie theater (to be honest, I didn't even know there was…

Each Friday, the SURFs in my group (aka Professor Gray's group) and his Solar Army team meet for an hour and present on what we've been up to! So what have I been up to?!?! I've made (synthesized :)) everything I need for my project! I've charachterized the photosensitizers, labeled…

What in the world is orienteering?!? I vaguely remember my HS gym teacher being really into it, but beyond that, I didn't really know what I was getting into when one of my friends and I (she had gone before :)) signed up to go orienteering this weekend. I got…

The LA National Forest sits right behind Pasadena, so I've been doing a lot of hiking lately. On Sunday, I went hiking with a friend and her family. We went to Switzer falls, a waterfall in the mountains. It was a great hike, especially since it was shady and followed…