I spent this Thanksgiving at the home of my graduate student mentor, Dave Henry. In addition to being a great research and awesome mentor, he’s also a pretty good guy to hang out with, so Thanksgiving was a lot of fun. In addition to Dave and his family, fellow graduate student Andrew and his family and Occidental Professor / SCUBA Diver Saul and his family were in attendance. I work on a day-to-day basis with Andrew, and I’ve had the pleasure of diving with Saul before, so we all knew each other and had a great time cooking and eating together.
I spent this Thanksgiving at the home of my graduate student mentor, Dave Henry. In addition to being a great research and awesome mentor, he’s also a pretty good guy to hang out with, so Thanksgiving was a lot of fun. In addition to Dave and his family, fellow graduate student Andrew and his family and Occidental Professor / SCUBA Diver Saul and his family were in attendance. I work on a day-to-day basis with Andrew, and I’ve had the pleasure of diving with Saul before, so we all knew each other and had a great time cooking and eating together.
As I sat down to write this week’s blog entry, I felt like I had just finished writing last week’s. I had the hardest time remembering what happened in this week–I supposed it passed very quickly. I asked some of my friends about what we did during the week; “Sets” they replied. Thanks a lot guys… Anyway, no thanks to them I managed to slowly recall a few interesting things to share with you.
As I sat down to write this week’s blog entry, I felt like I had just finished writing last week’s. I had the hardest time remembering what happened in this week–I supposed it passed very quickly. I asked some of my friends about what we did during the week; "Sets" they replied. Thanks a lot guys… Anyway, no thanks to them I managed to slowly recall a few interesting things to share with you.
Hi everyone! Sorry that this week’s entry is a little late; work was rough this week. I had a problem set (we just call them sets for short) due for a class called EE114 on Monday. EE114 is an analog circuit design class (you can find the course description here ). It’s taught by that wonderful man on the right side of the page, Dr. Ali Hajimiri. Professor Hajimiri is easily one of the best professors I have had at Caltech, and as you would expect his class is very well taught. Unfortunately, his class is also very difficult. Last weekend, our class’s problem set was worse than usual. Due to my other responsibilities and time spent avoiding them, I didn’t really get to start on the set until Sunday at about noon. I finished the set on Monday at 4:30pm (30 minutes before the due time). In that 28 hour period, I got less than an hour of sleep and was able to eat about two meals. That sounds really bad, but there is a positive side. For one, I wasn’t alone–we had something like ten to fifteen students working on this set together in Sherman Fairchild Library, and there’s some sort of bonding experience that accompanies a grueling set like this one. I still remember our collective groans as the sun began to peek through the library windows, with the end of our sets nowhere in sight. Another positive was that the set was reasonably interesting and challenging; it wasn’t mindless grunge work. Even knowing this, you might still wonder why I do it.
This gives sort of a Rip-Van-Winkle look. Anyway, either due to the fact that this is epically funny or the fact that my friends and I have poor taste, we found this hilarious. (You can judge for yourself, that’s a picture of poor sleeping Ali to the right).
Right now, I’m two stories underground and I’m clothed in a white puffy suit that makes me look like some sort of fat space bunny. A really fat space bunny. It’s cold in the room, and the suit’s not helping. I’m sitting in a captain’s chair at the console for a giant machine that reminds me a lot of the Death Star. Don’t worry though: I’m not dreaming, nor have I been abducted by aliens. I’m just in lab. Hi, my name is Tom Gwinn. I’m a junior at Caltech majoring in Electrical Engineering, and I’m going to be writing this blog for at least the next couple of weeks.