One of Caltech’s many clubs is the RISE tutoring program, where undergraduate students connect with local high schoolers and provide tutoring in various STEM subjects. I only became a tutor this academic year, but the experience has been so rewarding for me and, hopefully, also for the students I tutor.

Usually, while writing this post, I would be at Caltech playing volleyball. I begin school eith preseason, which for those unfamiliar (or are planning on joining women’s volleyball, women’s soccer, men’s soccer, men’s waterpolo, or cross country) is a 5 week long period before school begins where the sports teams I listed before practice and compete. My life during preseason is basically volleyball 24/7. Two practices a day (during school only one) and game days three days a week. No school work to worry about, spending time with my teammates all day, a nice refresher before school begins.

Every year, the Caltech Society of Women Engineers attends the National SWE conference to network with other SWE Chapters and to hustle for jobs. Last year, the event was in Minneapolis, and the year before in Austin. This time around, it’s in Anaheim which is much more convenient for us. Since it is much closer, we were able to send many more delegates to attend and miss fewer classes in the process of doing so.

It’s truly Autumn in Scotland now. It reached 0 degrees Celsius today, or 32 Fahrenheit for you yanks. They’re setting up the Christmas market downtown (as thanksgiving isn’t a thing here they just skip directly from Halloween to Christmas). Snow isn’t falling, but it does seem to be raining every other day. And it’s pleasant, quite pleasant. The rain turns Edinburgh into even more of a dramatic and beautiful city than usually is.

Hey fronds.

Almost every house at Caltech runs their own ski trip. The members of social teams choose a weekend to reserve a cabin at resorts like Big Bear or Mammoth Mountain, and offer this accomodation for their members for the weekend for people to go skiing and snowboarding at these resorts. As I’m a part of two houses, Avery and Blacker, I get the chance to go on both - which I am happy I got to do this year! Usually I have fencing tournaments scheduled over the same weekends, and so I can’t go to ski. It was extraordinarily lucky this year that I got two trips. Freshman year, I could only go to one, and last year I could go to neither.

The Snow Lake trail is a 6.4 mile with an elevation gain of 1700 ft. It’s about a hour drive east from Seattle, near the Snoqualmie Pass. Out of the 5 hikes I’ve done in the Seattle area, this one has been my favorite! I would highly recommend it.

In an old abandoned church in San Francisco, there’s a blast to the past in the form of a roller rink. The Church of 8 Wheels is an old-timey place, with pews, a DJ, an open floor, and a lot of roller skaters. They’re open only on Friday and Saturday evenings, but there are quite a few people who come to skate. There’s a large range of abilities, from those who are completely new (they rent out skates) to those who look like figure skaters in their roller skates.

One of my friends from Seattle recommended that I hike Rattlesnake Lake and Snow Lake while I was in Seattle, so here I am, Rattlesnake Lake! The lake is located about 40 minutes drive east of Seattle, and the lake is a short walk away from the main road. It was a beautiful sunny day! :)

Facebook gives their interns so many opportunities to have fun. A really big event they hold is called Intern Field Day. Facebook had the same event last year, and the format of the day hasn’t changed much. The day is split into 3 parts, where each of the 4 teams that interns have been split into play against the other 3 in sports and games such as dodgeball, soccer, capture the flag, and other classic team games. The teams get points depending on their wins and losses, and whoever showed more spirit in playing their game.

Facebook treats employees extremely well - and I do mean treats in the literal sense! The team I am on, Messenger Growth, had their offsite in Half Moon Bay. Everyone who wanted to attend drove down or took a lyft. There were even some engineers from Seattle who had come down for work, and were able to join everyone on the team in going to the offsite.

At Caltech, there are 4 different a cappella groups: Out of Context, a mixed gender group; Fluid Dynamics, another mixed gender group (and the oldest group at Caltech); the Pipettes, a women only group; and the Keytones, our men only group. Each term they have a concert for all of the groups to perform their current songs. The Spring term concert - Acapalooza - is the most special to the groups because the seniors are graduating and will have to say goodbye.

For this Fourth of July, I met up with another Caltech senior in Bellevue, which is located on the opposite side of Lake Washington from Seattle. Thankfully, there’s a bus running from U-District, where I live, to Bellevue, so it only took about 30-40 minutes to get there.

At the end of third term, Caltech hosts the Techstock music festival, where multiple bands perform to compete for a prize. There’s usually also an artist invited to the event – last year, the Mowgli’s came to Caltech, and the year before, Bowling for Soup came.

If you were following my previous post, you know that I went to the Galapagos as part of the Evolution class I took last term.

Every now and then, ASCIT puts on small social events for students to go and do something off-campus. Last term there was a Color-Me-Mine excursion; groups of students were chosen by lottery to go to a session at a place called Color-Me-Mine, where groups can go and paint, chat, snack, and even drink if they are old enough (this would depend on what was reserved for the group though). They either paint something on a canvas (like a landscape or a still life) or they paint pottery.

For Chinese New Year, all of the Chinatowns that I know of put on a parade at some point in time. I heard from my family that the parade in Chicago was actually on a Monday a little farther into the new year, but in LA, it was on the first weekend. I went to see the parade that day (not very early admittedly); from what I saw, it had a lot of other ethnic groups marching as well, including dancers, cowboys, etc. as well as marching bands from a lot of high schools around the area.

While I was home in Chicago, my dad wanted to visit and exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center. At the time they were holding a biannual architecture exhibition. And the sheer number of contributors and pieces was astonishing. We spent at least a couple hours there, taking one of their guided tours, and saw some amazing things. It was still probably at most a half of the things that were on display, and we certainly didn’t examine many of the pieces for long.

My cousin was in town for a few days, and she wanted to go shopping at a kristkindle market. We have one in downtown Chicago that has been going on for at least a decade. However, a newer one just popped up this year in Wrigleyville, right next to the field where our baseball team the Cubs play. It even has an ice skating rink.

After our first outing together with the seniors, we started training on the ergs (rowing machines) and with weights. We started going on weekly novice outings, usually once or twice a week. At first, it was pure chaos since we would have 8 novice rowers with a novice cox, with a ton of other novices boats on the Cam. (The cox is the person who steers the boat by telling which rowers to row). Furthermore, before daylight savings kicked in, it would still be dark out when we got to the boathouse at 7am, making it very cold.

I’ve been hearing about a really good cafe in Pasadena called Amara Cafe from a teammate, who always went there for drinking chocolate. She’s told a story about how her boyfriend doesn’t like the chocolate there because it’s too bitter, even though she goes pretty often. So a couple friends and I finally found the time to go this past weekend.

Everyone who went on the hike also visited the small beach on Silverwood Lake. Although no one went swimming, some people dipped their feet in and skipped rocks. I was watching on the side; Richard and Praful were especially impressive as both got four or more skips on multiple rocks. It was also amusing to see the people who were not as good throw a rock and have it just plop into the water.

All of the Houses (or Hovses) hold their own trips for their members. Last weekend was Avery’s Camping trip to Silverwood Lake, which they offered for one or two days. Before the trip, there is a lot of planning and organizing by the socteam (social team) representatives: to reserve the campsite, plan food, and also rent camping supplies. The participants also have to organize drivers and passengers in order to get there, because it’s an hour’s drive towards Las Vegas from Caltech.

After seeing a the skyline of London from afar, we headed into Westminster, home to the classic tourist attractions. To get there, we took the tube towards Buckingham Palace.

Across the river Cam about a thirty minute walk away is West Cambridge. This area is home to the Computer Science Department, the University Sports Centre, the Institute of Astronomy, and more. Food trucks come on a regular basis, so there’s no need to worry about getting food back in town or in college between lectures.

Each College in Cambridge has its own Boat Club, with rowing teams for men and women. At Corpus’ club fair, I signed up to be a novice rower! I’ve never rowed before, save for once on the rowing machines in Caltech’s gym (although I definitely did not have the right technique when I used it then). I’d heard the rumors about having to wake up at 6am for rowing practice, but I was committed to trying something new. I love sports and don’t have the opportunity to row at Caltech, so I definitely wanted to take advantage of it here.

To celebrate the beginning of our volleyball season, Tom Mannion offered to hold an opening banquet for us on the first Saturday of preseason. Tom is the Director of Student Activities and Programs at Caltech and often opens his home to welcome students, especially on weekends. He always has food for the students who can come, and there is always too much of it. So we were especially excited to request the types of food that we enjoy, things like sushi, curry, fruits, and brownies

Redondo Beach is about an hour’s drive from Pasadena. My aunt, who used to live in Arcadia, recommended a place there called Quality Seafood. They serve all kinds of seafood, including crabs, oysters, fish, shrimp, and more. Since we were craving seafood and summer is the perfect time for the beach, we decided to go!

A friend of one of the summer students came up from San Diego for the weekend and wanted to get a quick tour of LA so we decided to take him to Little Tokyo for an afternoon. Since 2013, LA has been in a ramen frenzy with new shops opening every other week. LA is known for having great fusion food, so many of the ramen new comers claim to be fusion rather than traditional. We decided to take him to one of the top ramen places, Shin Sen Gumi which has become a mini chain due to its popularity. It is fairly authentic and allows for quite a bit of customization.