culture

Pasadena, City of Roses
local culture

Pasadena, City of Roses

Even if you’ve heard of Caltech before, you might never have heard of Pasadena, the quaint Los Angeles suburb it’s tucked into.

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Rotation Rotation Rotation - The Caltech Houses
culture

Rotation Rotation Rotation - The Caltech Houses

My favorite part about Caltech is the Houses! The easiest way to describe them is as Hogwarts houses: each has their own personality and group of people and the first thing you do at Caltech is go through a “sorting” process. The people are what makes the Houses at Caltech so great. As a frosh, it’s amazing to be able to come in and immediately have a group of 100+ people to support you. Because the Houses have students from every grade, you make friends with upperclassmen and can ask for help on tons of things like:

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My Best Advice for the Class of 2025
academics culture

My Best Advice for the Class of 2025

It’s crazy to think that it has been four years now since I was applying to college. I remember it vividly. This week we’re spending some time reflecting on our personal admissions processes, and how we ended up at Caltech. There’s one question though that I wanted to spin out into a separate post: “what advice would you give to the admitted class of 2025?” And I think the best way to do this is to tell a more detailed story than I did in my other post.

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Zooming Through the Year
academics culture

Zooming Through the Year

These past six months have been a whirlwind- from having to move out of Caltech housing in March within a week’s notice due to COVID-19, to starting the first term of my junior year, I’ve definitely experienced a lot of change. When I went home in March, it was to a completely new state-my family moved from Chino, CA to New Jersey in January (great timing, huh?). While I missed seeing my friends from home, it was fun to have the chance to explore a completely new place. The pandemic obviously limited what I could see and do, but I got to experience walks through nature and along rivers normally foreign to a SoCal native and had some time to focus on bioinformatics research for the lab I work with on campus.

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Photos From the Time of Covid
culture

Photos From the Time of Covid

It’s month 6 of quarantine and I’m writing to you from Colorful Colorado (also known as the state where it snowed last week and was 95 out today). Climate change? Maybe. International conspiracy by the Greek God Zeus to make me miss Pasadena and Caltech more than I already do? Most definitely.

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String food = new String(“Too Much Food”);
culture

String food = new String(“Too Much Food”);

Hello, Java monsters! If you couldn’t tell from my EXCELLENT punning, I’m taking CS 2 this term, a computer science course about the wonderful world of Java. That’s one of my new classes for this term. Also included: plate tectonics, seismology, field geophysics, physics lab, and a design-your-own English class about American minimalism as a prep-course for my thesis (which I’m hoping to start next term).

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Snowboarding at Cypress
culture

Snowboarding at Cypress

Snowboarding with my friend Cecilia is an annual occasion when I go home for the holidays. Cecilia and I actually learned snowboarding a few years ago. We signed up for these intro lessons, but arrived at the slopes early and thought that we would try a run before the lesson to see where we at. We were slightly confused, so took the lift to a green run instead of the bunny hills. We got down that run 80% on our butt and 20% on our feet, but it was a great start. By the end of that day’s lesson, we were getting down that same run 80% on our feet. Of course, now we are much better.

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Ice Skating
culture

Ice Skating

Ice skating seems rather uncommon here in Southern California as there are only two year-round rinks within driving distance of Caltech. One is the Pasadena Ice Skating Center which is only minutes away, the other is the Santa Monica Rink which is way out west. The interesting thing is, the Olympic figure skating Mirai Nagasu is actually local. Her family owns a sushi restaurant in Arcadia that is only 10 minutes away. There are a lot of Caltech events at the Pasadena rink. The houses often play broomball with each other. For broomball, we would rent out the entire rink. It’s extremely fun and you do not need to know to skate to play. My friends and I have also gone a couple of times to actually skate during their public skate sessions. In fact, two weekends ago, a friend and I headed over to polish up our extremely rusty skating skills.

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A Night of Poetry
culture

A Night of Poetry

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L'X Campus
culture

L'X Campus

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OC Can You Say?
culture

OC Can You Say?

It’s Sunday night and you know what that means: FOOD! TRUCK! ROAD! TRIP! (minus the truck part of the food truck).

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Caltech Art Gala
culture

Caltech Art Gala

Every year, Caltech’s literary and arts magazine Totem hosts the Art of Science competition.

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LACMA
culture

LACMA

Caltech is starting a new Visual Culture program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and headed by the Caltech Humanities and Social Sciences Department. The program will include new courses, a postdoctoral instructor, artists-in-residence, guest lecturers, and the addition of a visual culture professor to the faculty. The first artist-in-residence is Leslie Thornton, who is an experimental filmmaker. She’ll be teaching a class on the concept of time in filmmaking next term, which seems really interesting! As part of this program, Professor Jurca took a group of 12 students to the LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We were there to specifically see the “Double Vision” exhibit, which focuses on 3D art. Many of the exhibits required special 3D glasses for viewing. There were three different types of glasses, each for different kinds of 3D art. One of them was just like the ones you get at 3D movies, and another was the classic one red lens one blue lens type. There were also exhibits that did not require you to use glasses, and others that asked you to look through other lenses like the in the photos below. You can find more about the exhibit here.

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Nevada
culture

Nevada

My favorite part of every term is Geology (Ge) 136. Ge 136 is a field trip based class open any undergraduate or graduate students at the institute. Each student in the class chooses a topic, writes a brief report, and then presents on it in the field. Mostly members of the Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS, another classic Caltech pun) enroll, meaning the class is always filled with people ready to answer any questions about colorful rocks, weird extremophile microbes native to the region, or even the planets and stars we can see at night (most trips are in regions with low light pollution so the Milky Way is generally visible).

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My Favorite Udon Place (!!)
culture

My Favorite Udon Place (!!)

My favorite udon place of all time is Marugame Monzo in Little Tokyo. I found out about it in my freshman year, and I’ve never been disappointed! This is what the main street of Little Tokyo looks like:

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Hiking Mt. Zion
culture

Hiking Mt. Zion

There are a bunch of nice hikes in the San Gabriel mountains, just 15 minutes drive from Caltech. Over winter break, I hiked the Mt. Zion trail via Lower Winter Creek Trail (this one). The trail is 9.6 miles long and has an elevation gain of 2,100 ft, and it took us about 5 hours to hike.

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Dourmet Dishes
culture

Dourmet Dishes

I’m trying to get consistent with meal prep this term. Busy weeknights usually find me floundering at the thought of actually cooking and resorting to the straightforward but actually somewhat time-consuming fried-egg-and-rice. Instead, I want to avoid the dilemma altogether and cook a large quantity of real food once a week. Today, the first day of winter term, I kicked off this resolution today by making seven servings of chicken curry.

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RBG
culture

RBG

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, affectionately known as the Notorious RBG, is a soft-spoken, eighty-five year old woman who stands just an inch over five feet tall. She’s a widow, grandmother, and also a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

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A Geology Meme a Day…
culture

A Geology Meme a Day…

Keeps your bad grades away! (hopefully – just took the final, did not go well). Hello from Maryland! As you can probably tell, I’m a couple days behind with my blog posts. I’m currently staying with the parents of my roommate from last year while I’m at the American Geophysical Union conference in Washingotn, DC. But more on that later (they’re my new favorite people!).

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Page Interhouse
culture

Page Interhouse

Each house hosts one big party during the school year, and Page is the first to host it in November. There are four interhouses during Winter Term, and then the last three are in the Spring. This year, our theme was Club Penguin.

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Union Station Holiday Festival
culture

Union Station Holiday Festival

Last weekend, there was a holiday festival at Union Station. On the way there, we passed by a street full of small stores that seemed to sell Mexican items. I have a feeling I’ve seen it before, so I think it might always be there.

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Huntington Trip
culture

Huntington Trip

I’m beginning to get the suspicion that every Caltech humanities class tries to find some excuse to go visit the Huntington. I’m not complaining though. I love the gardens. It gives me an excuse to get off campus and be surrounded by lush foliage like I was living in a different world. Even if only for a moment. This Huntington trip was a bit different, and sponsored by English 128, the contemporary Irish literature course I’m taking taught by Dean Gilmartin.

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How much food can one boy eat?
culture

How much food can one boy eat?

A lot. That’s the honest and unabridged answer. I went on a food tour this Sunday night with our director of student activities, Tom Mannion. Tom has made it into a few posts before so I’m not going to dawdle on that too much, but basically, he’s the best and he took us on an Asian food of SGV tour.

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Vancouver Trip
culture

Vancouver Trip

Over the summer, all of the Caltech undergrads in Seattle got together to go on a weekend road trip to Vancouver. With 9 people, we booked an Airbnb and set off from Seattle on a Friday evening.

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Part Time Dog Walking
culture

Part Time Dog Walking

Over the past year, I’ve been regularly dog-sitting for this cute maltese-poodle mix called Rocco. He has separation anxiety, which is why he has a diaper on in the first image. When I come visit, I take off the diaper, play with him, and take him on a walk. He’s such a cute dog! He always greets me by immediately rolling over for a belly rub.

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Welcoming New Frosh and Rock Climbing
culture

Welcoming New Frosh and Rock Climbing

It’s the end of Rotation, and all the frosh have rotated into their new houses! As part of our house initiation, we painted Fleming’s red cannon a nice Page blue :) (with Fleming’s permission, of course). During my rotation 3 years ago, we pulled pranks like stealing Lloyd’s gong and Ruddock’s couches, but nothing as big as this. Apparently the paint is washable though, so it should come off fine.

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All Hallow’s Eve Alley Ordering
culture

All Hallow’s Eve Alley Ordering

As a Vice President (a veep as we call them) of Blacker House (only one of three), I am a part of putting on something we moles call Alley Ordering. It’s a 1-2 hour event that we plan ahead of time, filled with fun and games. At least, we hope it’s filled with fun. This time around, it was Halloween themed. Qiao Qiao, one of our other veeps, came up with all the activities for people to do, even insisting on a turnip- and potato- carving activity - for old times sake. This is because before we started using pumpkins, all of the jack-o-lanterns used to be carved out of turnips and potatoes. With that in mind, it’s probably more apt to call our theme All Hallow’s Eve.

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Coffee Shops of Seattle Part 2
culture

Coffee Shops of Seattle Part 2

Part 2! Here we have 5 more coffee shops located in Seattle.

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We Have A Potato Cannon
culture

We Have A Potato Cannon

When I say we, I mean Blacker. At some point in the past that I have no knowledge of, some members of Blacker decided that it would be a great idea to build a potato cannon. And it was. It’s used for shooting out many different things at high speeds. However, potatoes seem to fit the best in the canister and are both cheap and plentiful. Hence, its name was born.

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Blue Angels in the Sky
culture

Blue Angels in the Sky

Seattle SeaFair is a summer festival that has a bunch of events, including yacht races and more, but the main event I attended was the Blue Angels performance. The Blue Angels is the US Navy flight demonstration unit, and when they perform, they do loops, fly right past each other at speed, and other amazing aerobatics.

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(Less Painful) Hiking!
culture

(Less Painful) Hiking!

What is crackalackin’ my dudes?! It’s yo’ boi Chandrew in the house about to spit some fresh verse regarding the freshman orientation hike I led last weekend.

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Spotlight

Pasadena, City of Roses
local culture

Pasadena, City of Roses

Even if you’ve heard of Caltech before, you might never have heard of Pasadena, the quaint Los Angeles suburb it’s tucked into.

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Some Late-Night Stress-Saving Food Runs
academics

Some Late-Night Stress-Saving Food Runs

Midterms kept up its unrelenting attack on my sanity this week – at least a little bit. And how did I solve this? Two words.

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Caltech Art Gala
culture

Caltech Art Gala

Every year, Caltech’s literary and arts magazine Totem hosts the Art of Science competition.

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Quick Trip to the Beach
global local culture

Quick Trip to the Beach

Although there are a lot of smaller things, such as midterm smoothies and milkshakes (Blacker does something similar to this) and some larger things like Faculty Dessert Night, the soc team usually agrees that beach trip is the most work.

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