orincorr's Journal

Long time no post
I know, I know, I stink at this regular posting business, but at least occasional posts are better than no posts, yes? I'm back at Stanford and it's the start of the quarter, so things are still a bit slow, but I expect things to pick up next week. Clara hosted a party for all the Olin kids in the area on Saturday, and it was nice to see everyone again and hear the latest gossip/news that they don't send out to the alumnae. Nicole came up for the weekend from Irvine, so she, Michael Wu, and I went up to San Francisco yesterday and showed her all the touristy things. It's been unseasonably cold, but still, the trip was a lot of fun and it's good to get out of the apartment. My big goals for this quarter are to a.) exercise and b.) get out more, so I'm trying to start as I mean to go on. As a result, I have very sore legs since I went running and am woefully out of shape. But at least now I know enough biomechanics and anatomy to know exactly what is hurting and why... Occupational hazard, I guess.

In terms of classes, I'm taking advanced dynamics, fatigue design and analysis, and medical device design. Advanced dynamics looks to be a fun class, certainly better than classical dynamics was last quarter (more about that later.) It's taught from the ME department, not AA, so the prof is actually a good teacher and cares about the class' learning (what a concept!) Fatigue design and analysis is the class I wished I had taken concurrently with Jon's Failure class back at Olin - it's the theory of why stuff breaks and how to design stuff so that it breaks when you expect it to and not before. The prof who's teaching it isn't the most engaging I've ever taken a class from, but the topic is interesting enough that I don't mind. Medical device design is pretty much a SCOPE project except done in 20 weeks (two quarters) instead of 26. I'm working for Zimmer, the company that makes orthopedic implants, to develop and implement a protocol to determine the mechanical properties of cartilage to use in knee models. It sounds like a really fun project, and it's definitely applicable to my research. And this is the 8th year the class has been taught, so the bugs have been ironed out...

Since this quarter will hopefully be less crazy than Fall, I'm taking advantage to do a lot of work in the lab. I joined the ACL/OA project in the BioMotion lab, where we're looking at the relationship between ACL injuries and osteoarthritis, since people with injured ACL's have a much higher incidence of early OA. Hopefully, this'll help us figure out how OA starts and how to prevent it. So far I've just been doing cartilage segmentation from MRI images (outlining the tibial and femoral cartilage in each slice of an MRI scan of a patient's knee), which is then used to build a 3-D model of the cartilage. By comparing the injured ACL knee to the other normal one, we hope to see if there's a pattern to how the cartilage thins after injury. It's highly repetitive, essentially requiring no cognitive function, so I go segment cartilage as an antidote to problem sets. And I'm getting to know the other people in the lab more, so I feel less like an interloper who doesn't belong.

I am glad fall quarter is over, since especially the end got pretty bad. I essentially failed two of my midterms, so I had to do really well on all my finals to pull decent grades. As a result, I practically didn't leave my room for a week straight and went from bed to desk to bed. I've never studied as hard, but at least it paid off and I did well. Much better than I had any reason to expect. My last (and worst) final was on the last day before break, so that day one of my friends living off campus had a holiday party where we got suitably drunk to inaugurate winter break and forget classes for at least a little while.

My winter break was otherwise quiet, and it was nice to be able to loaf for three weeks. I realized how much I miss having a real summer vacation without needing to work or run madly from place to place. I've picked up knitting again, except now I actually learned how to purl as well as knit, so I can make real things instead of just scarves. My first project is a poncho made out of black/grey boucle yarn. It's essentially just two large rectangles sown together, but at least I get to practice stockinette stitch a lot. And the boucle is bulky enough that it doesn't show my mistakes too much :-)! Now I just have to stick to my goal of knitting every day...

The same, only different
The sun is shining, the sky is blue, not a cloud in the sky. Sometimes, it seems almost sinful to have weather this nice in November. And it's definitely sinful to be sitting inside doing homework on a day as nice as this, but such is life. Or rather, such is graduate school.

Midterms are over for this quarter, so I've had a little bit of a break (no Dynamics homework this week!) and actually had a weekend with only one problem set to do. On the flipside, I've also gotten 2/3 of said midterms back. Safe to say, some things don't change: I still seriously stink at in-class exams. Oh well, it's only 30% of my grade (HW is 10% and final is 60%), so if I do really^3 well on the final (unlikely) I might just pull off a miracle. Let's just say I'm hoping the (in)famous Stanford grad school grade inflation kicks in at some point. But that's just Dynamics (I haven't gotten Linear Algebra back, but I suspect it will be the same thing...)

On the other hand, Biomechanics is just getting mo' better. We've started working on our term paper: it's similar to a grant proposal, in that we look at the prior research in an area and propose something new to do. My group is looking at the development of early-stage Parkinson's as it relates to gait, with the intent to come up with an easy battery of diagnostic tests to help diagnose people early. It's amazing how much research has already been done on gait and PD, and how much is still totally unknown and not even being investigated. The whole concept of walking and running still amazes me, and learning more about it just makes it even more stupefying that it just all works. Most of the time. (Yeah, yeah, so I'm a little excited...)

Stanford, part deux
First off, I am still alive and kicking, I just haven't posted in a (very) long while. I'm blaming my total lack of ability to write non-scientific papers and the fact that I think in math now. But I'll do my best to be coherent...

Stanford is VERY fun; in fact, in some highly publicized Princeton Review survey (we all know how accurate those are...) Stanford was voted as having the happiest students. I can see why: sunshine, free food and/or alcohol are proliferous. Example: the Design division of ME throws a kegger every Friday afternoon, open to all ME students. And currently the sun is shining, not a cloud in the sky, and it's probably 80 degrees out. And it was that way yesterday. And it will be that way tomorrow.

Stanford is also seriously kicking my ass. Or rather, Stanford classes are kicking my ass. I'm taking just three graduate level classes (which is all the credits my fellowship pays for, which is just as well...) and eating a lot of humble pie. I look back upon PDE's with fond memories; compared to Classical Dynamics, that class was easy - I routinely spend two full working days each week to finish each Dynamics problem set (consisting of 5 problems) and that is with a lot of help from the TA's. (It's funny - all of Olin's advertising puts great emphasis on the fact that at Olin, TA's don't teach classes, but
A) Even at a research 1 university like Stanford, TA's do NOT teach classes either, even undergrad classes. They teach extra problem sessions or workshops.
B) Often, the TA's are better teachers than the prof, since they took the class before and know what issues students have. They also teach how to solve problems, rather than teaching concepts/theory, which is equally as helpful.)
In short, I love TA's. Lord knows I spend enough time with them...

Stanford classes are also really cool (despite kicking my ass). Biomechanics of Movement, the one BME (biomechanics) class I'm taking this quarter is ridiculously interesting. Ever wanted to know the force-velocity-length curve of muscle? How you actually walk? Why running on different surfaces makes you run faster or slower? Well, now I know. In Linear Algebra we've talked about how Google works, both the search algorithm and the page rank algorithm (turns out it's just a very clever use of matrices and column spaces) and lots of other applications (modeling gas fields, anyone?) It's pretty cool to be taking classes that don't have to teach how to draw a FBD or solve a 2nd order ODE and can move on to the cool applications of those ideas.

Stanford quarters are ridiculously short. I've been here for just a month, and already I have midterms next week (after which, I might cease to wax poetic about the wonders of learning stuff and instead admit how ridiculously badly I'm doing.) The good news is that graduate classes here are generally graded on an A+ to B- scale. The bad news is that getting a B- is a bit of a warning and a C means you should pack your bags and go to some place less demanding. Scarier than grades, though, is the prospect of quals next year. But we'll burn that bridge when we get to it...

And last but not least, Stanford research is very exciting. I've been sitting in on the lab meetings of Prof. Andriacchi and Prof. Delp's labs to get an idea of the kinds of projects they have open to new students, and it's all just really cool stuff. The good news is that since I'm funded, I don't have to join a lab group right away to find someone to pay my tuition, but I should still be around. The way it works in ME here, (unlike, say, EE) is that most people who take quals (93%) pass, but in order to even be allowed to take them, you already have to have a thesis project, advisor, and funding all lined up. Since ME's generally take quals the fall/winter after their first year, that gives a one year "courtship" window to find a lab, advisor, and project before finishing the MS. That sounds like a lot of time, but I'm so swamped with work this quarter that I haven't been able to do more than go to lab meetings and meet with professors, so I've done essentially no research. I am lucky, though, in that I'm reasonably certain of the lab I want to work in (Andriacchi's Biomotion lab) and the project I want to do (osteoarthritis, probably early diagnosis of or obesity links to), so I just have to convince them that I'll be a good researcher. Which shouldn't be that hard to do ;-)

Stanford
Today was the first day of classes for this quarter, so my vacation is officially over. Sigh...

I moved to my apartment last Wednesday - it's relatively new, reasonably roomy, and my roommate is nice. She's from China by way of UVA and studying financial mathematics, and therefore will make more money than I can ever aspire to ;-) Thursday and Friday were ostensibly orientation and advising, but I only got to meet with one of my three advisors, since the other two weren't available. Orientation consisted mainly of lunch with faculty and current students, and happy hour on Friday night. It was actually nice to not be subjected to the usual barrage of ice-breaking events that generally accompany undergrad orientation, and I find it's easier to meet people over food than contrived games. Still, there are 174 of us new students in the department, so there are a lot of people to meet. So far, most everyone seems normal and well adjusted, with the exception of yours truly ;-)

The weekend I spent at IKEA, Target, and various other places buying things for the kitchen. As much as I dislike shopping, this was a lot of fun, largely because I got to buy all the things that I keep walking around at IKEA wanting to get. And cooking is WAY more fun with a proper kitchen and the right equipment. I just hope that I keep having enough time to actually cook, as opposed to relying on ye olde microwave and frozen food. Stanford has a great (free) shuttle system that goes to most of my favorite grocery stores round here, so hopefully I won't have problems keeping myself reasonably fed (no scurvy for me!)

After food, next in importance, I suppose, is what I'm actually here to do, which is take classes and theoretically learn stuff. Since my fellowship only pays for 10 credits a quarter, I am forced to maintain a sane schedule (no more 20-credit semesters!), which translates to 3 courses and a PE class or seminar. I'm currently signed up for Linear Algebra, Biomechanics of Movement, and Medical Device Design, with Classical Dynamics as a substitute if I don't get into Medical Devices. I've had all but Biomechanics today; Linear Algebra is a class taken by mostly for the ME's and quite a few of the CME's (computational engineers), so the whole class is something like 200 students and is held in an auditorium with mikes and such. It's definitely a novelty, and not necessarily one I like - the desks are terrible to write on and there is no space for anything. However, the large lecture classes are videotaped and put online, which is a definite plus. The prof seems good and promised to include lots of MATLAB, so I'm optimistic that it'll go well. Medical devices sounds great, but I'm not sure I'll get in - the prof is taking about half of the currently registered students. The replacement class, Classical Dynamics is one of those good-for-you-but-painful classes, but given that this is my weakest ME area, I'll have to take it at some point anyway, I think.

Aside from classes, I've been busy doing all the annoying things that Olin used to take care of for us - buying software, getting shop-trained, scheduling advising appointments, and making sure by bills are paid. On the upside, Stanford has vast libraries, with a large collection of Czech books, so I'm indulging in reading while I still can.

Aaaah, home
So I'm finally home from my travels and travails this summer. My laptop is currently sad and unfunctional, which is why my posts have been rather non-existent as of late. But my new hard drive (with 10GB more space!) is all ready for its new home (yay warranty!) so the laptop will rise again.

(Somewhat) short recap of everything I've been up to for the past several weeks:

My internship at P&G got extended by a week and a half, since my supervisor, section head, and associate director all couldn't make my final presentation as it was originally scheduled. Plus it didn't hurt that I got some more time to work. Overall I really liked my project - I can't say a lot about what I actually worked on, save that I was responsible for developing the formulation and processing method of a new product that P&G is intending to launch. That meant I was free to direct the project and do whatever I thought was necessary to move the project forward; it, however, also meant that I knew the most about my project and didn't have a lot of people to ask for help. But my bosses were all happy with my work, and recommended me for permanent hire once (if) I finish school. Trouble is, I really like the company, the people I worked with, and even Brussels, but I don't think I could be happy working on detergent and cleaning products permanently. Still, I have at least 5-6 years to finish, so I have time to make up my mind.

Besides working, I spent the weekends touring the sights of Belgium - Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp, and even made it to Koeln (Cologne). I liked Ghent and Bruges for their very old medieval city centers, but Bruges feels like a movie set - the city was totally dead except for the tourists when I went, and a little too picture-perfect for my taste. Ghent at least had some life and felt like a city where people live. I ended up going to Antwerp twice - once for the city, which isn’t that spectacular, aside from the cathedral, and the second time with a bunch of friends to go see the Tall-ship races (sailing ships, ranging from 1-masted yachts to 5-masted schooners of yore that Columbus would envy). Koeln has a beautiful cathedral, next to which some wise (or foolish, I'm not sure which) city planner put the main train station. Koeln was bombed pretty thoroughly during the war, so there isn't much left of the old city beyond the cathedral, but still, it was so nice to go to a place where I understood people, even if just for a day.

After finishing at P&G on the 6th, I visited Czechia for the past week and bought books, ate way too much, and generally enjoyed myself, albeit for only a brief time. Then I heroically dragged my suitcase (50+ lbs) up and down at least 20 flights of stairs to make it from Pardubice to Prague, and hence make my way back to Brussels and a day later, to San Francisco. Now I'm finally home and get to do nothing for three days before moving to Stanford (and by doing nothing I mean reading, reinstalling everything on my laptop, packing and unpacking, and watching lots of TV.) Monday I have to show up to my Stanford apartment and pick up the keys - orientation for the ME department only starts on Thursday, though, and classes get going on the 25th, so hopefully I'll get a couple more days to veg. It'll certainly be a change not having to fly and ship all my junk, bu instead pack it into a car and drive for 20 minutes. I'm getting a little sick of schlepping my stuff all over the place. I'm a little nervous about what it will be like, but it can't be worse than 1st semester senior year, right?

Computer guru needed
Any computer gurus out there reading this blog? I need a spot o' help:

I have become the victim of the (in)famous (at least judging by the number of Google hits) Windows Stop 0x77 KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE ERROR and I'm wondering if anyone knows of a cure. The symptoms:

My cold laptop will boot fine into Windows and work for ~5 minutes (this depends on how much I'm accessing the hard disk), then it blue-screens with the aforementioned KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE ERROR. If I try to restart immediately, BIOS says it can't find the primary hard disk drive and refuses to boot anything. If I wait for ~5 minutes or so, BIOS will find the disk drive and proceed, but neither Linux nor Windows will boot successfully (Linux says it can't find the hard drive, and Windows blue-screens with the same error before even booting all the way.) The longer I wait before restarting, the more complete the Windows boot before it crashes; however, booting is accompanied by an intermittent clicking noise from the hard drive and only intemittent disk drive accesses. If I let the laptop cool all the way down (about half an hour or so) Windows will boot normally and the process repeats.

Microsoft says this about the error; I don't have a boot virus since the error arguments aren't zero, but neither do they match the other error arguments described. (I can't run anti-virus since it accesses the disk so much it crashes Windows immediately, but my external drive isn't infected because I can scan that.) My solution has been so far to move all important files off my internal disk into an external one (~200 MB before each crash...) and keep my fingers crossed that something worse doesn't happen before I'm done, but I would really like to fix this.

Does anyone have any ideas? (Keep in mind I'm in Belgium and have rather limited Tech Support, so reinstalling anything major will have to wait.)

Thanks!

(More interesting post about my life will follow after I do some more work...)

Happy hurting
Everything hurts, except for my face – this is about how I felt yesterday morning after waking up. Everything is sore, especially my back and shoulders. And I have bruises and cuts galore. Why, you may ask? Adventure weekend, that’s why.

Adventure weekend is organized by P&G for the interns every summer – it’s two days of fun in the sun in the Ardennes. Saturday we left early in the morning (well, early for a weekend – 8am) and drove to a tiny village southeast of Brussels in the hills by a river. There we were awaited by several guides, who proceeded to guide us through a couple of relatively innocuous activities – building a short bridge over a stream to drive a Jeep over, canoeing down the river, dry-land fishing for objects, and a bunch of team-based relay-type games. The day was gorgeous, sunny and hot with enough of a breeze to maintain relative comfort but ensure that we were all burned crispy by day’s end. The real adventure, however, came after lunch, where we did a spot of rock climbing and (very) high ropes course.

The rock climbing was very fun at first, until I made the mistake (perhaps?) of taking the “challenging” trail up the rock as opposed to the easy way. The company organizing the whole thing had strung up a steel safety cable and installed some iron foot/handholds into the rock to help people climb, but still, the way up was highly dicey. Part of the problem was my height, or lack thereof – the holds were convenient and at the right height for someone 180cm tall, but less so for someone of my 165. But I think that would have been fine, if it hadn’t been for the fact that we were climbing in the full sun, so my hands were very sweaty very quickly, which tends to reduce friction and grabbing power quite drastically. The first part, however, went okay – there was one point were I was holding on my practically sheer will (and my safety harness), but I made it to the middle point. The second part, however, was not so good; I wasn’t first in line and so had to wait to climb, which probably didn’t help matters, and I was already tired from the first part of the rock, so I simply couldn’t make it from one hold to another and fell. The good thing about it was that once you fall once and know that the harness will hold you, the rest of the climb becomes a little less scary. But by the time I fell, my arms were about to drop off, so I swallowed my (somewhat injured) pride and climbed up the easy route. But I’m still happy – I didn’t think I would make it even that far, so I consider the climb a success.

After we made it to the top, we went through a high ropes course, which I actually thought was much easier than the rock climbing, since all it requires is good balance and the ability to not look at the ground. By this point we were quite high up on the mountain, which would ordinarily create some difficulties in getting back down. However, the company thought of everything, and so installed a zip-line back down to the ground as reward for having climbed up all that way. And let me tell you, that was one of the most fun things I’ve done in a very long time; the take-off point was enough that we were sliding for a long enough time to fully appreciate the sensation of flying. It was definitely worth all the scratches and bruises I got on the way up. As the last organized even of the day, we built and raced rafts made out of inner tubes and plywood down the river. Somewhat predictably, mayhem ensued and everyone got soaked, but everyone had fun. After some symbolic drying off, we headed to our accommodations for the night. And what swanky accommodation they were; rustic and country-like, but definitely very swanky. Dinner and the evening/night/morning passed as anyone who knows what college-students like to do on the weekend can imagine; the coordinators from P&G who “chaperoned” us on the trip (I say “chaperoned”, since chaperones generally speaking don’t buy 300 Euros’ worth of alcohol for their chaperonees) had perhaps the most fun of all. It was certainly entertaining to watch them.

Anyhow, Sunday morning we woke up at 8am for the last part of the adventure weekend: 11km of kayaking down the river. That was perhaps the most fun of all – the day was beautiful, it was cool on the water, and I had a good friend paddle with me in the kayak. Only trouble was that it hasn’t rained in a couple of weeks (which they say is uncharacteristic for Belgium), so the water level was a trifle low, so going over some of the rapids was more an exercise in getting unstuck from rocks than paddling. But as I say, it was very very fun. By the time everyone finished going down the river and had lunch, we were all pretty much ready to keel over from exhaustion (although I must say, paddling is a pretty good way to get over a hangover…) I was also starting to feel the combined effects of rock climbing and paddling on shoulders and back, and just about ready to go home. Luckily, most everyone was in the same boat, so I ended up at home by early evening. I took a most wonderful bath and crashed in front of the TV, watching none other than athletics and beach volleyball, feeling my muscles get stiffer and stiffer. Which brings me to this morning, and having everything hurt. But I’ll say thins – it was very worth it; the weekend was loads of fun.

Ahh, team bonding
I have to admit, I got really lucky in where I ended up in P&G this summer. Everyone always asks what a ME is doing at a company that makes shampoo and household cleaners, but believe me, I have plenty to do that doesn’t involve lots of organic chemistry. Unfortunately, I can’t say anything about my project, but I can assure everyone that it is indeed cool and exciting and interesting and I’m learning an incredible amount. After this summer, I will never look at laundry detergent or shampoo or Mr. Swiffer the same way again – the amount of science and engineering that goes into making them all work at essentially zero cost is incredible.

But on to more fun topics I CAN talk about: my department and team bonding day. My department, hard surface cleaners, is made up of some 60 people, with all kinds of backgrounds. The department is pretty young, with most everyone around 30 or so; we have a lot of Belgians, but also plenty of French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch people, along with a smattering of Germans, Greeks, and Czechs (that would be me!). Everyone speaks English, although the Belgians do have a tendency to go off in Dutch when they’re alone. I’m getting used to the sound, but it’s definitely a bit bizarre – it’s a lot like German, with enough modifications to make it difficult for me to read, and with a pronunciation that makes everything sound like there is an r in every syllable. Some things are especially funny, since the same word in German and Dutch mean very different things; for example, gekocht in German is the past participle of to cook, whereas in Dutch it’s the past participle of to buy. Especially in museums, where every painting says gekocht 1XXX, this just looks hilarious.

Anyway, by common consensus, my department is one of the funniest ones at BIC (Brussels Innovation Center), which was also proved to me Monday, during our department team bonding day, a.k.a. Fun at an Amusement Park Day. As this implies, team bonding took place at Walibi, an amusement park near Brussels, and was really just an excuse to have fun for a day. We arrived at the park in the morning, and were broken up into seven groups and given a questionnaire to fill out (with questions like “What’s the name of the hotel in Lucky Luke City?”) until lunch. After lunch until park closing, we could wander around the park and ride all the rides. The day was great; I was randomly put into the group with my and my office mate’s supervisors, along with a couple of other people I didn’t know very well, so I wandered around the park with them for the day. The only thing marring the day were the terrible lines we had to wait in; it turns out, this is the last week of school, so there were hordes of kids at the park celebrating the end of the year. But the rides were really fun, and it was fun to just hang out and get to know people. Dinner was provided by P&G, a barbecue, during which the Italians were watching the Italy vs. Australia game (which Italy won, but by a penalty during overtime which was a dubious call by the ref.) Part of the amusement park is also a water park, which is open much later than the remainder, and the restaurant we were in is immediately adjoining the water park, so during dinner we got to watch people frolic in the water park in bikinis and Speedos. After dinner, which was generally quiet, some of the Belgians caught their second party wind, and proceeded to accompany our exit from the park with loud singing. The singing continued well into the bus ride back. I’m dead tired and sunburned now, but the day was great fun. And I got paid for it ;-)!

Did anyone say football?
\begin{gloat}
We just beat the US 3:0. Yippee! (That would be World Cup soccer, for all y'all Yanks ;-)!)
\end{gloat}

And it was a nice looking match, as compared to some I've seen this weekend. For everyone not in Europe, World Cup fever has fully broken out, and will last for about another month or so. All games are shown on multiple channels (French, Dutch, German, English), and owing to the lack of a time difference, in primetime. There are at least two matches every day, so I can come home from work every day and veg in front of the TV while watching other people run around in coordinated fashion. It's really fun, especially watching the various styles of play.

In other news, the weather has finally gotten summer-like here - it's warm, even hot, sunny, and generally really nice summer weather. And not too humid either, just perfect for hanging out in the shade and eating ice cream. Which is precisely what we did on Saturday - there's a huge forest on the outskirts of Brussels, part of which is very civilized and park-like. We went hiking there for several hours, sampling the wares of intrepid ice cream sellers that appeared like mushrooms after a rain. And they make good ice cream, too. That night we went out ostensibly to go salsa dancing, but what actually happened was that we went to the club, saw that it was empty, and went out for a drink or two. We came back sometime later, to a very hot and crowded club that played mostly techno, with a live congo player who approximated something like a salsa beat on top of techno. I didn't stay long, but then again, I'm not one for clubbing.

On Sunday morning we went to an open-air market, which was quite interesting. Brussels has a large Middle Eastern population, and apparently all of them go to this market, so it was densely populated by Turkish sellers yelling at the top of their lungs that their tomatoes were sweeter/redder/cheaper, etc. And they have the best olives. Good times indeed. After coming home and stashing the loot, I headed off to the Museum of Ancient Art, because I wanted to see it, and also because the one place that is guaranteed to have climate control is an art museum. In fact, I was cold and had to go outside to warm up.

Work otherwise is going well, I'm very busy and starting to work in the lab/plant, which makes me very happy. Stressed, but happy. I blame Olin.

A week in the life...
The past week has been quite interesting.

Friday morning was spent at the Commune, the equivalent to a city quarter city hall, where I, and a couple of the other interns had to register as residents. It was a perfect example of bureaucracy gone berserk. The Commune is only open from 8am-1pm, but there are so many people every day that you have to come at 7am, write your name down on a piece of paper, and receive your ticket when they start giving them out. Then you wait several hours (and I do mean 3-4) until your ticket is called. Because so many people come, they stop giving out tickets at 8:30, because if you get a ticket after that, they won’t get to you before they close. To add to the entertainment, the secretaries only speak French (not even Dutch!). Thank goodness the HR intern coordinator came by to translate for us. I, being a new EU resident, waited in a separate line to get registered; because I theoretically don’t have to be registered since I am an EU citizen, my wonderful interpreter had to argue them into letting me do it. (I have to register, so that I can apply for a visa to go to the UK, to the P&G Newcastle center, which I might need to do some work at.) So I waited in line, only to then be told that I need passport pictures and a photocopy of my passport. Trick is, there was no copier on site, so one of the other interns (who also needed copies) and I ran around the area for a while trying to find a copy shop that was open. We finally broke down and went to Citibank, where there was some hope of finding someone who spoke enough English to point us in the right direction. Sometimes, transnational corporations are a blessing… After the copies were settled, the rest of the morning was spent just uneventfully waiting in line.

After lunch, we finally went to work, and proceeded to get allergy tests for the specific chemicals we might be exposed to at P&G. No undue reactions on my end, thank goodness. That afternoon I also got my desk #1, and computer, and proceeded to try for the first time to log in and access e-mail. An hour and half’s worth of IT support time later, I could at least log in and access the internet. But not e-mail or Sametime, which is the chat program P&G uses.

The weather finally cleared up over the weekend, and it was warm and sunny enough that we spent Saturday walking around inner Brussels. It’s small enough that it’s easily covered on foot and without getting lost. And there aren’t too many tourists, so it was really pleasant. That night we went out to a famous pub, Le Mort Subite (the Sudden Death, named after a card game). The beer was wonderful, and the bar was filled with locals, not tourists, which made it nice and homey-feeling. One of the Belgian beer specialties, deservedly so, is kriek – this is cherry-flavored beer, which sounds strange, but tasted absolutely delicious. It’s only one of several kinds of flavored beers (apple, strawberry, raspberry), but is definitely the best. And Le Mort Subite brews their own, so it was extra good.

Sunday was spent sleeping off both jetlag and the pub, in about equal measure. The other five interns who all started June 1st are all really fun, so we hang out all the time. It makes the hotel a little homier. Plus, we’re all working on different projects in different areas, so we have lots of notes to compare.

Monday is a national holiday (Whit Monday, I think), and the weather was so nice I just roamed around Brussels again. I got to bed very late, so getting up on Tuesday was not so much fun – it’s hard adjusting to a schedule where I get up at 6:30 and go to bed at 11, when there’s still light out. But the fact that I almost fell asleep several times while reading articles today suggests that I just need to get with the program and to bed early.

I was finally able to start reading up on my project on Tuesday, and spent it getting trained, and trained some more. And I get lots more training next week. Wednesday, I got a tour of the pilot plant, where I’ll be spending lots of quality time. It smells wonderfully of detergent, although the signs everywhere are in Dutch. Good thing red buttons are universal. Wednesday, I also received my desks #2 and #3 – when I got in to work in the morning, my desk #1 was gone and my things out in the hallway. The whole department is being moved, and I’m getting a new office next week, but I guess someone forgot that in order to move things, you need a vacant space to move them to, so no one realized I would get booted out of my desk. Thankfully one of the other researchers found me a new (and better) office and let me use her desk while my things were begin relocated from the hallway. As they say, good times…

Work is otherwise going well, which is about all I can say about it. I’ll be starting to work in the pilot plant next week, so I’ll be able to get my hands dirty, which makes me very excited. I also have a place to live next year at Stanford. I was getting a little nervous, since they hadn’t responded with my housing assignment, but now everything is settled. And I even got my first choice housing!

P&G
***The last entry was supposed to have been posted yesterday, but because of jetlag I only got to it today...***

Today was out first day at Procter and Gamble - there were six other interns starting today (five in R&D, one in Engineering), and we're all from different countries: Sweden, Greece, Tajikistan, Turkey, and the Czech Republic. All told, P&G has people from 55 different countries working there, which I think is pretty dang spiffy.

Anyway, today was the day of signing forms, listening to presentations about safety, and P&G culture, and lots of other eminently useful, but somewhat boring topics. We did, however, get a free lunch out of the deal, and a box full of P&G goodies which are also eminently useful, and not at all boring. Good thing I only brought trial versions of shampoo, soap, toothpaste, etc. - turns out that P&G has company store on campus, where everything is 50% off for the employees. I will take reasonable requests for souvenirs.. ;) (For those not in the know, P&G makes everything from Tide to Swiffer to Oil of Olay to Pantene to anything Braun or Gillette.)

The only thing marring the morning was the fact that the taxi sent to ferry us to work this morning was an hour and half late, so we missed some of the early presentations and perhaps more importantly, the free breakfast. But we made up for it at lunch. ;) (Their corporate cafeteria is better than even Olin's.)

After lunch, I met with my supervisor and got introduced to the project I'll be working on. I can't actually say what it is, save that I'm doing process development for a brand new product. It's a brand new area for P&G and for the group I'm in, so no one really knows how to make the product, which means I'll be doing some real development work. My boss sounds really cool, and understands that I'm not so good on organic chemistry, so I've got a couple of chemists I'm also working with. From what it sounds like, I'll be doing a lot of lab work, which makes me happy. And the entire building I'm working in smells like laundry detergent, so what's not to love? I'm sure the early optimism will fade, but at least life won't be boring.

Monday is a holiday, so I get a three-day weekend right off the bat. Tomorrow I have to register as a resident of the commune the hotel is in, so I'll get a lot of reading done at the offices. Then I get to do two more medical tests (I'm starting to understand why they're so health-conscious here - there is a LOT of chemical development going on), and get my office (I mean desk...) and computer. Yippee!

PS: I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it warms up for the weekend - the last few days have been cold and rainy and miserable to be outside in.

Brussels
Wheee! Turns out I seriously underestimated the extent to which French and Dutch are spoken here, and seriously overestimated the amount of things written in English and the similarity of Dutch to German, so for the first time in a long while I find myself in a country where I totally don’t understand the main languages being spoken. So it will be an interesting summer – we’ll see how much useful French I can/need to pick up. The good news is, everything official is strictly bilingual, so if I can’t decipher something in the French, I can look at the Dutch and sort of make out what it says. Still, I am definitely going to seek out a bookstore soon and see what I can scare up in terms of French for Beginners books.

My first impressions of Brussels, as stem from the cab ride back from the airport, is that is feels like an awfully small city, considering its general importance. Granted, I’m biased, because the last city I spent lots of time in, Vienna, was a former imperial seat, so that it felt like a true big city, despite its paltry 1.2 million inhabitants. The other thing that really struck me is the level of EU propaganda around – Brussels is the administrative seat of the EU (the Parliament, Commission, and other bodies are all located here), and there is a lot of construction going on in the center of the city to prove that fact. However, the propaganda seems to me to be somewhat defensive, as though the EU had to beat people over the head with its accomplishments and powers in order to get them to notice and care. Which I suppose is actually true. Sort of reminds me of the propaganda Olin used to put out (and still does, to some extent): “You don’t know anything about us, but we’re better than everyone else…”

Our hotel digs are quite nice – I’m sharing with another intern from Turkey who studies at Wash U. We get a bedroom, living room, and a small, fully equipped kitchen with miniature versions of everything you would have in a real kitchen (stove, dishwasher (!), microwave/broiler combo (!), and toaster). Well, the toaster is regular-sized, since a miniature toaster that only fits crackers defeats the point. But the true marvel is the dishwasher, which fits probably two plates and two mugs, and would be more at home in a child’s play house. We haven’t tried it out, so I don’t know how well it works, but its simple existence makes me smile.

In the words of Mark Somerville (who had a great commencement speech, by the way), I'm a little glad and a little sad to leave Olin. I will miss everyone terribly - I apologize for not saying goodbye to everyone in person, but I lost it at the end and it was better to just leave. I'm excited to see what the next classes will make of Olin now that we're not there to say "You can't do that!"; I am, however, equally worried for the same reason. But I trust that everything will be fine.

California is beautiful, sunny and warm without being too hot, and it's wonderful to just sit. Not even read, just sit and be. I haven't done much of that recently, and I miss it. That's not true, I am actually waiting in between processing the vast mountain of laundry I brought home. And realizing that I screwed up and packed some of the clothes I need for Belgium into the boxes that will arrive next week. Oh well...I'll deal.

Paralyzing fear and being special
So we had our first meeting of the semester with our SCOPE advisor, which went both badly and and well - well, in that Dave gave us an honest, candid assessment of what we, and the SCOPE program in general, had accomplished last semester, and badly, in that Dave gave us an honest, candid assessment of what we, and the SCOPE program in general, had accomplished last semester.

That got me thinking, and they weren't very pleasant thoughts. Before I start though, I'll make a caveat: Olin has changed so much since the days of yore, and each class has had such a different makeup and experience, that my thoughts can necessarily apply only to my class, and perhaps only to myself. Anyway.

Even since we came to Olin, we've been told we're special, that we're the best of the best, that we're brilliant, and risk taking, and entrepreneurial, and renaissance engineers, and lots of other nice things that make us all feel really good inside. And then classes hit, and all of a sudden, we're failing, and not doing well, and have no time for anything besides classes. To counteract that, Olin sets up a world in which we're still special, and still smart, and failing doesn't matter, even though inside we know that we're still failing at lots of things. Add to the mix the fact that everywhere Olin trumpets the fact that we're engineers who can read and write and present and work on teams, and it's no surprise that the thing that we value most about ourselves is not the fact that we can design and build stuff (because we've failed at that so many times over), but the fact that we can work on teams and write reports and present pretty presentations. The fantasy world where our Olin specialness outweighs the fact that we haven't ever actually had a project succeed prevents us from doing anything about it, because according to this worldview, there is nothing the matter. Then along comes SCOPE, and all of a sudden, we're not special anymore, and there are no more excuses. The project sponsor doesn't care about all the extenuating circumstances that we use to rationalize our Olin specialness - they just want results. So what do we fall back on, what is the one thing we know for sure that we can do well? Write reports and make pretty presentations.

At the end of the day though, reports and presentations don't get the job done, and we actually have to do engineering. But because every project we've ever worked on has failed, it's reasonable to expect that this one will fail too. But the trick here is, this project can't fail, because unlike all the other projects we've ever done, this project has consequences for others - for the next class, in that none of the sponsors will ever come back if we fail; and for Olin, in that we've made SCOPE such a centerpiece that if SCOPE fails, Olin has failed too. So what do we do? We cover our butts. We make as few decisions as humanly possible, because we might be wrong, and those decisions that do get made, get made only after an incredibly exhaustive search of possibilities to make sure that if something doesn't work, no-one can ever accuse us of not having done due diligence.

Besides time, there's also the money issue: paper and electricity is cheap - it costs us practically nothing to surf the web for endless hours doing research, but it costs lots of money to buy something, test it, and realize it's not the right thing. Couple to that our fear of breaking something or burning something out because we don't know what we're doing, and it's no wonder that few SCOPE teams built and tested anything last year. As Dave rightly points out, Olin students have racked up five-figure costs in just burned out motors and sensors and controllers alone. Given how little money we have, that statistic is not likely to encourage anyone to just turn something on and play with it to find out how it works. And so we're all frozen: we're frozen because we're scared that we don't have enough information, knowledge, and experience to make technical decisions, because the wrong decision will spell disaster for the project, SCOPE, and Olin.

And now we're graduating, and it's scary, because we really won't be special anymore, because there will be no one to tell us that failure is okay, and because a lot of us feel like we're liberal arts majors masquerading as engineers while Olin expects us to be the best engineers on the planet Earth. Worst of all, I don't know how to fix it.

World, I'm sorry,
but given that there's precious little in my life to gloat about right now, I have to get my kicks when I can.

The feedback (so far) on my AHS paper:

I almost finished it yesterday, and I expect to be done on Friday. It was a surprise to see it written in German. I take it you are a native speaker, but rusty. The paper seems sound to me, but I am making a good many grammatical corrections. In any case I like it, and you'll have it back soon.

I have attained the lofty status of a rusty native speaker of German - woot woot!

Okay, enough levity. I need to do my Self-Taught.

Minty fresh update
I'm going to build a crop-spraying robot for the next few months! Yipee! And I'm project coordinator for my team - more death, doom and destruction on my plate. Miks put it best: I will be OWNED, but in a happy way. The project is cool, my team rocks, and I'm honestly excited about the company we're working for (Vision Agribotics). Plus Dave Barrett is our advisor, so what could go wrong? (Fate, don't answer that one...)

Best weekend of the year
I love Labor Day weekend... Very little work, lots of nice weather, awesome people I haven't seen for three months and the time to actually relax and talk to them. Wonderful...and so short...

I finished the draft of my AHS Capstone proposal last night (or this morning ;)...) and realized that I might be in over my head. The good news is that between Wellesley, Brandeis, and good ol' Haahvaahd (is there any book published that they DON'T have?), I can get my mitts on pretty much every book ever written about Leo Perutz. Trouble is, there are only five. At least I can argue that one reason for writing about Perutz is that he's been neglected and forgotten by contemporary scholars. And it makes my literature search easy. On the other hand, I have that many fewer perspectives from which to be inspired (read: copy verbatim ;)) I'm definitely putting in my 12 hours on this every week.

In other news, I turned in my SCOPE survey so the die are cast, as it were. Now I'm going to pray to the gods of engineering and teamwork (read: Dave Barrett and the rest of the SCOPE advisors) that I get a good team+project. Then I'm going to pray long and hard that we can actually pull this thing off w/o dying and/or turning out crappy work. We shall see.

My two real classes, Transport Phenomena and Partial Differential Equations (Zuzko, ani se neptej co jsou zac...) look pretty interesting and reasonable (although that's what I said about Thermo as well, and we all know how that turned out...). Although the fact that I haven't taken a math class in a year and linear algebra in two years, and hence my recall approaches zero, will make life interesting in that painful sort of way.

But my suite is absoultely palatial, my suitemates kick ass, and the sun is shining, so life is good!

I'm done!
And it's my birthday, he he he.

I turned in my paper on Wed, gave my presentation yesterday and took my leave of my prof and grad student. Today I just laze about and pack. And gloat about the fact that I go to the best damn college I know. After seeing the presentations of the other students, I can with all confidence say that OLIN WORKS. We crank out the most consistently awesome kids - other places have isolated geniuses, but the average Olin kid is better than the average kid somewhere else. Not because we know more, but because we are, to paraphrase my prof, energetic, motivated, and willing to work hard. My head is getting so big I can barely pass through the door.

I am going to apply to Cornell for grad school - there's too much interesting work going on here not to. Weather be damned. Speaking of which, I'm going home! Yipee!

I'm afraid I've got nothing more profound to say right now.

All work and no play
make for one productive summer research student. Too bad I'm not one of them. I did spend all weekend at work (and I do mean all weekend...), although I got precious little work done. Well, that's not true - I did precious little work, because I was mostly waiting for layers of resin to dry before pouring on more. Reason is, according to ASTM standards, polymer composites have to condition (ie: absorb atmospheric moisture) for five days after being cured, before they can be tested. That means in order to have my PowerPoint done by next Monday, I have to test them this weekend at the latest, thus leading me to spend all last weekend making them. It really wasn't too bad - everyone from the lab showed up to work at some point or another, so it was quite the party. Or as much of a party as can be had in a cramped lab/office that smells a bit like fermenting soybeans. I got a lot of reading done. I've also looked at a lot of grad schools and fellowships to pay for said grad schools. Good news is, all the engineering/mat sci programs I've seen so far are fully funded, so extra fellowhips are just icing on the cake (although, as Brian told me, coming with your own funding means grad schools love you, since they don't pay a dime for having you come). Cornell pays its grad students about $20,000-22,000 per year (I asked), which, considering monthly rent is something like $300-400 in Ithaca, is pretty nice. I expect (hope) other places aren't much different.

Speaking of Cornell, they're doing a damm fine job of making me want to come for grad school - almost all of the research talks we've had have been totally fascinating and cool, and something I'd like to work on. The last one was especially interesting - check out this prof. He's done work in 3-D printing of living, breathing cartilage - a prototype of custom-made replacement organs. Really neat work.

Ithaca is even more gorgeous
To recap the previous week: I worked, worked some more, and worked again. We're down to the last two productive weeks (since the last week we're here is filled with presentations/presentation practice), so I have a lot of work to do to finish my project. But we have results! And they're good!

Part of the reason for working so much last week was the fact that we had a mandatory all-day trip to Corning (the town) on Friday. We toured a little bit of Corning's (the company) R&D facilities, then went to see the Corning Glass Museum (CMOG). The tour wasn't that exciting, largely, I suspect, because they couldn't show us much due to safety and/or privacy concerns. CMOG was really cool, though. It's a museum devoted entirely to glass, with both artistic and scientific exhibits. They just happened to have three exhibitions of Czech glass while we were there (contemporary sculpture, Communist-era design, and 19th and early 20th century design) that were all really interesting. I'm a sucker for pretty glass, so this was me in hog heaven. Especially amusing to me is that some of the pieces on display from the early part of the 20th century are things that my grandparents own. We only had two hours in the museum, so I didn't really see much else (I almost entirely missed out on the science exhibits). I'd really like to go back, but w/o a car this is problematic.

On Saturday I (finally) went to see Taughannock Falls - they're some 40 feet taller than Niagara, and the gorge around them is quite beautiful, but owing to the fact that it's high summer and it hasn't rained in a while, the waterfall was a shadow of its former self. Still, it was nice to see it and hike around a little bit.

\begin{ShamelessPropaganda}
I've finally started proofreading e-texts for Project Gutenberg again, which is why I haven't gotten lots of sleep the past couple nights. Try it - Distributed Proofreaders is a great way to help out. They have books in English and a little bit of others; if your taste runs to more exotic languages, say Spanish, Czech, or German, try Distributed Proofreaders Europe. It's a great way to read some interesting forgotten literature, as well as getting the warm fuzzies from helping to save a piece of history.
\end{ShamelessPropaganda}

Cheers!

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