some prefrosh ramblings

<p>Now that I've turned in my chem set and gotten some sleep, I'll ramble a bit on how the first two weeks at Tech have been (for your edification, and my amusement). :)</p>

<p>(Title: According to Caltech I am still officially a prefrosh until tomorrow, when I get sorted into a House.)</p>

<p>First day -- was fun. I got put in a single that looked like it had never been used (but that probably wasn't true). It had all the necessary amenities -- a thermostat, a sink, a nice closet, a desk with a bed on top, etc. The Caltech Housing Office was really nice and gave us a bag full of toothpaste and soap and stuff like that.</p>

<p>Around 4:00 we went to convocation, where some guy went up and talked about his chemistry research, and some other guy talked about Richard Feynman and Linus Pauling and all the brilliant geniuses who were famous for being great teachers. It was the oddest welcoming-speech I'd ever been to. Then we left and went to the President's garden for dinner. Yes, the President did let 250 freshmen into his house for dinner, and he did give us free Haagen-Daaz ice cream. We got put into groups for frosh camp. (Mine was pretty awkward, everyone kinda just sat around and watched the UCC guy talk.)</p>

<p>Frosh camp -- The next day, they stuck us on a bus and took us to a Marriott hotel on the beach. Things we did:</p>

<p>(1) Boat races! Each team was asked to build a boat that would travel 10 feet in the pool without drowning any of its passengers. Some people took this far too seriously. My friends and I gave up halfway and went to the beach (but our team did end up coming in second, which was really surprising/luck-dependent).</p>

<p>(2) S'mores on the beach! They were sticky, and really <em>really</em> sweet. Apparently the marshmallows were homemade.</p>

<p>(3) Boring lectures! One of the "lectures" we had to attend (Study Habits At Caltech And You) was actually a scavenger-hunt thing where we had to build towers out of balloons, bob for apples, and jump in the pool with our clothes on. I still don't know what it had to do with study habits. Another was a skit on why it's a bad idea to get drunk or depressed without telling your RA. It was rather amusing, albeit depressing. And then we had the Honor Code lecture, which really was a boring lecture.</p>

<p>(4) Talent show! Apparently people at Caltech can juggle while solving Rubik's cubes. And whistle real well. This one group wrote a parody of that skit we had to watch. We even had a math professor come up and play some exotic instrument that looked like a huge-ass flute.</p>

<p>And of course, I had a lot of fun and met a lot of people (though eventually I started only hanging out with two of them -- asking "what's your name, where're you from" 2x10^6 times gets exhausting).</p>

<p>Classes: Most were good. Ma 1a, the calculus class, hasn't taught us any calculus at all so far. The first thing the guy did was tell us the real numbers satisfied the field axioms, and then he showed us how to do induction and delta-epsilons, and then he told us what a least upper bound was. So a lot of my friends thought Ma 1a was absolutely soul-crushing. (I've seen the stuff before, so it kinda just tickled.) The lecturer is actually really engaging if you can understand him. I think it's my favorite class.</p>

<p>Ph 1a was disappointing. See, when I heard it was taught by David Goodstein, the guy who made the Mechanical Universe videos, I thought it'd be absolutely amazing. But apparently he's gone a bit senile, and the class is nowhere near as amazing as his videos...in fact, the high points of the class are when he shows us clips from them. Oh, and so far he hasn't taught us much real physics, just how to differentiate things like x^n. I guess he just assumes we don't have much background. He's a good lecturer, though. And he explains things well. It was just disappointing, that's all.</p>

<p>Ch 1a was pretty cool. Our teacher has a great sense of humor and likes to stick pictures of where he's traveled in his presentations. So far he's lectured on the Bohr model of the atom, and he gave us this problem set on "what we should've learned in high school." I ended up staying up until 4 am to finish said problem set. It became a lot easier once I'd read the suggested reading, and I could do practically all of it by myself. Though there was this one badly written problem that nobody could do until our TAs covered it at recitation. I think I would've finished the set earlier had I done chem before math instead of vice versa.</p>

<p>Rotation -- We visited most of the houses for lunch and dinner. I still don't know which one I like the best. They were all kind of the same; each contained normal, friendly people, but each had its own traditions and gimmicks to attract us into the House. Like one house has people sit on a block of ice and slide down a metal ramp (which I highly doubt they do after rotation week). All houses prepared skits and propaganda leaflets for us, and most prepared videos.</p>

<p>Dinners were interesting. Most houses seem to like dumping water on people, throwing stuff, and pounding on the tables (as opposed to real applause). Food is served kind of like in Chinese restaurants, where it's carried out on a central plate and you put whatever you want on your own plate. (Caution: none of the central plates came with serving spoons.) The food is actually really good -- they even have icecream machines!</p>

<p>Hope that was helpful.
Additional information upon request :)</p>

<p>I think the reason "study habits..." is named as such is to keep the fun a surprise :P</p>

<p>I hope you enjoyed / are enjoying rotation. It's almost over!</p>