<p>Hahahaha, lizzardfire, did you see this thread from yesterday?</p>
<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=177179%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=177179</a>. Start at post #14.</p>
<p>On Thursday, I met with my SURF mentor for the upcoming summer -- the world's top expert on network economics. We talked about an interesting 2003 paper that I found in a slightly different field from ours... he suggested how to apply the result in an unexpected way. To do this, we need to understand how perturbing a real symmetric matrix affects the spectrum.</p>
<p>So I emailed one of the world's top experts on mathematical physics, Barry Simon, about where to start reading to understand eigenvalue perturbations. He emailed back within a few hours and told me to come to his office if I had questions after reading the book chapter he recommended. I told my mentor what I would start working on and he emailed back within a few hours. I'll have a meeting this week to discuss the same issue with Rick Wilson, one of the greatest living experts in combinatorics.</p>
<p>This all sounds so mundane to me, and maybe it is. But I just realized that within a span of a few hours, I can get in touch with and have serious scientific conversations with the absolute top talent in pretty much any scientific field. As an insignificant undergraduate.</p>
<p>Just one thing to say:</p>
<p>Wow.</p>
<p>The Econ professor who teaches a course I'm taking is a young guy with shaggy light hair, a congenital incapacity to tuck in his shirt, and a perpetual half-scowl which turns to hysterical laughter every three minutes. My first remark on hearing him lecture was, "I've never had a professor actually lecture while stoned before". He seems to talk so slowly, in such a laid-back way, that it's impossible to be intimidated and harder not to understand what he's saying. He plays dumb so you can play smart and get this stuff. It's amazing.</p>
<p>Anyway, it's easier to relate to him than to the older, scarier tenured faculty (who aren't old or scary at all). He invites us to seminars. I went a few weeks ago. The talk (by a distinguished older prof from another university) was about empirical tests of scientific theories. Suppose that if I have some theory to make predictions about the world, and you have some randomized test to determine whether my theory is good. It turns out that if I know your test, I can rig my predictions in advance so that your test will never detect that I am a charlatan, even if I know nothing at all about the world. (For example, I can trick you into thinking I can make reliable forecasts about the probability of rain without knowing the first thing about meteorology.) It was a fascinating, very knotty talk. </p>
<p>Afterward, my Ec prof told me that I should come to the lounge for snacks following the seminar. "Have whatever you want -- beer's over there, cheese, crackers." We sat for a while and chatted, and he asked me jokingly why I wasn't having a beer.</p>
<p>"Did you think I was 21?" I asked.
"How old are you?" he wondered.
"20."
"Man! I thought you were 18!"</p>
<p>(Note to any absolutely crazy parents: professors won't pressure your 18 year-old children to drink. This guy knew me and actually thought I was a senior. Doesn't make the quote any less funny.)</p>
<p>I love this place for how laid back and egalitarian it is -- how you can enter a cozy little piece of the academic community without really noticing. And how your professors will offer you a beer.</p>
<p>ben, is your interaction with professors fairly typical among caltech students or are you more of a special case?</p>
<p>I've never had a professor offer me a beer! I must not know the right ones...</p>
<p>yms, I can whisper to you who he is later.</p>
<p>There will be a post later on whether I am a special case.</p>
<p>so you've read about all my wonderful experiences and you wonder whether i am typical or whether this is highly unrepresentative advertising.</p>
<p>i am somewhat atypical in what i actually choose to get out of Caltech, but not atypical in the sense that the things i do aren't available to others. they are -- all you have to do is ask.</p>
<p>any professor will gladly chat with you about science and many will offer you a research project. you are welcome at any seminar -- the faculty love to see undergraduates who are trying to get involved in the scientific community early on. it is easy to be invited to dinners with professors and visiting speakers if you just watch your email inbox.</p>
<p>i am disappointed that many of the students we admit are so bashful when it comes to taking advantage of the best undergraduate academic experience in the country. maybe they're afraid that they'll annoy the professor (but really, with a 3:1 ratio, the probability that a prof is overwhelmed by students is zero).</p>
<p>more likely, most people are afraid that they'll seem too stupid or too ignorant to approach these luminaries. you have to get over this; you just do. i know what it feels like -- maybe you'll offer your idea or ask your question only to be laughed at or brushed off. maybe. who cares. the truth is that most of the time, when you think you don't understand something everyone else does, you are completely wrong about that, and everyone else is thinking the same wrong thing about you (equilibrium!). at some point, i said, whatever, i'll look dumb if that's what it takes. and then suddenly you realize the absence of this stupid fear (which leaves you not understanding for years) is exactly what differentiates excellent students from average ones. once you learn to ask your questions and push your ideas, doors open like magic.</p>
<p>so that's the only sense in which i am atypical -- i have this ten cent insight about how you have to get over shyness and fear of failure -- and then ask your questions and approach others with your ideas. if you learn to do this, then what i get out of Tech will seem like peanuts compared to what you'll get out of it.</p>
<p>Bravo.</p>
<p>Well, you can really get a lot out of many schools (even a community college), but Caltech offers more.</p>
<p>One day earlier in the semester, I was sitting near the physics building and trying to work out a problem which I'd been thinking about in the lab earlier on (if you're curious, relating the Moon's synodic and sidereal periods). An hour or two later I had the problem worked out and was so excited I brought my solution to my lab instructor.</p>
<p>Later on I searched on-line and found that the same equation I had found had been derived by Copernicus and that my own derivation was pretty complicated by comparison...</p>
<p>So, I've paid for my current research project with temporary embarassment. It was worth it.</p>
<p>As far as "fear of failure" is concerned, I generally just jump off the deep end immediately and postpone the fear till later.</p>
<p>what alleya said in another thread is true. one of the most beautiful experiences you can have as a student is to have an (incomplete) idea about how to solve a problem, bounce it off someone, hear them refine it, and keep going back and forth until you have the whole thing figured out.</p>
<p>more generally, collaboration is a slightly complicated issue. my personal feeling is that the whole "collaboration is KEY" deal they tell the frosh is overplayed. right from the get-go, many people do all their problem sets in big groups, and that's not the best way. people should think for a long time on their own and THEN talk about their ideas to others. that way you get the benefits of struggling against the material AND the benefits of collaboration. maybe we should instill the notion a little more firmly that collaborating is, in a small way, an admisison of defeat; you couldn't slay the beast alone.</p>
<p>on the flip side, the proudest students (who take the notion that collaborating is an admisison of defeat a little too seriously) would benefit hugely from working with others every now and then. it is a fairly magical thing when the collaboration is real -- not one person telling another the answer, but really figuring it out together. insisting on struggling through everything alone deprives you of learning this process, without which very little actual science in the real world gets done.</p>
<p>the last paragraph i know from personal experience. math is, in many ways, a solitary sport (like running) and i make myself work a lot before talking to classmates about the problems. but i'm glad i've relaxed about that a little recently, and have gotten to experience that magic. one virtue of caltech is that pretty much everyone will be unable to slay the beast alone sometime (but nobody will be unable all the time.)</p>
<p>I love this thread. Keep it going, Ben!</p>
<p>depressing discovery: i have a finite capacity for work. after thinking hard in lecture for an hour, i can't really do homework for a while. after doing one hard problem, it takes some time before i can do another. as a result, maybe about 10% of my time is utilized for actual productive thinking work. this is very depressing.</p>
<p>in my unproductive time, i mostly read the new york times, Slate, etc., play chess, talk to friends (usually about philosophy or math), and help high school students with the college application process ;-). but WAIT! these things are also WORK. (you can easily imagine people for whom reading the NYT, playing chess, or talking about philosophy would be quite hard and unpleasant work. if you want to find someone for whom helping people with college apps is work, go find a director of admissions).</p>
<p>discovery! the things i file away, psychologically, as rest, are actually work for other people. (the reverse is probably also true). there is nothing intrinsic or fundamental that makes some things rest and other things work.</p>
<p>what if you could trick yourself into thinking some "serious" things (not the frivolous things i do with my spare time) are rest? experiment!</p>
<p>so i got some forbidden math books (actually they are exciting because they are related to a question i am studying in my research). they are not for classes, and they compete with work in my classes. excellent!</p>
<p>so far, i have been quite successful in stealing away from my odious work to do this completely non-work-like reading, whereas actually to an alien from space (or a humanities major, which is really the same thing) my rest and my work are completely indistinguishable. </p>
<p>rapture! i have succeeded in pushing the figure above 10%.</p>
<p>i should say that i am mindful of the possible harms of this approach. by working so much on math or whatever, it is possible to burn out. (one of the sad but useful observations you will make at caltech is that some brilliant and incredibly successful people burn out -- lose the will to work -- by being too ambitious and not giving the mind enough rest.) in fact, i am often the one telling people to work a little less and to be kind to yourself a little more.</p>
<p>but really, this only begs the question. even playing video games (surely THAT is taking a break from work) is quite similar to doing your Math 1c homework in some absolute way. (what's not similar is plowing a field or something.) if you can really make deeply intellectual work your rest and relaxation, then you are at no risk of burnout.</p>
<p>we'll see how it goes. i like caltech because it's given my intellectual life enough dimensions that some of them can be filed as rest and others as work.</p>
<p>counterweight to last post. ("Ben Golub, do you just think about work and math ALL THE TIME? You are so boring! Gnarr, I'm not coming to Caltech, Ben Golub is boring.")</p>
<p>an interesting property of this place is that despite budget crunches every now and then, there is a shocking amount of cash slushing around to do cool stuff. the Moore-Hofstader fund (a gift of the cofounder of Intel) provides over $100,000 in disbursements per year (among fewer than 2000 students) to do cool expensive things. have a Jimmy Eat World concert on campus. buy a DDR machine for students to use 24/7. prank MIT. whatever.</p>
<p>there's other slush funds of this kind too. a recent announcement is the George Housner fund. if you can propose a research-related project or trip of any sort -- (try to synthesize a new chemical, go to Stanford or Tahiti for a conference, fly out to see a collaborator) -- you can write a proposal of a few pages and get money to do it. how much money? $100,000 a year is disbursed per year, in perpetuity. go claim your share.</p>
<p>though we struggle with the trivial sometimes, the emphasis here is still firmly on funding and supporting awesome things in every way possible, in a way that no other institution in the world does.</p>
<p>oh, by the way -- the student government and and the houses also have a lot of social money to throw big parties. as a consequence, this term there is a big party every weekend except for prefrosh (not allowed) and midterms (not smart). this is slightly atypical, but it's still nifty what caltech students will find time for when they're not doing ... well, see previous post.</p>
<p>Moore-Hufstedler fund! <a href="http://www.its.caltech.edu/%7Emhf/%5B/url%5D">http://www.its.caltech.edu/~mhf/</a>
If they can find a room for it somewhere, Caltech Medieval and Renaissance Society is going to apply for a grant to get a forge. Yay amateur blacksmithing!</p>
<p>That second dude has a funny name and I got it all wrong : )</p>
<p>That's not the only thing you got wrong about her :D</p>
<p>Edit: Forgot to mention the Don Shepard Fun Fund! Every term a little yellow paper appears in my mailbox. Here's what the Student Life office says:</p>
<hr>
<p>The Don Shepard Fund, sponsored by the Student Life Office, was established by the late Larry Shepard in memory of his son, Don, a former Caltech student. The Don Shepard Fund gives under-graduates the opportunity to do something fun that they might not otherwise be able to afford.</p>
<p>Each award is worth $25.00. It can be used for a nice dinner out, to see a play, hear the symphony...what ever you would like as long as it has some socially redeeming value. If youre not sure, ask us!</p>
<p>We will reimburse you up to $25.00 when you bring us the event receipt. Winners will have until the first Friday of the next term to bring in a receipt.</p>
<hr>
<p>Most people who remember to turn in their sheets win. I really enjoy the fact that this fund exists. I also love the fact that there's a bench on the Olive Walk that says "The 'Enjoy Life' Bench" on its nameplate.</p>
<p>Ha! I was gonna say it would be funny and/or awkward if the dude were female.</p>
<p>one of my econ professors, Preston McAfee, decided to figure out how airlines price tickets. (have you ever tried to buy airline tickets? then you know why this is an interesting question.)</p>
<p>he hired an undergrad to run a massive data collection effort. poke the American Airlines website thousands of times a day and track how ticket prices vary. nifty. (he has written a very</a> readable exposition of their joint research.)</p>
<p>caltech detected this poking and thought the undergrad was mounting a massive denial of service attack on american. so the lawyers temporarily shut off the undergrad's internet access. when she told them this was academic research, they went to talk to the professor.</p>
<p>at any other university (certainly any state school) the lawyers would have killed off the research pretty much immediately. it exposes the institute to "needless" liability and doesn't pay off pretty much at all in the short term. shut it off. open and shut.</p>
<p>caltech's general counsel (who is a REALLY good lawyer) came to mcafee and said essentially the following. "find me a plausible answer i can give if American comes to me asking what is going on." it took mcafee 24 hours, and a plausible answer was produced. whereupon the internet access was restored and the research continued.</p>
<p>there are very few places where even the lawyers will do everything they can to make research and cool discoveries happen and worry about the rest later. this is one of them.</p>
<p>Well, feel bad, because the Hufstedler bit is in memory of the Honorable Shirley Hufstedler :-P</p>
<p>I would usually not feel bad about something like this, but someone who dispenses piles of cash for me to have fun is certainly worth some respect :D</p>