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As usual, I fail to post much regarding my life, but I wouldn't want to bore anybody with details about work and class and such. Or at least I know I wouldn't want to read it. ;) Regardless, a few updates, categorized easily for anybody's procrastinating perusal. Once more, I bold keywords.
In lab news:
My rhomboid is still strained, and it is uncertain how soon I can return to distance discounting--we stopped temporal discounting when all the tamarins just simply aborted their trials--and start lifting heavy plexiglass. In some ways I wish they'd redesign the experiment, and on the other hand, I feel more hardcore for doing it. The outline for the grant application is due on Nov. 1, and that makes me feel like less of a goofball having fun running experiments on moody monkeys.
It was Marc's birthday yesterday! Happy Birthday Professor Hauser! Unfortunately he had to duck out and miss the delicious cake we had during the full lab meeting.
Hamlet died last week, of unknown causes, but Ophelia is a nasty little marmoset and looks very happy without her mate.
Yesterday, KR and I led a discussion about a 2004 Wilson & Daly paper, and I was uncomfortable with the insistence that we stay to the outline when very interesting discussions started flying about during her introduction. Of course it is necessary to go through the paper, but when good criticisms are being posed of the experiment's design--despite it being more or less clear that hardly anyone read the paper assigned--it's a good idea to foment that into an awesome thing that you use to segway back into your presentation when you think enough time has been spent. One thing that sometimes happens when I lead parts of debates and discussions in a formal or semi-formal setting--people look to me to give instructions on what to do, as if I were an authority figure. Were I poised for world domination I would use this to my full advantage, but otherwise I am merely suspicious that I fail to sink into the masses as well as I should, that it is difficult for me to become "one of them" even among students in a Harvard lab. When people were discussing what I presented and posing questions back and forth with each other and with me--I was surprised that I could answer and pose return questions, so I'm slightly relieved--they waited. Right. They waited to be called on. Like pupils in a grammar school classroom. They didn't sit and obediently raise their hands during the previous discussion, even though they were just as driven by the questions and results posed during mine. They just obediently waited to be plucked from the mires of silence and brought upon the podium of my selection. Absurd. Unsettling. Must improve on becoming "one of you guys" and less of an authority figure, thus disseminating waves of needed emotion into the masses prior to world takeover. All in all, I feel my discussion in lab could have been better. (And I still have the nasty habit of assuming people can implicate and connect unmentioned trivialities into something I'm saying when they really don't, only to be surprised when others assume these side notes and additional ramifications are things I haven't considered. Again, improvements, improvements.)
Salem
Planning to go down to Salem this Saturday, in honor of Halloween and simply to relax in the middle of my four week-long "midterm week." Why is it so long? Because certain classes -coughcoughorgocoughcough- like to have multiple midterms within two weeks of one another.
Extracurriculars
SWIFT layout is done, the next grind for the issue two months from now begins. Distro begins sometime soon i.e. by Saturday morning at the latest. I missed two WHRB 95.3 FM meetings, both for the general comp and classical, and have emailed Cambridge about my abysmal status, whatever it may be. Harvard Book Review has still not yet received the pre-publication hardback editions of the books the staff is supposed to review, so I am twiddling my thumbs waiting, although that is a mixed blessing since it means I have more time to do work.
Other classes
Science B-29 Midterm was exceptionally easy, no worries there. I must pick up on my organic chemistry, though. I was just in a funk the day of the alkane-cycloalkane-stereochemistry-reactions-alkene structure-alkene reaction&synthesis-carbocation-EZcistrans-Markovn;ikov-Hammond-oxymercuration-hydroboration-cyclopropanesyn-hydrogenation-hydroxylation-cleavage exam, which should have been an easy thing for me. On the other molecule, I am very good at drawing chair structures, carbocations, and flipping things. Hooray! Language and Culture is being one big cottoning-on-fest in which I hope I instinctively know it all in time for the midterm, and just wish Sapir had been more cogent and Saussure less simplistic. They showed us last year's midterm and it was pretty easy, and even had a phonological analysis question on it.
[Warning, elitist complaining ahead: I don't know why people assume that just because they have more busy coursework at other schools that their courses are harder than what we get at Harvard. Just because your class is named All-You-Could-Learn-In-The-Holy-Field-Of-Organic-Chemistry doesn't mean it's harder than my class of Principles of Organic Chemistry. There's a reason Harvard is an excellent school, and here's a hint: it's not just in the students. People may say "Oh, but I'm taking the third-year course in physics-chem-math-pickasubject at So-and-so university and that must mean we're so much more advanced than you lazy Harvard people who only take four classes your first year, have no direction about what they're going to do, and have a lower GPA than mine."
I have many issues with that statement. (1) People aren't lazy here. They may whine and gripe and stress about work they have but it's because they do have a lot of work, not just in their classes. Lots of people here have done some very amazing things, and continue to do them. We have hundred of extracurriculars and it's considered a big thing if a student does more than two or three, because they are all small-business or corporate-level investments of time, because many of them operate as companies who make a profit (Cambridge-wide-and-international-newspaper The Crimson, Boston-area-w/- millions-of-listeners-radio WHRB, internationally-distributed-find-it-on-your-Barnes-and-Noble-shelf-Clinton -and-Niall-Ferguson-were-writers-last-year Harvard International Review, professionally-produced-Broadway-directed Balm in Gilead of HRDC, just to give a few examples of black holes of time) and continue to do so with the dedication and hours put in by student members. Others are serious legal advising groups, tutoring and half-time teachers in the Boston and Cambridge community, and others do much more.
(2) Harvard is hardly a place without any direction. Some students have their whole lives planned out, and others are still deciding on a concentration their senior year (good luck to those!) but whatever the situation, there are about fifteen people you can talk to for help. At any one time, a student has at his disposal, his house masters, his three deans of different departments, the department head of any concentration(s) he chooses, his wing tutor, his assistant wing tutor, his sophomore/junior/senior tutor, his Allston-Burr Senior tutor, his resident tutors, any of his professors, his TFs, and the six or seven support groups around campus. These are all readily accessible, and for those more reluctant, they do plenty of advertising, beg for people to come to office hours, and will even have dinner with you. If you have a direction and goal, they'll help you, and if you don't, they'll show you the multitude of options present at Harvard.
(3) We are generally limited to four classes--it takes some persuading of your wing tutor to let you take five, let alone six--because these four classes are difficult, or at least time-consuming and thought-provoking, even down to the most easy throwaway class. The great thing about Harvard is that you are allowed to take graduate-level classes even your first semester, something which I and my peers do often. We don't divide first-years into some safe little group of courses and encourage them to take an easy time. Tutors encourage you to take stimulating, interesting classes, and to lead and gain real experience. Students take the most advanced courses they think they can handle, or at least ones they think they could be stimulated enough to not be suicidal. Freshman take Math 55, a class with problems some graduate students can't solve--so I hear--that is nevertheless still rated as a freshman class. We do not get an easy time with just four classes, make no mistake about that, and there may be an equally good chance that what is considered a first-year introductory class here may be a fifth-year class or a first-year equivalent at So-and-so-university, but there is a good reason to assume it is more likely to be the former. There is, however, a very high probability that a GPA at Harvard instantly gets bumped up one or two points when transferred to another university. The GPA here, regardless of inflation, is meant to gauge how much you learned from the class, and when my GPA is reduced, it is important to me because it means I wasn't able to apply it as well as I could have on tests and papers.
(4) Which is not to say that people at So-and-so-university don't have stress and hard work with their six or seven courses that they have to lottery to get in (in some universities) and choose before they even get to shop it and talk to the professor and see if the professor is asking questions relevant to those of the student's. I'm sure they have their own large loads of work like any college student does, and stress about it in similar ways. My point is that there is no basis for claiming your life is equally hard or much more difficult than ours just because you happen to take more classes of some certain year. Everyone got into a different college for a reason, and we have already split into our own systems of gauging difficulty, advancement, and excellence. Qualitative aspects need to be taken into account. We're in college, it's life, and you choose your own destiny. Don't slow it all down by deriding others on the basis of numerical values.]
Now that I'm done with that, something lighter.
I opened my curtains today, and the window, and took a deep breath of the cold crisp autumn air. I love days like this that sink into the marrow of your bones. I really feel as if I should settle in the Boston area, or at least the whereabouts of tri-state region. It is beautiful today. It is beautiful every day here, even when it's blisteringly cold, ridiculously rainy, or muggily hot. I love it here.
ETA: Cambridge says I'm fine, and that I just need to hand in the assignments that are due! hooray!
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