The Injury Report [Summer Edition]

Don’t worry, this is a short one.

Over the summer, I biked dozens of miles, went bouldering ten or so times, and hiked at three state parks, among other acts of physical prowess. My most grievous injury was walking backwards into my roommate’s desk while folding laundry. My second most painful injury was banging my shin against our poorly-placed dishwasher while putting dishes away. Obviously I should stick to safe things like bushwhacking, leaping over streams, and rock climbing.

As an aside, I’m mildly shocked that my roommate and I didn’t end up with poison ivy sometime over the summer, considering the amount of hiking we did and the number of poison ivy minefields we accidentally walked straight through.

Apples, Chowder, and Chili

What do these three foods have in common? They can all be found on the Ithaca Commons at various times of the year – there's Applefest in the fall, the Chowder Cook-off before winter break, and the Chili Cook-off in February. And yes, I went to all three this year, because senior year.

I went to Applefest with my roommate and an honorary apartment member. We got there a couple hours after it opened for the day so it was already crazy crowded. The line for apple cider donuts was slightly insane, so we skipped it. Besides, I’ve had fresh apple cider donuts made at a cider mill, and while I wouldn’t turn down a donut if offered, I wasn’t about to stand in line for an hour for one. Besides, there was so much other food.

Applefest on the Commons (and adjoining roads)

I got some peanut butter fudge and an apple bread but also got to taste some apple dumpling and apple crisp that my friends bought. And now I want more apple baked goods.

A couple months later, I returned to the Commons for the Ithaca Ice Festival and Chowder Cook-off. This was mere days before my grad school applications were due but I thought I would be okay timewise since I had already written my personal statement and started filling out the other sections with my name, current address, home address, cell phone number, home phone number, recent lucky numbers from fortune cookies, and other things like that. I was partly wrong*, but I’m more glad to have gone to the Ice Festival than I would have been to finish my applications a couple hours earlier.

I went with a former roommate to see the ice sculptures and eat chowder. Of course, on the one winter day it needed to be cold, it was in the forties and sunny. It made all the ice sculptures look very shiny though. At least before they melted. We ended up trying clam chowder, vegetarian chowder, seafood chowder, jambalaya, corn chowder, and haddock and bacon chowder. The only chowder that I was unsatisfied with was the “New England” clam chowder. I’m from New England; don’t mess with my clam chowder. Though it could have been worse. It could have been Manhattan clam chowder.

Sea horse ice sculpture on the Commons

After winter break, I made my most recent trip to the Commons for the Chili Cook-off, this time accompanied by my current roommate, a former roommate, and a former suitemate, among others. Again, we tried a variety of the foods being offered. There was sweet chili, spicy chili, tomato-y chili, chili with lots of vegetables, and meat chili. And then there were chili calzones and chocolate chili. And hard cider.

I guess that brings it full circle – back to apples. I’m definitely glad I went to all the food events on the Commons this past school year. That’s one piece of advice I would give people – check out local events whenever you can. Sometimes you don’t have to go far or spend much money to have a whole lot of fun. And eat some good food.

*I finished all my applications on time, and didn’t feel seriously rushed for any of them, but I ended up submitting my last application at 9 pm on the day it was due.

Coming Home Weekend

Time to catch up fall semester. After an epic summer in Ithaca, I started classes and was immediately sucked into the spinning vortex of terror ChemE. I did make a point to go to the homecoming football game, like I have for the past couple of years.

It did not rain, and it was not negative ten degrees without wind chill, so people actually showed up. I stayed until halftime to see the marching band show, then had to leave to go grocery shopping. Such is my exciting life. The marching band played a show featuring music by The Who and at one point spelled out “WHO” on the field, but it took me a good minute to figure out what they were spelling because the percussion behind them made the H look like an A.

People!  At a football game!

When I left Cornell was tied with Bucknell 7-7 in a display of offensive excellence and output*. The game, however, ended 19-14 in favor of Bucknell due to a late touchdown. The football team’s season ended 1-9, with the sole win coming in a 3-0 home game against Columbia. Yes, 3-0.

Later that weekend, my parents visited and after church and lunch (Saigon Kitchen, would recommend), we went hiking at Treman (again). Then we went to Wegmans for dinner and I went back to the hotel to work on practice GRE tests. Again, I know I have an extremely exciting life.

Gorge Trail at Treman

The next day, Monday, was GRE day. If I had actually planned well, instead of putting it off all summer, I would either have taken the GRE at the beginning of the summer when I was home or at the end of the summer when my roommate with a car kind of occasionally had time to drive me. I had been looking into bus options but in the end, since I likely wasn’t going home for fall break, my parents came to visit instead – and to drive me to Binghamton to take the GRE.

After signing in, which included copying a lengthy (okay, not really) passage in cursive, I was put through another elaborate procedure in which I was photographed, searched, given pencils and scratch paper, and finally walked to a computer in a room with surveillance cameras above every terminal. Four and a half hours later, I walked away from my computer in the room with surveillance cameras above every terminal, returned my pencils, collected my belongings that had been exiled to locked storage in the waiting room, and went outside to taste freedom fresh air.

I got my results a couple weeks later, and I’m happy with them, especially considering the amount of studying I did. I got one GRE practice book and went through the chapters and practice problems over the summer/a couple weeks before the test. The week before the test, I worked through two or three full length tests, though not all at once. That turned out to be enough for me, even with the GRE being my first real multiple choice/standardized test since high school.

With the GRE over, I could turn to the next part of the grad school application process – the applications themselves. Or I could wait until the week before the applications were due to really get working on them. You know, good life choices.

*To be fair, I guess the Cornell defense had a good game, according to the game report.

#SummerInIthaca2015

It was the hottest of times, it was the most humid of times. It was the season of sunshine, it was the season of thunderstorms, it was the epoch of mosquito bites, it was the epoch of muddy hiking boots, we had work every weekday, we had no problem sets on weekends – in short, it was summer. Summer in Ithaca to be precise, and all of us in the apartment were doing research or working, not taking classes, so our nights and weekends were free for all the shenanigans and misadventures we could devise. And devise them we did.

I’ve written about most of the things we did, but I also wanted to compile a chronological list as well as record some of our other accomplishments.

6/13 – Sat. – Buttermilk Falls State Park
6/20 – Sat. – Taughannock Falls State Park [same link as above]
6/24 – Wed. – Princess Ida (Schwartz Center)
6/26 – Fri. – Rockwood Ferry concert (arts quad)
6/27 – Sat. – Museum of the Earth
6/28 – Sun. – Lick Brook Falls
6/30 – Tues. – violin/piano concert (Schwartz)
7/1 – Wed. – 4th 1st of July fireworks (slope)
7/3 – Fri. – Cascadilla Gorge Trail
7/9 – Fri. – alumni hockey game (Lynah Rink)
7/10 – Sat. – Racker Center rivals (hockey) (Lynah) [same link as above]
7/16 – Thurs. – A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Plantations)
7/18 – Sat. – Cayuga Trail/chimes concert
7/21 – Tues. – Klez Project (Schwartz) [same link as 6/30]
7/24 – Fri. – Mutron Warriors concert (arts quad) [same link as 6/30]
7/25 – Sat. – Treman State Park
8/1 – Six Mile Creek/The Small Kings concert (Taughannock)
8/15 – Lab of Ornithology
8/19 – blueberry picking (Grisamore Farms)
8/24 – Buttermilk Falls State Park

Additionally, I read the following:
The Naked Mountaineer (Steve Sieberson)
Two for the Summit (Geoffrey Norman)
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (John Boyne)
Reservation Blues (Sherman Alexie)
Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert)
Migraine (Oliver Sacks)
The Astronaut Wives Club (Lily Koppel)
Carrying the Fire (Michael Collins)
If I Fall, If I Die (Michael Christie)
Speak (Laurie Halse Anderson)
Train Dreams (Denis Johnson)
A Walk Across America (Peter Jenkins)
The Wayward Bus, Burning Bright, Sweet Thursday, The Winter of our Discontent, and Travels With Charley (John Steinbeck)

Watched the following:
28 episodes of The Walking Dead (Seasons 3 and 4 minus a few episodes)
9 episodes of The Astronaut Wives Club (Season 1, minus the first episode)
Season 3 of Sherlock (still can’t decide if my favorite scene is Sherlock getting shoved to the ground/head-butted/punched in the face all in the same night or the pub crawl)
Mean Girls

Tried a couple new recipes for peanut butter chocolate oatmeal muffins and white chocolate brownies

Went rock climbing half a dozen times

And collectively, in the apartment, grew mold on the following:
potatoes, peaches, tomato sauce, onions, oatmeal muffins, raspberries, bread, broccoli, and clementines

Stuff I Did This Summer

Or: The Effect of Spherical Confinement on a Monodisperse Colloidal Suspension using Brownian Dynamics Simulation

Or: Everything I Never Wanted to Learn About Diffusion

After it was all said and done, I was left with some graphs, several gigabytes of free software on my computer, and approximately ten million data points. I’m actually not even exaggerating. The program I worked with kept track of the positions of hundreds to thousands of particles for several hundred time steps, and that’s a lot of data.

How I ended up doing research is yet another of my “Well, it’s kind of a funny story” stories. I met with one of my professors to talk about working on the project I had worked on the past summer. She said, sure, I could work on it, but how about research? It would involve coding in Fortran. I hadn’t programmed anything since my freshman year Intro to MATLAB class and told the professor so. No problem, she said, you’ll be fine.

Okay, then. After talking to the grad student I’d be working with, I decided to do research over the summer, because why not? And that’s how I ended up reading research papers about exciting topics such as long-time self-diffusion and modeling hydrodynamic interactions while coding in Fortran to confine imaginary spherical particles in a larger imaginary spherical cavity. When I told my dad I was working in Fortran, he asked if people were still coding things in Fortran. Apparently so.

My job over the summer was to modify existing Brownian dynamics code to simulate particles enclosed in a sphere. By tracking their positions and collisions, you can do magic math to determine properties of the fluid. I also got to edit Python code (another language I had never seen before in my life), and do post-processing on my millions of data points.

All of this mostly took place in Olin, making it two consecutive years of not being out of Olin for longer than two weeks, discounting winter break. I was jammed into a corner of the group office with two grad students, but I had my own desk and I could see out of a window, which instantly elevated the space over the senior/undergrad lounges. Actually, lounge is a bit of a misnomer, because there’s very little lounging done in the lounge. A lot of last-minute-deadline-meeting, procrastinating, complaining, some sleeping and eating, but not much on the relaxation front. Which makes it the natural place for many of the seniors to congregate during their final year. #FunInTheSunDingyGreyBasement #ChemELife

Anyway, in the end, when summer was over, I learned some stuff about colloids and computational microrheology. I had fun, because I’m a nerd like that.