Meeting Goals

Today I happen to be very pleased with myself. I've always been a self-driven type of person, and it pleases me when I meet goals I set for myself (it's also good to meet goals other people set, such as schoolwork goals, but that's not as fun). Today I have met two goals at once - booyah!

You might recall I'm in a medical study that tracks how many calories I eat, and that monitoring has led to some weight loss. I've been continuing to try and make healthy choices, and I am pleased to say that I have lost (and kept off for a couple months now) exactly 20 lbs. Yea!

I feel much better, and my graph looks good too...

And, to make today even better, I have met my savings goal. I am fortunate to have parents who impressed upon me the importance of being prudent with my finances, so I have always tried to spend and save wisely. My goal for this semester was to gather $1k in savings, and as of this morning (with a few cents of interest putting me over the edge....) I have $1000.01 in my savings account. I know that seems like a small amount to anyone who has a real job, but it means a lot to me. My credit card is paid in full every month, I have a chunk of money invested, and I have started a (quite small so far) retirement account.

Onward and upward!

Generating Innovative Ideas

Last week one of the professors in the Mechanical Engineering department was awarded a prestigious award for Teaching Innovation.

I attended his lecture, at which he was given the award. His talk was on how he encourages innovation through his teaching techniques. It was really interesting, I thought. He talked about how it is always better to learn through doing than to learn through simply listening. Of course DOING takes more resources and more time than just LECTURING, so we are fortunate to be at a school with the means to accomplish this.

One specific example he gave was the freshman class he teaches on design. One class period is on writing specs. Writing specs means to carefully record the steps or procedures for a given process. It's usually a dreadfully boring process, tedious and detail-oriented. But this professor breaks students into teams, gives them pieces of fruit and has them write specs on how to dissect it. Then, the student teams swap specs and try to guess the piece of fruit that the unknown spec was written to dissect.

One day the Dean of the MechE department was giving tours to parents of freshman. The Dean took them by the classroom (happens to have glass windows, like a lab) to view the lecture. It happened to be the "writing specs" lecture, and the students looked so engrossed the parents didn't even want to interrupt! The most boring lecture topic of all, and the students looked to busy to disturb!

During this lecture I was attending on teaching innovation, the professor did an "in-class exercise" of sorts, to illustrate a point. He handed out pieces of paper and told us to write for four minutes and list as many ideas as we could on "how to save money at World's Best School." The faculty all laughed, because we have been going through recession-related budget cuts, and the topic hit a little close to home...

After four minutes, we all turned in our papers. While the professor continued talking, three of his students looked over the papers. Further along in the lecture, the professor declared the "winner" of the contest. The criteria turned out to be (and we didn't know this) how many ideas you wrote down. The winner had 30 ideas. I had perhaps six.

"So how do you come up with that many ideas? How was that person so creative?" asked the professor, "And can that be TAUGHT?"

One of the techniques he teaches in his classes to encourage proliferate ideas is to come at the problem from different viewpoints. So if, for instance, you are trying to think of ways to improve student life - think about dorm life, food on campus, extracurricular activities, mentoring available, sports offered, student clubs. Generate as many ideas in each category as you can.

I thought that was useful. Breaking a vague problem up into smaller digestible segments seems like the right way to go.

The professor also mentioned other techniques, but the kicker came at the end of the lecture.

In his last couple minutes, he held up the "winner" of the ideas contest - the one with the 30 ideas. And it turns out, that person had done just as he said. There were four or five categories of saving money, and ideas under each category.

Maybe he had a plant. :)

Massage Class

Way back in January, I wrote a list of classes I'd like to take, and things I want to do. I'm at a point in life where I'm as free and unencumbered as I ever will be, and I want to take advantage of it.

Well, I took the archery class. And I loved it.

Now I'm continuing to tick off things on the "wishes" post. I'm taking a second-quarter class in massage. It started three weeks ago, and it goes every Monday for eight weeks until the end of the semester.

I'm really enjoying it! I had my doubts on the first day of class - the teacher is your stereotypical alternative-medicine advocate, with the wild mane of frizzy hair, long loopy scarves and full skirts in earth tones. She urged us to be "open-minded," to pay attention to "the healing power of touch," the "magnetic forces between all objects," and to "set our intentions in prayer before laying on your hands." Oh my. And I knew it was going to be a hard sell, because she told us that "If you are looking for scientific proof," and here she mentioned that more people at World's Best School have asked about scientific studies than anywhere else she has worked, "then this is the wrong class for you."

Um, yeah. You expected to try and teach a bunch of engineers and scientists about neti pots without any supporting evidence? She must have seen the skeptical looks, because the next week she brought in photocopies of an article. Except it was from Wikipedia.

Nice try.

This week, she brought in a couple studies from more reputable sources, and you could tell everybody breathed a little easier. We students like our data, thank you very much.

But the spiritual bent aside, our teacher is certified in a variety of types of massage (including prenatal massage, how cool!) and has been practicing for nearly twenty years. She is very knowledgeable, and has organized lesson plans for us to follow.

Each lesson lasts two hours. It starts with our teacher explaining the techniques we will learn, and showing us anatomy charts where appropriate. She then demonstrates on a volunteer, and then we pair off and try the techniques ourselves on each other. It's a wonderful system - it means I get a free massage every week!

The first week we learned compression and traction. In my own head, every time I think about it I think "compression and tension," but that's my engineering bias coming in there.... :) Compression is just what it sounds like - pressing into the body with the palms of your hands. It's very simple, feels good, and is soothing. A good opening stroke, says the teacher. Traction is stretching - the arms away from the body, the ankles away from the spine, and the head from the shoulders. Well, not TOO far away from the shoulders. We also learned effleurage (long sweeping strokes), and petrissage (kneading).

The second week we covered head and neck massage. I found this very odd - I never have people touching my face. But I paired up with a spunky girl that I really enjoyed working with - we had fun especially with the scalp massage. We laughed that the boys were having a hard time dealing with girl's curly hair...

This week we did abdomen massage. This is the teacher's specialty, as she does a majority of her work in pregnant and post-pregnant women. We learned how to feel your partner's breathing, and to gently release tension in the stomach and hip muscles. One particular technique involves pressing straight down into your partner's belly button. Here you can most strongly feel the pulse, because major veins and arteries run through your middle. The teacher said that according to traditional Chinese massage (or was it Mayan?) the naval chakra is the strongest, and the pulse here is a measure of your vitality.

Well, it turns out that my pulse is ridiculously strong. It scared my partner. "Why is your belly MOVING?" she cried. We had the teacher come over to ensure that no strange growths were occurring in my stomach, and fortunately no, I am not abnormal. I just have a combination of a really strong pulse and really strong abs (thank you abs workout class!), so my poor partner couldn't even feel what she was supposed to.

Up next week for Miss Vitality: neck massage! I can't wait.

Trust in Classmates

One of my favorite things I discovered when I came to World's Best School is that there are many, many people here who are like me. Driven like me, dedicated like me, and many much smarter than me. This incredible place where I am surrounded by an army of geniuses has had several advantages.

One is that it is vastly easier to trust my classmates. In undergrad, group projects were always a crapshoot. Your teammates can make or break a project - that's a commonly known fact. In undergrad, I always had to worry "Will I get a good team, will I have teammates who won't pull their share, will there be team members who don't have a clue what they are doing?" If any of those were true, it meant a lot more work for me - checking other people's work, harping on people to get their share done. It got easier as I became an upperclassman, because I finally knew most of my classmates and I could try and get in teams I knew would be good.

I was worried when I got to World's Best School, because I didn't know anybody and I had to jump right into project classes. But a fantastic thing happened. EVERYBODY here is a good teammate. Well, nearly everybody. In an astonishing turn of events, I sometimes have to struggle to keep up MY end!

And now I get to enjoy the benefits. Both of my classes are project classes, and this weekend I am working on both projects. I already finished my part for one class, and sent it off to the rest of the team. Now I get to sit back and TRUST that they will finish the rest of the assignment. And I do trust them. They are capable, they are motivated, and I don't have to worry. It's a fantastic feeling to lean on colleagues and feel that support.

Now if I could only finish my section of the OTHER class project, so that my teammates there can trust ME. :)

Lab Equipment Taking Over

This week one member of our lab was much busier than usual. It was a real crunch. Emails between lab people were flying back and forth, trying to schedule working time and negotiate schedules.

Finally, the most senior member of our lab threw up his hands and sent out a link to a Google calendar. "Here," he said, "I've added everybody to the permissions, and this calendar will be the definitive say on who has time when."

So, my readers, the lab chiller now has a Google calendar. Too many people were trying to use this piece of equipment at once (it's a machine that chills water for use in experiments).

So now, a piece of our equipment is now more computer savvy than I am. More connected. More Web 2.0.

All it needs now is a Facebook page - but I'm afraid my lab equipment might have more friends than I do. :)

Homework chuckle

One of my classes is about mechanical assemblies, and one of the homework problems made me chuckle.

The problem requires you to design three parts that assemble and intermingle with certain requirements. There are many ways to design the three parts within the requirements, but it gets tricky and complicated quickly. The problem statement noted that:

"In past years, some students have presented designs that look like spiders fighting. This is not necessary."

Figure 1: Unnecessary spider fight

I am now sorely tempted to incorporate a few hairy legs in my part design.

Cutting Your Losses

There is an art to being a student.

As a freshman you don't yet realize it, but by the time I reached senior year in college I realized I was a homework and test-taking machine. I am GOOD at what I do. I have been trained for school for over 15 years now. That's one of the reasons that I decided to do grad school right away and not take time off - I want to take advantage of the honed studying skills I already have.

I have perfected the art of cutting my losses.

I remember a story my father told me. He said when he was in grad school, he was taking a class on computer modeling (a state-of-the-art class at the time, and a tedious, painful process with the programming techniques of the era). The teacher assigned a homework set that took a hellishly long time to complete. So long, in fact, that the alloted time on the computer for the class was used up (yes, they had to book time to use the computer...). The teacher decided at the last moment to extend the deadline for the assignment, but my father made a judgement call and turned it in incomplete.

There are criteria for when to give up.

My father had already learned the concepts in the homework. No additional information would he gain by completing the assignment. The many extra hours would add only a percentage to that one homework grade, and an even smaller percentage to his overall homework grade, and a nearly insignificant amount to his final class grade. In short, it wasn't worth his time.

You have to be smart about where you put your resources.

If you decide to half-a** it too often - if it becomes a habit - then it's a pattern and you can't escape the consequences. Many, many college students fail because they bank on the fact that each individual piece of work for each class isn't worth much. But they add up to a lot. You have to judge where you put your time and energy. If you are smart about it, you are not slacking off - it's just resource management. You don't spend six hours on one homework when you have a mid-term paper worth half your grade due. You don't spend a hour on one problem in a homework when the other problems are easy and worth just as much. You don't spend ten minutes on a multiple choice-problem on a test when the essays are worth 60%.

You have to accept, sometimes you can't do everything.

Things are going to fall through the cracks. I remember distinctly one evening my senior year of college. I was so tired, and so overwhelmed. I had a homework for numerical methods due the next day that I hadn't even started. I tried to get out a piece of paper and start, but I was so wrung out I just started to cry. I crawled into bed, turned off the lights, and just curled up under the blanket. My last thought before I drifted to sleep was, "I should be working. I should be working. I should be working." I felt so guilty, and really I just needed to give myself a break. I should have just taken a deep breath and said, "I could be working. But I need to be sleeping. And that's okay."

Then your decision becomes, so what do I spend my time on?

I have a homework set due on Wednesday. I tried to work on this yesterday, and I worked more this afternoon and a bit this evening. I got through the first problem, but then realized I don't understand the rest the material. It's going to take me hours to teach myself the concepts that are confusing me. I could work on this all day tomorrow, but:

This is the last homework for this class, and there is no final exam. I have done all the other homework sets and gotten good grades. I will never have to know these concepts again for this class, and I don't need it for my research. In the meantime, I have a conference coming up that I need experimental results for. My professor is expecting me to make research progress this week. I am trying to collaborate with two other students on a really cool research tangent, and I have responsibilities at my dorm this week.

In short, all the criteria for making a judgement call are in place. This homework is not going to be worth the hours it takes me to do it. I'm setting aside my pencil and calling it a night.

Besides, tomorrow is my birthday. 

And with that, a good night!