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!

Writing Papers for Business vs. Science

I am taking a class on entrepreneurship this semester, and I absolutely love it. It's my favorite class here yet. I've written before about how I gave an elevator pitch about my idea, and then how I got to form a team to work on my idea.

Well, a team has been formed. Two business students, and two engineering students (including myself). We spent a week or two doing market analysis and cold calling people to get reactions and feedback on our idea. It turns out that the idea might be worth something after all, and everybody we talked to was excited to hear about what we were planning. One person even wanted to know when he could see a demo, and offered his site for testing.

So all in all, the project is coming along swimmingly.

Two weeks ago we turned in an Executive Summary section of a business plan. The idea is that each week we turn in a different section of the business plan - Market Analysis, Advertising, Sales, Pricing, etc. The Executive Summary is the intro at the beginning of the business plan, and is usually the last thing you write, but the professors make us write it near the beginning so that we think about the big picture.

We got back that assignment last week. Overall, the grade was good and the comments were positive. The professor would reference various groups' papers during the lecture, to illustrate points. Usually to point out what NOT to do. For instance, when talking about focusing on the customer, the professor said, "Now let me read to you from Group A's report. Here in the section on customers they say that there are X thousands in area 1, Y thousands in area 2, Z thousands in area 3, and then in addition there are even more in area 4. WRONG! You need to pick an area and stay with it." Then the professor went on, "But contrast that with Miss Outlier's group. They say that they have identified 320 targets to begin with, and then 560 potential cutomers ready right after that. And look, I can check Appendix A for a list of contact information. Now THAT is focus."

So my group and I were sitting there feeling very pleased with ourselves.

But then later on in lecture, the professor was trying to make another point, and he said "Let me read to you from Miss Outlier's report again. Here is their very first sentence." He then proceeded to read the opening sentence in a monotone, all in one breath.

"Now how boring is THAT?" he asked. The class tittered, because indeed it did sound very dry.

"It lacks PASSION!" he cried, "Where is the enthusiasm?"

And I was thinking, SO? When was the last time you read a scientific paper with the word "fantastic" in it? What else did you expect when a bunch of engineers writes a report?

In a word, dear readers, I was unaware that my report was supposed to display passion. I quite distinctly remember designing the first sentence of the report to relay precisely and concisely the content of the report.

And of course, I do HAVE passion. I have that in spades. I hope it shows through in my face-to-face presentations, but I never have to portray anything beyond a subdued confidence in my writing.

So this will be an adventure. Apparently writing for business is a bit different than writing for science.

Or, rather:

Crafting compelling stories from a business perspective requires confidence and excitement to shine through the words, instead of stifling the passion with the dry prose of scientific treatises. I'm EXCITED! Vote for MEEEE!

Where was this on my To-Do list?

As life rolls along, sometimes we take for granted the things that have no problems. You don't think about your calendar until you lose it, you don't worry about your body until you fracture your foot, and you most certainly don't worry about your skin until you wake up with a rash.

Yes, dear internet, this morning I woke up and it seemed like my eyes didn't quite open all the way. I just attributed this to the fact that it was 7am, and stumbled into the bathroom to take my shower.

I noticed that my eyes still felt puffy, and when I washed my face my skin was itchy.

Upon stepping out to brush my teeth, I was confronted with my own red, blotchy face in the mirror - what has happened to my FACE?

Somehow I have managed to attain a rash over most of my face. I made a pit stop this morning for Benadryl, which has helped greatly. The only thing I have ever been allergic to is the skin on mangoes, so I'm not sure what caused this. The only two things I can think of are 1) the new face lotion I'm using this week, or 2) the mango sherbet I had for dessert. The only problems are 1) why wouldn't lotion problems have shown up sooner, like the day I first used it, and 2) there is no mango peel in ice cream, and my bowl of sherbet was from almost the bottom of the container - I've had no problems eating the first 2/3rds of the pint!

Either way, this wasn't something I was planning to have to deal with today. But life rolls along regardless...

Austin City Limits

Way back in January, I bought discounted early bird tickets to this year's Austin City Limits - a big music festival out in Texas. I watched the airline prices, and scored a great deal this summer on a direct flight to Austin.

And then finally, when I had almost forgotten that I made all these preparations, the day arrived! Earlier this month I attended ACL, and had a blast. I stayed with a friend of mine from college, and spent the weekend with a few thousand of other festival fans:

Even got to spend some time with another friend from undergrad:

Enjoyed myself under the wide open southern sky:

And listened to awesome music played from seven platforms distributed across the field (or mudpit, as it became by Sunday...):

Also, thanks to my host, I got to see the Texas captiol buildings and the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential museum. We ate at a tacqueria that served the fresh version of Dr. Pepper (only available in a limited area of Texas), and chowed down on a huge bag of kettle corn. Life is good!