the eXternal mind

These are reposts of my Flickr album.

Beckman Auditorium. It’s also known as the Wedding Cake. I walk by this about 4 times a day. Notice the look and feel of the campus (lots of greens, low buildings, sunny).

I’m walking to my room (I can’t call it a dorm since it’s actually a house, or, hovse). This is a walkway. Notice the yellowish color of buildings. That’s typical.

A walkway in the Mods (Modular housing). Since some of the houses are being renovated this year, lots of people, like me, are living in “trailers” or Mods. Note that this is only temporary housing for me at the moment since this weekend is house picks. This picture sucks because I was about to take a picture when someone walked into the scene, and I didn’t want to make it seem like I was taking a picture of him (which I wasn’t anyway).

A better view of the mods. 15F is my room!

This is what you see when you walk through the door. The double that I’m living in is pretty small. That blue towel you see is hanging off of the bed of my roommate so that’s how small the room is. But there’s at least air conditioning and fast internet though :). The desk and everything is in disarray since I’m about to move this weekend and there’s no point of making things neat (excuses, excuses, of course).

Another section of my room. Heh, compared to all of you other kids in dorms, this is pretty damn shabby. Some books, drinks, two apples that I’m saving, some bathroom stuff, a radioshack bag of electronics, and two pairs of shoes. Clothes hung over hamper, messy.

Well, that’s it for now!

The first issue of The California Tech (Caltech’s weekly school newspaper) came out today, and although Euge and I already observed this, I’d like to publically point out that The Acorn, my high school’s newspaper, is better put together than The California Tech. The scary thing was, I took a look at UPenn’s daily newspaper once, and it seriously looked like a real Inquirer-like newspaper complete with current worldly news and everything. I was pretty impressed with that. Nevertheless, Caltech’s newspaper isn’t so bad…

Today was the other orientation trip (the other one being to Lake Arrowhead). I chose kayaking since I went canoeing before with Fed and enjoyed it. It was only about an hour drive to some location near Los Angeles where some canal was being used as a kayaking route.

I shared a kayak with another girl, Anna, who I informally met two years ago through a online collaboration/research program at NASA SHARP. I said hi to her early in the week, but I didn’t actually talk to her besides a short greeting. She was a really nice person though and we had some good chats while rowing. At this one point though, we had to turn our kayak around since the coast guard or something said that we were entering a sensitive US Naval territory. Supposedly, there’s some kind of small base there for some sort of testing.

So kayaking was fun although tiring since we were rowing just about the whole time. Initially, the kayak turned a lot since we weren’t coordinating things very well. Also, I was using different strokes than she was. Eventually though, we got the hang of it and everything went pretty well. I don’t use those muscles a lot though so they are kind of sore as I am typing now. One kid, unforutnately, lost his wallet and room key into the water. So the lesson is: Don’t carry important stuff with you when around large bodies of water!

After kayaking, we walked a short distance to a beach. It struck me as strange in a couple of aspects immediately:

1. There was no boardwalk. I’m used to Wildwood.
2. The beach was pretty big in all directions so that if one looks out to the end of the beach (which is visible faintly) one seems very small and inconsequential to the beach. Again, in Wildwood, there’s people and structures all around so the beach seems small.
3. The waves were larger, more frequent, and came in from many different directions. I think the Atlantic Ocean beaches are a bit toned down and the waves seem to be parallel to the shoreline.
4. There was no one on the beach! It was pretty much deserted in all directions besides a small group of us Techers (term giving to Caltech students). No lifeguards. Nothing. Anna said that this is mostly because no one wants to come to LA beaches. They go to the nicer, less polluted ones in Orange County and other places (names I forgot).

The water was freezing so no one bothered to swim. It was nice there though. It seemed less adulterated with commercialism—more in tune with nature.

Upon my arrival to Caltech on Day 1, I went to pick up a big envelope that included a bunch of information such as the advisor assigned to you.

Oh, you know, everything was all fine and all until I read who my advisor happened to be and then nearly died of irony.

You see, my advisor is Demetri Psaltis. Yes, that Dr. Psaltis. He’s one of the big names in Holography and Optics research today. Literally, almost every optics publication ends up citing some paper of his. Well, at least I know that’s true for holographic data storage.

The story starts two years earlier when I was at the Georgia Institute of Technology as a NASA SHARP summer student. I was placed under Dr. Ali Adibi’s Optics group there (actually working with one of Dr. Adibi’s graduate students, Omid). Dr. Adibi was a pretty famous name in holography at the time already since he made a big breakthrough in holographic storage while he was a postdoctorial scholar at Caltech. Dr. Adibi was working under, well what do you know, Dr. Psaltis! During my time at GaTech, I had to read a lot of holography papers and just about the majority of them were by Dr. Psaltis and his research team at Caltech. In fact, reading about research coming from Caltech was one of the reasons why I chose this school in the end.

In one of my Caltech admissions essays, I actually wrote about what I mentioned to you above. I didn’t think they’d really care though. Apparently, I was wrong. Heh, the irony! Who would have thought that the author of the papers I were reading two years ago would actually be my advisor? Who would have thought that I would actually be at Caltech?

I bet that somewhere, someone is laughing in an evil manner at me. I have breakfast with Dr. Psaltis tomorrow so I hope he doesn’t drill me in holography or anything like that!