In Which I Am A +1
September 23, 2014
This post will be a little rushed as my draft was deleted and I’m already well behind.
The rest of the week was busy in much the same way with a few additions. The evening brought an interview for ISAB, the international student advisory board, a group dedicated to connecting with the administration over issues of international student welfare. My interview went fairly well, though I felt I ranted a little about the state of undergraduate education. My time at Hineni had made me quite a fiery critic of many educational practices within universities.
Following the interview, I had a little time to get back to homework before heading off at 9PM for a Google recruiting event. I was attending as a +1 of Nikki Limtiaco, Rigel’s girlfriend and a former student of mine with whom I was good friends. The event was held at Pod, the fanciest sushi bar around and Google provided generously with much food and an open bar. I eventually gave in and tried one of the nicer whiskeys while chatting to a Google engineer, Michael who had previously worked in my current lab. The event was highly enjoyable with many of the top students from Penn CIS attending. I made a bunch of new friends and additionally swapped details with Michael who had a lot to say about where I would be working for the next few years.
I returned late and got a little more work done before the usual start the next day. Class on Thursday were the same as always but I was incredibly stressed out by my homework load. I did attend the Glee/Penn Dance mixer in the evening, but stayed for a little over half an hour before returning to my room to continue working. Friday was much the same however the evening held a few fun differences. Friday at 3:30PM was my Penn Pipers audition, an acapella subset of the Glee Club, known for their quality of tone and ability to blend. I was excited to audition as not doing so was one of my few regrets from my previous time at Penn. The audition went very well, with me singing a rendition of “Fly Me To the Moon” as popularized by Sinatra.
From there I attended the PennApps opening ceremonies. For those who missed my previous accounts of PennApps, it’s a ‘hackathon’ (read: programming competition) with over six hundred attendees from around the world coming to Penn to compete for tens of thousands of dollars in prizes. Though I wouldn’t be hacking away all of Saturday, it was still an opportunity to see friends, generate new ideas and meet new people.
After the opening ceremony I raced to Hillel, where I met with a few graduate students to head to Rodin for a meal hosted by Sarah. The meal was small and lovely and went late. However my night still wasn’t over as I headed back to PennApps to play board games with the representatives who were there from Facebook.
The next day I woke up just in time for lunch, arriving at Hillel where I was to meet Elan and Naomi Hachen who were hosting me for that meal along with yet more graduate students, including Debby whom I had become friends with the previous week and who had also attended Sarah’s meal. The meal was really lovely, and again went late into the afternoon. At around 8PM I headed back to PennApps, this time with my laptop and was reading to do some coding my self.
I was up way into the late hours of the night coding, reading up on documentation and finally at 4AM, finished my project and walked home to get into bed for a few hours before judging and presentations.
Thursday – Day 170
January 23, 2013
Thursday I managed to stay attentive during physics despite the lack of sleep, but was busy almost the entire afternoon with homework of various sorts. However, Thursday also marked the lead up to PennApps over the coming weekend where thanks to the day off on Monday, I would spend approximately 48 hours coding non stop. PennApps is a student ‘hackathon’, a competition in which you have a set amount of time to build something technological from scratch. PennApp is also the largest college hackathon in the world with over 500 attendees semesterly! Part of the day was spent searching for team members and figuring out ideas. Eventually I ended up with the usual crew, Rigel and Nikki, with whom I was most excited to work with.
In the evening I attended a talk by Facebook on getting started using their developer tools to make apps and caught up with Rigel for a brief talk regarding how our team would run. Following that I went for a delicious dinner with around thirteen exchange students and though we had to wait a while for our table, the spicy szechuan food was excellent (I had some very yummy spicy fish!).
The rest of my night was spent preparing all my homework and the homework for CIS121 before the weekend, as I knew there would be a mountain of stuff to get done. Up again till the wee hours of the morning, I was a bit behind but I was motivated to keep going in order to leave myself time over the long weekend.