In Which I Suit Up For The Heat
September 8, 2014
Today was boiling hot and stiflingly humid. I dressed for the weather in the morning and attended physics, trying my best to make friends with a few of my classmates.
After class I walked back to Hillel for lunch and during my meal received an urgent text message. I was required at Platt Performing Arts Center for Glee callbacks, so that I could help demonstrate quartet singing. This required me to dress up in full suit and bow tie, which given the sun beating down, was not the most ideal of outfits.
Following my dress change, I speed walked over to Hill House to meet a potential piano instructor for lessons this semester. The first meeting went pretty well and I was looking forward to actually learning to play properly for the first time. However, the entire time, I was sweating in my outfit and must have looked quite amusing to the instructor who was in jeans and a tshirt.
Much of my afternoon was spent singing the same song over and over, trying to maintain nuance for the different auditionees. After that was over, I had a brief break for dinner at Hillel, followed by Newman night. A ritual of induction that I won’t go into on this forum.
The night ended surprisingly early with our intro social event starting ahead of time. This left me a few moments to gather myself before another nights rest.
In Which I Take a Productive Break
September 6, 2014
The next day was empty. Almost entirely. I slept recovered and ate lunch with some new people. A welcome break from the hectic schedule I had previously been running under.
In the night I was a little more productive, refreshing my resume, website and doing a little coursework for cryptography. When 9.45PM hit, I set off to Rodin to join a number of friends from the community for nerf-gun capture the flag in the engineering buildings. Unlike the time in February, this time was packed out with over thirty five people playing. It was great fun and great exercise as per the previous time and I was looking forward to the subsequent times we would get to play.
Sunday was a little busier again, with Glee taking up the bulk of the day. The early afternoon was taken up by ‘Grilling with Glee’, an event held to recruit new members that largely involved us standing around free food and chatting with any prospectives as they came by. The day was a hot 33 degrees and very humid and so it wasn’t an altogether pleasant task, but I met a few new and lovely people including Jasmine, one of the tech staff for Glee that had joined the previous year. It was also a good chance to spend some more time with the other new members of PGC that had joined.
The evening consisted of sitting outside auditions to speak to auditionees and make them feel comfortable and enthusiastic about joining club. However, Sunday night was a little low on volume and so I would be returning the next night again to meet more of them.
In Which My New Education Begins
September 3, 2014
Note for some of you unfamiliar with my blog, I’m always late in writing things up, so this post refers to the events of 27/Aug.
Today was my first day of classes however the day didn’t start till 10:30, leaving me plenty of time for a sleep in. After waking up late, I headed to the library to pick up some books and subsequently to the distributed systems lab (where I had a desk) to lay down my belongings. My first lecture was CIS520: Machine Learning with Lyle Ungar which was so overfull that around fifteen people sat on the stairs for the duration of the lecture. The lecture itself was brilliant. Lyle was highly energetic, clear, concise and gave excellent examples and motivation for everything he did. I was really looking forward to future lectures. Following that was cryptography with Nadia. The course wasn’t quite as thrilling given that I’d seen the material before, however what was really exciting was the homework released at the end! Eleven ciphers all encoded using a ‘one-time-pad’ with the mistake of additionally using the same encryption key for all of the messages.
After a meeting with Nadia to discuss my first semester of research (breaking the Linux PRNG), I obtained a key to the first year PhD office from Charity Payne and sat down there to work on breaking the codes. The first year office was actually quite nice, with around twenty desks and plenty of natural light. There was a kitchenette, a whiteboard and a nice meeting area with some couches. My own desk had a terminal and some drawers and served quite nicely for my uses. I sat down to work on cracking the codes with an almost single minded focus, not making much progress for a while. When I glanced at the clock I found hours had passed! It was already time for me to run off to a final new graduate student event at the Annenberg Center for Performing Arts.
I arrived there and caught up with a few of the other PhD students that I remembered, grabbed a snack and walked around the booths offering student services. The event was fairly fancy but I surmised that it would be the last pricey looking event that I’d be invited to as a graduate student for some time. After the speeches I met a girl from the Graduate School of Education by the name of Kimberly. She had bright red hair and an equally glowing smile. After a few minutes of conversation I found that her parents had educated her well, teaching her dungeons and dragons and initiating her into most of geek-culture from a young age. We got caught up talking for quite some time and when I looked at my phone to check the time I realized I was over forty minutes late for Glee Club call-time. I apologized and raced off, forgetting her name and missing her contact details.
That evening was the Glee Club ‘free show’, an introductory concert for freshman to advertise to them for the purposes of encouraging auditions. I unfortunately had to sit out on a few of the dance numbers giving my lack of experience with them. The show went fairly well and a few alumni I hadn’t seen in the past year made it out to see us, which was wonderful. The free show left me exhausted so after another full day, I went straight to sleep without anything in between.