Summer

Hmm. I don't know why I lost interest in blogging lol. Still don't feel like blogging right now even, except my grad student has been at lunch for an hour and half and I'm bored. He's not even my grad student actually, my real grad student is away at a conference and I can't really get started without him so yeah...

Back in Boston! It's pretty sweet. Went sailing yesterday, need to get over my fear of tipping over after seeing the professional people leaning back all the way into the water practically. I think we're going to Six Flags on Saturday, whoo!

Home was pretty fun too. We went to Disney World for a week :D that was soo awesome. I felt like a little kid again. I especially loved the fireworks in the Magic Kingdom (omg I get to see Boston's 4th of July fireworks this year!!). Also Julia's grad party went really well and I saw all my friends again (even though some of them came home just a few days before I had to leave *sad*). Also Matt visited and met my parents (awkward) and my friends (^^) and I took him around Sylvania and such. I miss him :(

Mm getting pretty excited about the work I'm going to be doing (once my grad student gets back...). I love working on stuff that's relevant to society lol. We're working on structuralizing an important protein on the influenza A virus (swine flu anyone?). My part is mostly expressing the protein using recombinant DNA technology (yay bio!) but then my grad student is going to apply NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance = strong magnetic fields) to determine the structure. I'll prolly get involved in that eventually, it kinda confuses me right now though. The ultimate goal is to develop drug targets for the protein and thus the virus.

Also planning on self-learning Java and having Jeff teach me how to play piano properly. Whoo! :)

K back to playing Farm Town on facebook until my other grad student gets back from lunch. Lol gosh they are so lenient here, I don't have to come in til 10am and 1.5-2 hr lunch breaks?! Sweet :P

~Marie

08-09 Memories :)

Wow it's so weird to think that I'm a college sophomore already.. but anyways, as I sit at home watching the Cavs vs. Magics game (go Cavs!), I thought I would write a note highlighting my favorite memories from an amazing freshman year at MIT (got the idea from Vivian lol):

I'll try to go in chronological order I suppose. And I'll add a picture for every month or so :P

• FUP 2008 (Freshman Urban Program, my pre-orientation program). Yay FUP buddies! Exploring Boston for the first time, giving back to the community by volunteering at schools and homeless shelters, scavenger hunting, chilling at Revere Beach. Ride that pony, Vermonsters, Gender skits, Class banquet, karaoke, glo bowling, need I say more?
• Orientation itself including lots and lots of free food, random FUP reunions, and athena chair racing (!).
• Rush week including free steak & lobster dinner (Chi Phi), a cruise in Boston Harbor (Pi Lam) and lasor tag (PKT)!
• Russell Peters giving a show at MIT, he was hilarious.
• Seeing a line of elephants march down Mass Ave during the Ringling Bros. elephant parade
• Fall Formal hosted by Simmons, Next, and Mccormick, held at the amazing Roxy Nightclub in downtown Boston. Also, bringing 3 boxes of martini glasses back to Simmons :D
• Midnight sailing with Gina (although I think I had a test the next day :P)
• Watching the Head of the Charles Regetta with Tory and enjoying a beautiful autumn day on the Charles river
• Halloween Weekend including Spooky Skate (haha ice skating in costumes), Steve dressing up as a girl and getting honked at, helping face-paint for an event Simmons held for little kids, and going to some sweet frat parties
• Martini Night at ADP, drinking fruit cocktails, winning tons of (fake) money from poker with Tim (also our own poker set)
• 9A Thanksgiving - spending hours making roast chicken, tofu turkey, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pies, stuffing muffins; Jeff mixing drinks at his 21 & under bar; eating the food together and being thankful for our friends <3
• Christmas time in the lounge - decorating the lounge with snowflakes and lights and floppy-disk wreaths one evening after my MITSO concert, listening to Christmas music when psetting. Everything was just more cheery lol.
  
• Pi Lam BJNT, Steve showing up with two dates (me and Lucy) because he needed a date for "his friend" haha. Also the very red Asian santa.
  
• 9A Secret Santa - exchanging gifts the Sunday before final exams, getting an awesome penguin pillow (thanks Brian!), following Matt the Bubble Wrap Pope into the Simmons brunch and getting a lot of weird looks
• Having a snowball fight at 3am the night before (or morning of, I should say) our math finals cuz it was the first big snowfall in Cambridge, carving a 9A in the snow, building a giant snowball (ok I went to sleep for that part)
  
• Coming home for winter break and spending time with my family and friends - making annual Christmas cookies with Angela and Alice, going to the Lights Before Christmas at the zoo with besties (haha we made Yang take our jumping pics, it took so many attempts, by the end he was ashamed to know us lol), annual Chinese New Years party
• Disney movie parties with friends during breaks, Harsha quoting all the lines from Mulan, my mom and Angela's mom going "how old are you again?"
• IAP in general - cooking dinner, nearly setting off fire alarms, eating out (lounge money whoo), playing Catan every night (the guys at least... "it's night-time!"), watching anime with Matt, only having one class/one pset a week
  
• Going on a random hike one Saturday morning with Brian & Lucy after going to sleep at like 4am, seeing beautiful frozen waterfalls and climbing to the top of a hill overlooking Boston
• Taking a Chinese brush-painting class and learning how to paint pretty flowers lol and hanging them up in a 9A window :)
• Mystery Hunt - Yeahh Simmons Pet Mangoes. Staying up all night to solve ridiculous puzzles (yay I helped solve the drinks one and the comedians one lol), eating unhealthy snacks while glued to our laptops, making Jeff watch Love Actually when our brains got tired :P
• Chinese New Year's at Lucy's family friend's house, eating homecooked Chinese food which I miss a lot, watching the CCTV special
• That one bet that Omar, Steve, Tim, and Brian made to see who could go the longest without making a crude/sexist joke where the losers made us girls breakfast and Steve losing after one day lol. His breakfast was yummy though ^^
• Trip to NYC the last weekend of IAP - acting like complete tourists, going to Empire State Building, Times Square, Rockefeller, the Met; walking down 5th Avenue, Wall Street; Omar making us go see the Gossip Girl school lol; taking the Staten Island Ferry and gazing at the New York skyline as it went from daylight to dusk to night <3
• ZBT Soiree for Valentine's Day, pigging out on desserts made by their award-winning pastry chef, singing karaoke, going to Pi Lam's Communist Party after and having a blast
• Judging at the Harvard Debate Invitational with Tory on V-day, being the slowest judge ever lol
• Randomly making ferrofluid one Sunday morning except it failed so yeah..
• Coming home for spring break, visiting Blackwood and Amanda at BG, listening to Harsha sing along to My Fair Lady
• ADP Foam Party amazingness foam everywhere omgg
  
• CPW - hosting a prefrosh (almost drowning my prefrosh when taking her sailing D:), freee foooood, epic Capture the Duck, more athena chair racing, amazing CPW parties, Underground Capture the Flag which led to a spontaneous dance party, MIT giving us Mon and Tues off :D
• Spring Weekend at MIT - more free food, attempting to study on Killian Court, enjoying the gorgeous spring weather, Ben Folds and Sara Bareilles coming to MIT, watching a professional ballroom dancing competition
• Julia visiting me at MIT in between Yale and Harvard - going sailing, making her take notes for me in class hehe, dim sum, seeing the Boston Ballet, parties, having all my friends think she's like my twin lol
  
• ADP Semiformal Cruise with the best boyfriend ever <3. Cruising on the Charles at night, learning ballroom dance on the boat, being in love
  
• Getting a UROP and actually applying what I learned in bio class and learning techniques like cloning and recombinant vector expression!
• Making our own 9A t-shirts with lounge money because we're awesome like that
  
• Last days at MIT - ok so May kind of sucked, it was so intense, but I studied my butt off for finals and did pretty well (95 on math whoo!) and then we just got to relax for a few days (and pack boo...); Also, practically living in Brian & Jeff's room during finals week haha
  

• Eating out with friends during breaks, always sushi, Olive Garden, Poco Piatti's etc lol
• Eating out with friends in Boston and Harvard Square, at Pour House, Fire & Ice, Yenching, Barteley's, Cheesecake Factory, Uno's, CPK, and JP Licks and Berryline for dessert :)
• Baking desserts with Brian and Lucy when we were stressed. om nom nom
  
• Celebrating friends' birthdays by going out to eat, watching movies in the MPR, baking goodies, etc
• Playing in MITSO, even though I complained about the long rehearsals a lot. The first and last concerts were especially wonderful, our performances were so passionate. And that one concert where my friends brought a "We love you Marie" sign and flowers even though I was embarrassed as hell.
  
• Dancing a lyrical piece in DanceTroupe first semester, even though show week was the week before exams.
• Being IM Badminton captain for the Asian American Association only cuz I signed up for B league and there weren't enough people for that so we had to do C league and he assumed I had experience since I had signed up for B league lol
• Tutoring a junior in SAT Math at a local Boston public school. Ah how I treasured those afternoons doing arithmetic and geometry instead of differential equations and Fourier series and crap. Also my kid was very adorable :)
• Going to many performances in Boston with friends, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Legally Blonde the Musical, and Boston Ballet's The Nutracker and Sleeping Beauty at Boston Opera House. Felt very sophisticated :)
• Attending many a cappella concerts, by the Logs, the Toons, the Chorallories (oh yeah the Bad-Taste Concert.. very bad-taste). I especially loved the Logs' spring concert! So amazing :)
  
• Going out to Chinatown for dimsum with CSC and ATS but also many times with my friends. Also the time Lucy and I tried to find a good salon for haircuts and finally settled and then Jeff and Tim came back with fish for the lounge.
  
• Many many trips to the Galleria with Lucy (and Jeff) when we were stressed haha. I definitely accumulated a lot of clothes over the school year. And ate a lot of sushi.
• The guys' obsession with "I'm on a boat!" culminating in them singing it on stage at the ZBT Tsunami Party in front of everyone
• Many Thursday nights spent doing psets but also having fun and laughing and procrastinating and bonding through the misery. Also that one Thursday night during 1st semester where we didn't have any psets do the next day and Tim and I were like "wow what are we supposed to do without psets?" and played poker and stayed up talking about life instead
• Learning more in one year than I have from all of high school probably, from amazing professors - some Nobel Laureates... Schrock brought in his Nobel Prize on the last day of 5.112!; Hudson, who was the most adorable physics prof ever and actually made 9am class worth it, Jacks, who does cutting-edge cancer research; Mattuck, cute little man who mumbled to the board (also Manapat, the best TA in the world) and more.

So here's to a fantastic freshman year and memories that will last a lifetime! (cheesy I know XP)

P.S. This took so long, Cavs game ended a while ago, it was soo close ahh they lost in overtime *sigh*

Summer Vacation!

Omg so I haven't posted in foreverr. But now it's summer and I'm kind of bored so I guess I'll blog about some things late lol. But first, as usual, I must make a to-do list for the summer lol:

During 3 weeks at home:
1. Catch up on sleep (haha)
2. Hang out with friends
3. Visit OSU once
4. Go to Cedar Point at least once
5. Go on a family mini-trip (Hocking Hills!)
6. Visit bffy once hopefully (maybe with Blackwood?)
7. Have bffy visit during Julia's graduation :)
8. Read lots of books
9. Start and finish a Taiwanese drama

At MIT:
10. Cure cancer. haha jk don't really have any goals for my UROP yet
11. Learn how to cook (since we don't have any dining...)
12. Read lots of books (I have a Boston Public Library card!)
13. Self-learn some programming (with Jeffy)
14. Go explore some new places and restaurants in Boston :)
15. Go on lots of weekend roadtrips since Lucy has a car (Cape Cod, beach, maybe NYC?)

Hmm can't think of anything else right now. Going to do a memories post on fb later.

Btw, the Lakers are getting owned right now. The Cavs got owned yesterday. Sigh. Wow haven't had time to watch TV in so long lol.

~Marie

Grrrr

WORST 18.03 PSET EVER
I finished Part A yesterday and by 6pm today I had finished 1, 2, and 3 of Part B so I was like only 2 more questions to go, this shouldn't be too bad. I got back from MITSO at 9:30 and have been working on the effing 18.03 pset since then. And I just finished. Which means those 2 problems took me 7 hours to do (hmm it seems like more than that lol). But yeah. Hate 18.03 right now. So much. About to start 14.01 (did T/F yesterday). Physics class in 5 hours...

I can't believe spring break was last week.

Spring Break in Actuality

Wow so that schedule was an epic fail lol. I followed the first 2 days maybe but then the internship apps took longer than I had planned and I never got in the mood to do physics. Do kinda feel like studying bio but physics needs to get done first, which sucks.

Here's my short-term emergency plan for tonight/tomorrow:

Tonight - finish reading course notes (yeah i got bored with that so I decided to write a blog post lol) and finish Mastering Physics, which might have to involve watching a Lewin lecture about Faraday's law. Also finish the UMich REU app if at all possible (just need a one page statement!)

Tomorrow - dim sum lunch with the fam work on physics pset all day, pack, make-dinner-and-watch-movie night with friends! yay we're making pizza :D.

Sunday - study bio on the plane ride back. either that or watch like 4 evangelion episodes haha.

I didn't even get a chance to watch the movies/series that I wanted to. Here's what's been good about spring break though:

- Waking up after noon every day
- Visiting Blackwood and Amanda at BG! that was super fun, even though he didn't really have anything planned out for us haha. good times
- Visiting SV and seeing old teachers (except Vens was busy *tear* I wanted to complain about how hard diffy q is lol)
- Going to Olive Garden. yup love that Tuscan Garlic Chicken lol. and that was the only time I got to see Tiffy cuz her break was last week :(
- Sushi!! Haha
- Mr. Freeze! (really good ice cream place)
- Going to that one random Chinese restaurant in Michigan with 5 Chinese families even though it was just for the szechuan sauce and the parents are super lame. The food was good though, and that's what counts. We probably ordered everything on the menu collectively. I really like the pan-fried noodles.
- And last but not least... movie nights with friends! Sunday we watched Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas and Tuesday we watched The Swan Princess and then Harsha wanted to watch My Fair Lady which was soo long but pretty good. Stayed up late that night lol. Angela's mom and my mom both said "How old are you guys again?" lol.

Drawbacks of spring break:

- There's nothing to do in Toledo except eat, sleep, and watch movies.
- I miss MIT (but not the work) and my lounge peeps
- I miss bffy. A lot. Sigh.

Anyhoo, Yang and I are trying to decide what movie to watch tomorrow, so I'll go now lol

~Marie

Ok More Detailed SB Schedule

Ahh there is so much I have to do over spring break, I need to make a schedule of what I should get done each day. (For my own use really) Sucks that I waste half the day sleeping lol. But I do need my sleep :D.

Rest of today (Monday):
- Run on treadmill
- Watch Sex and the City the movie with Julia :)
- Email Dr. Najjar/Mrs. Cobau about Mich REU recs
- Finish Biogen app

Tuesday:
- Work on internship apps (Genencor, Genzyme, UMich REU)
- Look into NIH labs, email lab heads?
- Movie night! my house :D

Wednesday:
- Finish apps/emailing lab heads
- Visit SV 9th period/after school :)
- Read 8.02 course notes, watch online lecture that Jeff sent me. Start pset if have time. Or finish Mastering Physics. Or both.

Thursday:
- Visit Blackwood at BG! (No idea how long this is going to take..)
- Finish physics pset.
- Start reading/studying for bio.

Friday:
- Study for bio some more.
- Read for econ, start econ pset.
- Start math pset (the part that we've covered in lecture already).
- Dentist appt (bleh)
- Family card night? Hee hee

Saturday:
Don't want to do anything productive on Saturday, just relax and enjoy the last day at home.
- Finish anything above that didn't get done/ study some ore for bio.
- Sushi lunch with Joni?
- Make-dinner and movie night :D

Sunday:
- Flight at 7:30am. UGH.
- Back at MIT yay!!!

Not to mention I borrowed a bunch of books from the library today that I want to read (except they didn't have Atlas Shrugged boo) and also Evangelion to watch and a couple of other movies I wanna check out. Sigh. This makes spring break seem so short, and here I thought I was gonna be bored.

The internship thing is really becoming quite stressful. There are so many things I want to do over the summer. I really want the NIH one though. But the UMich one is really really nice and it's close to home, which is good for the first summer after college. But an internship in Boston would be really cool too. Or even just a UROP at MIT, that way I would have UROP to continue with next school year. So many options ahhh.

Anyways, gonna go start on the first thing on my schedule, which is running on the treadmill while waiting for my mom to go to sleep so my sister and I can watch Sex and the City lol.

~Marie

P.S. I organized my Gmail (after importing everything from MIT webmail) and Google calendar and I have one or more tests every week in April. Starting with a bio test the Wednesday after we get back. FML.

Spring Break To-Do List:

School:
1. Organize school materials
2. Study for 7.013 test, read textbook
3. 8.02 Pset, catch up by reading course notes
4. 18.03 Pset
5. 14.01 Pset, catch up by reading textbook
6. Attempt to learn programming (C++)

Work-Related:
1. Submit more internship apps
2. Contact lab heads for NIH
3. Find UROP for summer possibly

Fun:
1. Watch Evangelion
2. watch Slumdog Millionaire
3. Visit southview
4. Visit Blackwood at BG
5. Zoo trip?
6. Dinner/movie nights with friends

Food:
1. Sushi at Restaurant Pacific
2. Olive Garden!
3. Poco Piatti's possibly
4. Eggrolls
5. Dumplings
6. Bao Zi
7. Zhong zi
8. Duck