Jae-An's Summer 2017

Thursday, August 24, 2017

By Jae-An Wang

Although I still technically have another month until my summer ends, I highly doubt that anything of particular interest will occur between now and then. And so here I am.

This summer has been pretty laid back, especially compared to these last two summers when I was with the ILC and Global Glimpse (check out my other blogs). With my brother off interning in Taiwan, and being quite inconveniently situated in Pittsburg, I ended up staying home most of the time, not quite doing nothing but doing just little enough to feel like I'm living a somewhat unhealthy lifestyle. Between long sessions on Quora and catching up with everyone else on Game of Thrones, I've read a few books, mostly easy reads like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Room (would recommend). I'm currently chipping away at The Plot Against America, an alternate history book centered around an anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh winning the 1940 presidential election against FDR. Fascinating stuff.

AWWWW

Aww...

Other than reading, one of the high points of my summer was when six stray kittens wandered into our yard! Although I (quite unrealistically) wanted to keep them all for ever and ever, my parents decided we would clean them up and send them to good homes. And so we spent the better part of a day feeding and bathing wriggling balls of fur. The horrifying part was getting rid of all the fleas, which were concealed on all six kittens; by the end of the day, I'd learned how to crush them in such a way that they produced a disgusting yet oddly satisfying "pop." In the end, we put up an ad on Craigslist, and gave the kittens to trustworthy-looking people who showed up, much to my dismay.

Ayy school pride let's go

Our "Bruinization."
I need to stop making that face...

Orientation was also a thing that happened! After near-obsessive amounts of research on everything from the ratings of professors to orientation activities to shuttles to and from the airport, I flew down to UCLA for a couple of days to meet my fellow classmates and register for classes. I was pleasantly surprised by both the people and the campus; these weren't things that mattered to me personally when choosing where to go school, so it was like a nice bonus. Other things that happened at orientation included: meeting my fellow engineers, jumping into a cool fountain, participating in a midnight scavenger hunt that went past 1 AM (for my team anyways), getting pretty good beginner's luck at Texas hold'em, and registering for classes! Although I would like to say that all these things were equal amounts of crazy fun, figuring which classes I wanted/needed to take and then competing with around 350 other incoming freshman to register for the only chemistry class with a "good" professor on an extremely laggy server wasn't quite fun and games, to put it mildly. Luckily, I managed to get into said class, as well as the other ones that I wanted.

It's hard to believe that it's been nearly a week since I returned. I thought things would go by much slower now that I'm actually excited to go to school for once, but getting ready to leave actually has time moving faster than I want it to, annoyingly enough. One of the many things that's been eating up my time has been studying, despite the school year not even having started yet; because of some lack of foresight on my part, I'll be skipping the first five math classes engineers take and heading into the final one, MAE 82: Mathematics of Engineering, really just Differential Equations. And since I just scraped a C in Linear Algebra, the prerequisite, I have plenty of work to do...