I was just thinking about last August … wondering how I felt a year ago … so somehow I ended up digging up my 2009 Guide to Residences … (it's still so pretty & so exciting to look at)...

I looked at the empty i3 DVD slot on the inside cover … and flipped to the Burton-Conner page (which is where I live now) … and reminisced a whole lot -- and then

OH-MY-FRICKEN-G’ – I know all the people on this page!
This is actually a group shot of Burton 1 - my floor!

This kind of revelation is strange and mind-boggling to me. Last year this time, I looked at these pages with no particular attention to faces – they were just students, yadeeyada….but now I know them all?

So I guess my point is - all of you heading to MIT soon, GET EXCITED 'CAUSE THERE WILL BE LOTS OF CHANGES. New People. Places. Psets… HA.

Really I just have two other relevant things to say- 1) Seriously don’t get caught up on first impressions… I’m constantly in awe at how different someone is once you actually meet them … or talk to them outside of the classroom … etc. and 2) Open up! …I can think of a handful of situations where had I decided …not… to put myself forward (e.g. HEY DO YOU WANT TO HAVE DINNER??), I wouldn’t have met some good friends.

And just for fun, I dug up a personal blog post from a year ago –

HAPPY BACK TO SCHOOL !!!

(P.S. One of my favorite moments of the day is seeing all the people in western business attire standing beside the lonesome bus stops in the middle of nowhere, waiting for the suburban Coach bus that will take them to work. Inspiring!)

I’m interning at ETS – the Educational Testing Service, a.k.a. producer of the SAT, GRE, TOEFL, AP Exams, etc…Yeah. Anyways, I’m not working on the previously mentioned exams, but rather, a newer test called the TOEIC – Test of English for International Communication – a.k.a. English for the business setting.

So…..my job is basically developing test questions for the TOEIC. And for confidentiality reasons, I think that’s pretty much all I should be saying about that. I can’t talk about what goes on exactly, but I will say a couple things I realized about my job and ETS. 1) This is really serious – People take the TOEIC to get jobs, seek promotions, make their lives… 2) This is really hard… a question is not just a question. Now I’m just thinking how in the world the SAT – which has nearly 200 questions – is put together… D: 3) Essentially, ETS may seem like a big blackbox (hahaha first learned this word in 8.02 ), but nothing's arbitrary. :P

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Remember the Sketchbook Project mentioned in my last post? Several people I know have also hopped on the wagon – it’s a movement! So…. I’ve worked on a grand total of…dun dun dun… 1 page. :X I know, I'm ashamed.

I didn’t want to doodle any old thing, so I was waiting for thorough ideas to just come to me. But thankfully, one Sunday morning, I just decided to start something.

This one’s about how jaded I am about buying things…or just generally, the saturation of material goods all over the place... or the fact that you're almost expected to "spend" after a "payday" but really - there's nothing that tempting. Or maybe too many things. O.....KAY

Anyways,

It’s hard to believe tomorrow's August! There’s still a whole month until MIT begins once again, but for some reason, I’m homesick already.

It’s not that MIT is not exciting – on the other hand, it's probably a little too exciting. Everything is new and everything is your decision. Everything is A LOT. I just wish there would be more minutes in between to “miss home” and remember where i came from. Don't know if that made any sense. But this is the "growing-up" we've been asking for.

Well, soon enough it’s on to the next world: MIT. Is anyone (ever) ready?

Like in a Sketchbook, it's gonna take a certain dose of courage to start marking on every new page.

* Finished 1st year!!! Woop woop! It was crazy hard, no lies, but simply the wide/fresh variety of faces and experiences makes it all worthwhile.

* Came home to find my bed upgraded from twin size to full size (!!); makes me scared about the transition back to twin size in September though – heh.

* Drowned in all the sports championships I care about (or in the case of the World Cup - pretend to care about in spirit of global love): French Open (Vamos…); NBA Finals (aww Boston…; next year!); Wimbledon (Rafa!!!); and yea, the month-long World Cup – I don’t have much knowledge about soccer or the patience to watch it, but seeing a goal finally being made and all the fans in pandemonium of national pride is pretty exciting – I like, and want to join, so semi-arbitrarily: Viva Espana!

Let’s just move on from here.
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To me, summer has always been the time for some self-improvement in all areas of life – and that includes going through a summer reading list and catching up on a whole list of movies (recommendations?). Basically, it’s the time to become a Renaissance Man! – someone with skills/substantial knowledge in many different fields. So besides reading and watching movies and all the summer bummin’ I can categorize as “catching up with culture and society,” I also have on the list reacquainting-with-French, cooking/baking, paint, budget, and exercising (once again).

But I’m excited to share another project I have for the summer; I bought it as a challenge for myself on my birthday. (It actually extends beyond summer, into January 2011).

It’s called the Sketchbook Project; 2011 Tour. (Tagline: “It’s like a concert tour but with sketchbooks). Essentially, you pay $25 to get a blank Moleskine cahier sketchbook, which you're supposed to fill up by January and send it back to Art House Co-op, the organization that runs this project. (You pick a theme to somewhat guide the pieces you create.) The nationwide tour starts in February at the Brooklyn Art Library in New York, and then brings thousands of sketchbooks to six other cities including San Francisco and Chicago.

I’ve kept many sketchbooks/notebooks in the past, but to date, have completely filled up none…:( I want to finish one!!! This will be the one:

The theme I picked (from a hat) is inside/outside (which could have strong architectural implications so that’s something to think about...hmm). So far, I’ve only done something on the cover. Like I wrote in my bio, even though I'm probably going to be "Jenny" for the rest of my life, I really want to be a Chloé....so see if you see what I did there. :P

Anyways,

so many creamy pages...LOTS. OF. WORK. TO. DO....need. inspiration.
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Hey, Hi Inspiration! My parents decided a trip northbound through upstate New York to Niagara Falls and into Canada would be great for “getting in tune with nature and getting inspired”. Off we went for 4th of July weekend.

Some sights along the way:

This was literary my view for hours.......Did not realize these United States had so much farmland...and corn...

Niagara Falls illuminated @ night. Breathtaking.......wrath of nature.

In the daytime. I was on a boat like that. And I felt vaguely like Columbus discovering America.

2x the rainbow. :)

As great people have described before, traveling does wonders. Lots of thoughts are flowing in my head right now...Trying to translate those into words and pictures. And brainstorming for more trips. ;)

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2014’s! Hope your summers are going swell – perhaps indulging in some quality r&r before the hectic times @ MIT officially begin? So yea – if in your glorious, final pre-college summer days, you brew up any specific questions about life@MIT, feel free to post them here. Same goes for ’15?s ’16?s ’17?s… always. haha ☺.

If you’ve ever visited MIT, you’ll know this entrance at 77 Mass. Ave.

See the red circle? That’s where my studio is – literally behind that wall. See the blue around the focal “William Barton Rogers Founder”? behind it is where we hold architecture lectures.

Now that you have a general spatial understanding of where studio is, here’s the inside via webcam shots…

Someone decided to put all the pages from a puppy calendar on the glass wall by my workspace…

Mess, mess, mess – that’s how I function.

Using a stool to press down on a drying foam board.

Thinking about model iterations for the final project.

My friends have noticed that I’ve been “disappearing”, but frankly, I don’t mind. It’s just a great environment – tough but exciting work, cool air, lots of music, and great company! This past Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, I left studio at 4:30 AM. But there were still many people left – and they continue partying on with techno music, classical music, popular music; Teddy grahams, cereal, lots of coffee; chit-chat, impromptu dance practice, and the much-needed stretches of silence and concentration after perhaps realizing from a glimpse at the skylights – another day is coming. I pulled my first real all-nighter – ever – the day of the final review for the first project – it was ironically quite cathartic. I hope all-nighters come only once in a while though – or they’ll cease to be meaningful.

All this work is not for nothing. From the first project, I realized I love the entire design process: initial ideas, prototyping, computer models, real models, design, drafting, redesign, critique and conversation, redrafting, glue over fingers, redesign again, final design, final models, final drafting, final review…There are so many moments in between where I had no idea where I was going, but once the final review rolls along, everything solidifies, crystallizes, and I have to sell everything I’ve been slaving for. There’s an incredible sense of accomplishment and euphoria at the end of the long, dark tunnel.


Me after 1st Project Final Review – with my model & drawings.

A couple of serious shots of the final model.

I officially declared Course 4 Architecture a couple of weeks ago, and we just had our new major orientation yesterday. All I can see are challenging, wondrous things.

Two weeks ago, the MIT Sport Taekwondo team competed at the Eastern Collegiate Taekwondo Conference (ECTC) tournament at West Point Military Academy. We came home tournament champions with the long sought-after trophy:

Captains Jason Uh '10 & Mary Hong '10 hold up the fruit of the club's months of hard work (Photo credit: Bobby Ren)

To catch up: 1st quarter at MIT, I took P.E. Taekwondo and loved it. Master Chuang (head Instructor of Sport TKD) brought so much energy to each class, it was hard not to be excited. After the class ended, I took a mini-break – only to return just in time for the ECTC Princeton tournament. MIT took second after Cornell. Princeton was like an Initiation for me: the skilled and unwavering competitors from all the schools withstanding rounds and rounds of forms and sparring convinced me to commit.

For the next four months, MIT Sports Taekwondo would train religiously, systematically, wholeheartedly. They say it isn’t about winning; but when the goal is so clear – “ECTC Division I Champions (again!) over perpetual rival Cornell” – stakes rise, and so does the pressure. After the early MIT and Princeton tournaments, MIT was 236 points behind the Big Red – with two tournaments left to go. To keep the grand Championship Cup in picture, we needed to win West Point resoundingly.

The opportunity came on March 7. At 4 AM (yes, that is A.M.)– 2 busses pulled up at 77 Mass. Ave., picking up 48 people. 40-or-so of which would wait in line for McDonald’s at 7 AM somewhere in the middle of New York state; I was part of the left-over ones who could not eat or drink anything before weigh-in at the tournament in order to make a certain weight class … so I razed through the PlayPlace.

:) (Photo credit: Xuan Yang)

After 5 or so hours, we got to West Point. Besides MIT and Cornell in Division I, West Point also hosted SUNY Albany, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Tufts, and several more schools competing in Divisions II and III. In a typical tournament, Forms comes first. This is when all the competitors are divided by their belt levels, with each group lined up sitting around its own ring. Then, competitors go up on the mat to perform the World Taekwondo Federation form for their level in front of three judges. Personally, forms are hard to perfect, but nerves are even harder to conquer. It’s like playing in a piano recital – except people do notice when you mess up. That said, MIT snatched an impressive total of 17 –SEVENTEEN! – medals in Forms at West Point -

Erika Lee '12 (2nd Dan Black Belt) competes in Forms - taking 4th place.

Hilary Monaco '12 (Yellow Belt), left, competing at her first tournament - taking 2nd place.

(Photo credit: David Chen)

Once Forms finished, the real fighting began - aka Sparring.


Jason Uh '10 in red (1st Dan Black Belt); his team A1 reached the quarterfinals in a tough bracket.

Michelle Wang '13 in blue (2nd Dan Black Belt); her team A2 also reached the quarters.

Mengfei Yang ’12 in blue (Green Belt); her team C2 won gold!

Boys lovin' all the medals! (Photo credit: Bobby Ren)

It always befuddles me to think about what makes someone “good” in Taekwondo. Should you kick hard? Often? Or just right? Obviously the answer is “Just Right”. But by now, I’ve learned that “just right” is pretty much only right when the judge scores a point for it. And with no baskets, holes, or lines to guide a judge in scoring, sparring is more or less subjective. Judges aside, how should you even begin improving in sparring? I try to memorize all the strategies and combination moves, but once on the real battlefield, I’m just running on instinct and praying to god that I can pull out something I recall learning. In this way, TKD is not really much different from say, basketball – where only practice and experience guide you to respond well in each individual circumstance.

At the end of the day, MIT won West Point – and in the most respectful way possible, it felt awesome to eat away Cornell’s point advantage. But we are still behind with one tournament to go (UPenn). So on most Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings – you will find me @ Dupont gym, kicking and learning from an incredibly tight-knit and hungry community that is MIT Sport TKD:

The Fambam (photo credit: Bobby Ren)

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annnnnddddd some really belated words:

Congratulations MIT 2014!! Get all the juice out of CPW: begin finding out what you want to do, whether and how MIT can foster your pursuits; feel if MIT can become the place that’s “just right”.

To the seniors who are not/not yet MIT 2014: Walking around the rings at West Point, I saw so many “Almosts” - straightforward loss by 1-point, tie-breaker loss by 1-point, sudden-death-in-over-time loss by 1 point…Those single, critical points could easily be converted towards MIT’s point total – but they weren’t. We can sit around and wonder what could be done differently, but as the flashing final score lingers, there’s nothing left to do but smile, shake hands, and look forward to the next match. Memory of the previous battle may be painful, frustrating, or in the best-case-scenario, encouraging; but all these sensations ultimately build up the next stage for you to shine on. For everything that delivers an outcome – there’s a sense of finality. But if there’s anything to learn from Taekwondo, it’s that you can’t stand still and wait to be kicked. :]

I’m just popping in to show you guys a video from an exciting event at MIT last weekend. The Chinese Students Club (CSC) hosted their annual Chinese New Year Banquet. There were plenty food, skits, performances, and festive spirits – but the highlight came at the end. You see, this year, CSC (whose exec board includes our own Celena) brought Far East Movement (FM) to MIT’s Walker Memorial – you know, the same place I took both of my calculus finals. But on February 21st, the building was raging for very different reasons.

See for yourself.

[full]

Sorry for making y’all dizzy. :P A tidbit of info on this electrobop/hip-hop/rap group: FM’s songs have been featured in “So You Think You can Dance”, “America’s Best Dance Crew”, “Entourage”, “Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift” and more; they also recently toured with LMFAO. FM ended the performance @ MIT with their new song, “Go Ape.”

On a similar note, the Student Activities Office is bringing hip-hop/funk group N.E.R.D to campus for Spring Weekend. Last year, I waited four hours in the rain to see N.E.R.D. I would absolutely love an encore – but this time, under the protection of Johnson Athletic Center --

This is simply a dream. One of the most exciting things about partaking in art-related anything is the sheer range of supplies you get to use! Although all of the above goodies are complementary with the class, I still need to go out and buy fome-cor this weekend. Not complaining…yet. I really hope expenditures for 4.111 materials will be manageable as I can no longer depend on the parental units for feeding this creative money-sucker habit of art-making. (OK - a classmate just informed me that we could quite possibly be charged a lab fee ...but oh well, a sketchbook is a sketchbook!!! :P)

The following is a crop of the syllabus we got for studio this semester.

The purported “blizzard” that otherwise left 49 of the 50 US states covered somewhere in snow last week, forgot about dear Boston. But this past Tuesday brought an actual blizzard that killed our plans again. In the shot above, Professor Bill Hubbard describes our sad 4.111 week.

So essentially, today was the first real session of studio, and we…

practiced drawing a regular floor plan of our lecture space, just to get acquainted with representing a real 3D space on paper…

practiced drawing a section plan with a little person inside, as to imagine a body inhabiting a space...

and learned about our first project: we’re given a long stretch of lake-front space and a single wall, as shown above, and essentially have to design an environment for one person’s perfect reading experience – taking into account sunlight and shadows, views, the estate close by, etc.
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One thing I realized during the 3-hour process was that I need to use the materials now! No more saving everything for later, long-lasting use! Architecture is about to take over my life, and it should... I'm beginning to experience the huge transition from taking mostly GIRs to classes in something you want to commit to. Commitment is scary, guys! (End/rambing)
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More pictures! :)

Our workspaces! Equipped with drawing/cutting boards and T-squares!

The knife with which I will do much damage. :P

Sam '12, revelling in his new sketchbook.

An overhead drawing demo during lecture.
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Lastly, Prof. Hubbard used drafting dots during a demo, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Who knew something made of some puny paper and plastic can be so perfect! They’re like Pez dispensers for drafting dots! Drafting dots, by the way, are used to mildly tape down tracing paper and the like. I have a feeling I'll be using lots of those.

Hooray for second and last half of the week! ☺

7.013 – Introductory Biology (a GIR class)

I’m ALWAYS excited to take biology, but that interest usually fizzles out into indifference somewhere not too deep into the course. I think this has something to do with the science education track in American schools. I had learned some basic biology in 6th grade, some more in 7th grade, for a whole year in 9th (including some intense cramming for SAT Biology as I’m sure many of you are aware), and then hardcore AP Biology in 12th. It’s like – I know what meiosis and mitosis are, and why there is photosynthesis or ATP, but I can’t really tell you too many details. Yet when AP Biology came along, during which I’m supposed swallow down all the details, I felt already jaded by this subject that seems to always bounce back. But every time I have to take biology again, I’m excited again, since both of my parents are in the biology field – and well, I have lots of respect for their work.

I hope MIT’s 7.013 will be different, in that the professor will be engaging, the class less distracted than in AP Bio, and I myself more buckled down to memorize details. But speaking of which, I think I’m even more excited to see how MIT does biology. 18.01A-18.02A psets were definitely nothing like what we had in AP Calculus. How will 7.013 psets emphasize problem solving?

4.602 – Modern Art & Mass Culture (a HASS-D,CI-H subject)

We had our first lecture yesterday, and to be honest, I was a little bit unpleasantly surprised. It seemed a lot like an Art History class, where pictures of famous or not-so-famous works are shown on the projector screen …and we talk…about it… I’m hoping that as the lectures go on, the “mass culture” portion will be adequately incorporated, because I’m more interested in how the evolving art world impacts every other aspect of society – education, recreation, commerce, politics, etc. – rather than a straightforward discussion of so and so modern artist’s characteristic technique. But with that said, I have everything to learn in this class, since I’ve never actually studied art in a books and concepts kind of way.

8.02 – Physics II – Electricity & Magnetism (also a GIR)

Oh, physics. This is probably the class I’m least looking forwards to. Lots of equations, calculations, math-like things. Not to mention it’s held in a basement – with no windows, or fresh air. At least it’s under Stata. But!!! I'm crazy excited that the classical theory of electromagnetism includes cool natural phenomena like the aurora borealis!!! I’m also happy that this class is not graded on a curve, which means what I give is what I get. It’s going to be hard, but at least I know I got most of the freshman class there with me. ☺

Well, I saved the best for last, didn’t I?

4.111 – Experiencing Architecture Studio

As I might have mentioned before, I will declare Course 4 – Architecture at the end of this semester. Which means! That 4.111 is the first studio in a sequence of studios I will have to take for the degree. 4.111 basically introduces design and basic architecture techniques to course 4 majors, minors, or just anyone interested. We had our first meeting today, and there were students cross-registered from Wellesley and Harvard – which is pretty cool. The class will be a mix of lectures and studio time – during which we complete model projects responding to tasks somewhere along the lines of “design a space for reading that overlooks something” – that’s the first assignment, in fact. The roughly 50 students in the class are divided into cohorts of 9, and each student will get his or her own work space and locker drawers!

In my fantasies, I imagine 4.111 being like Project Runway, where designers create their projects, meet some challenges along the way, but ultimately stand before the judges (in this case “reviewers” who may be graduate students or industry professionals) to defend their work and get evaluated. But I've also heard horror stories about studio students disappearing as the semester moves along, spending the night at their work spaces, etc. But for now, I’m just looking forward to next week – when I will meet my workspace and cohort and first lecture and first project! And you can look forward to a more detailed, photo-documented post about 4.111 in a week or two. Wheeeee.

I don’t want to go a post without visuals, so here’s my favorite discovery of the day. Anyone have a guess where these two adorable chairs are found? I’m so in love.

P.S. How awesome is it that this entry is entry # 4111.....woot.

And now, I’m going to practice saying goodbye to Pass-No Record and start embracing real grades (ABC’s) for the 2nd semester. I'm going to grade my IAP.

The following is a hypothetical but unembellished report card. ☺

*click

Let’s see – 3 F’s and 2 C’s? What!!! Second-semester can’t be like this!

Okay, so the report card was just for fun, but the serious question to ask is: Where did all the glorious IAP time go? This seems to be a popular question popping up on Facebook statuses lately. For me, 18.02A was the obvious culprit, but I can't help but mention some other preoccupations that edged into those rare un-mathematical intervals of time.

To start:

I had never realized that my gummy vitamins were bear-shaped, that my Tupperware was microwave-safe, and that those green furry soybeans are called edamames

But then I learned, and now my food/grocery awareness improved just a little bit; still can't get over how exotic edamame sounds.

I didn’t plan on getting this bruise, and several others:

But then I did, and surprisingly I'm loving Taekwondo more and more everyday - despite the customary twinkling of fear before each practice. Taekwondo during IAP sucked up nearly 9 hours every week, but thank god for it I'm pulling my weight in getfit@mit. With every sore leg, bruised foot, and scratched elbow, I feel it's harder and harder to turn back and say "I don't want to do this anymore". And about that, I'm very excited.

I didn’t know there was a mulberry tree a little farther up Charles River:

But then I found one. One morning before calculus lecture, I power-walked along the Charles to put in some minutes for getfit@mit. I was happy to find that near the Boston University bridge, there are a couple of mulberry trees in a little park-like setting right next to an industrial overpass. This was an interesting find, precisely because I want to study the intersection between architecture and urban planning that improves the look, feel, and functionality of every precious space in the modern city.

It feels good to rematerialize the bygone times.
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Anyways, I gathered from this IAP that planning well and aiming high is really important - but prioritizing at the right times could be critical. If 18.02A was a fail, I would probably be freaking out under a pillow right now.

But it wasn't - so Happy February!

getfit@mit challenges teams of 5 to 8 people to log the most number of minutes exercised each week. Participants must enter their minutes every day, Monday through Sunday. There are weekly prizes for eligible teams and individuals drawn at random – “eligible” meaning they are meeting the steadily increasing weekly exercise goals suggested by the program (shown in the image below.)

In 2009, almost 2,300 people on 300 teams logged over 7,000,000 minutes of getting-fit-@-MIT. Those are some big numbers.

It’s easy to see why. Smack-dab in the middle of IAP – when everyone is trying to relax but feel relatively productive, nothing sounds more attractive than hopping on the “Wooo! Let’s get fit!” bandwagon. When Molly first sent out the email to the floor, a few people responded…and then tons more. What started out as plans for one team became three full teams of eight, divided by suites.

So what’s going to be my plan for this challenge? According to the official rules page of the program website, “Any physical activity done at a level that increases the heart rate and/or challenges the muscles will count as exercise”. Well, the possibilities seem endless now, don’t they. Most of my minutes will probably come from Taekwondo. If I go to Monday practices, that’s 150 minutes. If I go to Monday and Wednesday practices, that’s 300 – add the Friday practice, Saturday Office Hours (yes! There are office hours for Taekwondo), and an occasional treadmill date in there, well …Bring it on.

We start logging minutes on Monday, January 25th ----- all the way until April 18th. By then, working out should be an established habit.

Cheers to a healthy & vivacious second semester!