Saturday, September 25, 2010

First week!

Another epic first week of school. I have to say, this has definitely been one of the weirdest, most jam packed, and exhausting first week of school ever. I guess part of me still feels like I'm somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. There is still a lot of work to do for the ESW project but I didn't quite expect to be doing so much right after getting back to Stanford.

Monday and Tuesday, I went to a lot of classes. Both days ended with doing ESW stuff. I was really conflicted about my classes after Tuesday because I felt like I went to good classes both days. But I decided on classes Wednesday afternoon after talking to some more people about my choices. Usually I do whatever people tell me NOT to do. But I think I'm going to try out this "listening to advice" thing. Might be a good idea. Anyway, classes that I am taking this quarter:

GES 283: Soil Physics
CEE 280: Advance Structural Analysis
GP 160: Intro to Computing in Earth Sciences
Independent study for the ESW project

As you can see, the three classes that I am taking are all in different departments. I'm so glad I chose to go to school in a place where they are flexible about graduation requirements. I mean, I really think you should get a lot of freedom in class choices when you're doing a Masters degree. At this point, you should know what you want to do (to some degree) and tailor your learning to what (you think) you want to do in the future.

I went back home Wednesday night. I woke up Wed morning pretty convinced that I was going to go to some Thursday classes and therefore, unable to make it home. But all my classes are on MWF so I decided to go home Wed afternoon and got to spend mid-autumn festival at home with my family.

Thursday, I spent some time work on more ESW stuff and organizing in general. At night I went to a SFGI awards talk. Most of the topic was over my head but I had seen some of it before through working at Arup. I think I really need to do some studying in the subject of soil dynamics and seismic soil stuff. Seems extremely important for working in a seismic area.

Came back to Stanford Friday morning. Had to get up at 6:45am in order to take BART, MUNI, and Caltrain back. All three public transit systems worked very smoothly since it was rush hour and it didn't feel like I was in transit very long. The Stanford shuttle though, was another story. That thing is so slow. At least all three shuttles were waiting for Caltrain passengers when we got off the train. They were all available and ready to go.

I had class until 11am, went back to my dorm for a little bit, and then went back onto campus again carrying a giant poster. I feel like I'm always dragging weird stuff across campus. After dropping off the poster, I went to stand in the really hot sun for 4 hours, recruiting for Stanford Splash at the undergrad activities fair. Because this is California, the activities fair is outdoors. It was super sunny with no clouds in sight. I got sunburnt.

I was really tired and dehydrated after this and headed off to the CEE grad welcome reception. There was food and friends to catch up with. It was really good. Didn't managed to meet a whole lot of new students though. Oh wells, getting old. And then, I went with Joanna to a IEEE BBQ where we were amazed by the amount of guys in attendance. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise by now but it somehow still is. Then, I went home to my roommate's birthday party where I tried really hard to stay awake because I was super tired by that point. People went off to the Rains Welcome Back party afterwards but I couldn't get myself to go outside again and went to sleep instead.

1 comment:

yalu said...

hm seems really busy. also seems like really intense classes...