DID YOU KNOW? The airport in Portland, Oregon has free wireless.

I have discovered this on my way back from a West Coast chemical engineering graduate school of some repute. My return flight through Chicago was cancelled due to Chicago being buried under 20 stories of golfball-sized hail with frogs inside. Or at least that's what I have chosen to believe. So I'm flying back to Boston by way of Portland, Oregon and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. No, I don't know why. Perhaps The Madman Who Makes People Fly had something to do with my flight scheduling.

Anyway, as I see it, I've got three things to celebrate:
1. Free wireless
2. Jennifer Hudson just won an Academy Award
3. I am eating french fries dipped into Frosty right now and they are delicious

So, to celebrate, tomorrow I'm going to update this entry to blog about my CLASS SCHEDULE for this term! In the meantime, I'll be reading Schachnovelle by Stefan Zweig on my overnight redeye (or are those two things mutually exclusive?).

Catch you on the East Coast!

--

Word. So, my visit went pretty well--although I was a little surprised by how different the school's research philosophy was from that of MIT, I guess after four years it might be nice to get a different perspective on my major. Plus, you can't really beat the weather--I ran up what must have been 2,000 miles of hills with MIT alum Priya '05 on Saturday wearing only shorts and a t-shirt. In February! Anyway, the worst part of the whole ordeal was the 25 hour odyssey it took to get from my hotel room to my bed in Burton-Conner.

It took me over 5 minutes to spell the word "odyssey" correctly.

Anyway, as promised, here are my thoughts on my (three) classes this term. Hey, I must be 66% as awesome as Bryan!

10.392J: Fundamentals of Advanced Energy Conversion -- What a cool name for a class. I feel so smart just being in a class with that name, to be honest. Anyway, so far it's just been a review of all the energy and thermodynamics classes that I've already taken, except kind of stuck together, like maybe spot-welded together. But in the end Joe '08 and I get to write an AWESOME 20-page report together, which should be really fun because he's a junior and still cares about grades! This is also the first grad class that I'm taking on purpose at MIT.

10.491 -- Integrated Chemical Engineering II -- I found out this weekend that every other school in the country just calls this "design" or "process operations," but at MIT, where all but the hardest classes are designated with numbers, it just sounds so much more fearsome to call it "ICE." Anyway, ICE isn't actually as hard as it's made out to be. In fact, I wish I could take it for the next 8 semesters; that way I would eventually be in "ICE-nine." Oh man, I'm clever. But seriously, folks, this class rocks this term. Instead of using some made-up data for our project, we're modeling actual coal plants using Aspen and contributing to an MIT Coal Study that will actually be presented to the US Department of Energy by our professor. How bad can that be?

21F.404: German IV -- OH MAN THIS CLASS IS SO HARD. Seriously, it's stomping a mudhole in me. I think the problem is that German I, II, and III were mostly filled with Americans who were learning broken German, and then they all decided to stop taking German, leaving Ling and I stuck with a bunch of native speakers who use the phrase "überhaupt nicht" like it's going out of style. Luckily, I have one more Junior-Senior P/D/F option left. Also, as a point of interest, the Chinese department introduced the streamlined option to prevent native speakers from making everybody feel as depressed as I do, every single day in German IV.

See any other interesting classes in the course catalog that you could recommend to me? Guess what? I'm not going to take them! Whoooo! Seniors!

But do like Marilee Jones said and don't stop working just because you got into MIT--you have to wait until you get into grad school before you can start slacking.