A week in the life by Jessie L. '07

Sorry I haven’t updated in a while. This past week has been deathly hosing. So I will post about what I did this week – a sort of “sample week in the life of an MIT student” thing.

Psets/Projects
–7.03 (Genetics) pset, due Wednesday at 5pm (took 4-5 hours). This wasn’t too bad. It was inconvenient with everything else that I had to do.

–9.29 (Intro to Computational Neuroscience) pset, due Thursday at 10:30am (took about 9 hours). Yeesh. E&M neurophysics problems and Matlab implementations of mathematical models of neurons. I spent so many hours in the W20-5 Athena cluster writing Matlab code. I was sitting next to my friend Dennis ’08, who was doing something similar (in the “spending a lot of time on it” sense) with Java code because he’s in 6.170 (Lab in Software Engineering).

–5.12 (Organic Chemistry) pset, due Thursday at 4pm (took about 7 hours). Not as bad as the previous week’s pset. I like alkanes and rotating 3-D structures in my head more than I like resonance structures. But there was a lot more other stuff that I had to do this time.

–6.004 (Computation Structures) lab, due Thursday at midnight (took about 5 hours). Fun material. I’m thankful that there were more TAs than students in the lab on Thursday afternoon (and that one of them was my wonderful patient friend Kevin ’06). I’ve never done EE stuff before and it is interesting! But JSim is evil!

Quizzes
6.004 quiz, Friday at 10am. A quiz ten hours after my lab is due? How annoying! However, I thought it went well. And the MOSFET circuit design part of the lab was helpful studying for one of the quiz sections.

UROP
–2.5 hours on Monday
–2 hours on Thursday
–First half of required EHS training

Yeah, I’m excited to finally have a UROP. This was my first week and I couldn’t do much since I haven’t had animal safety training yet. Mostly I got to make electrodes. But it’ll be exciting. Maybe I’ll do an entry later about my UROP.

Meetings
UA Cabinet (Tuesday evening). This is the once-every-two-weeks meeting of the Undergraduate Association Exec (I’m the Vice-President) and committee chairs. It was mostly committee people talking about what was going to be in their fall budgets.

UA CoComm (Wednesday evening). This is the weekly meeting of the top people from the legislative (Senate) and executive branches of the UA – the “Coordinating Committee” or CoComm. I think these meetings are pretty torturous most of the time, but the bright spot is that I get to see cool people at them, like Mitra (the CoComm Facilitator) and Bryan (the Cabinet rep to CoComm). And those other cool CoComm people who aren’t bloggers. ;)

APO Chapter Meeting (Wednesday evening). APO is Alpha Phi Omega, a co-ed service fraternity. It’s a lot of fun. I have to go to the meetings, even if I’m hosed, because I’m the Administrative Coordinator, or AC, which means I have to take minutes.

Voodoo Planning (Friday evening). Voodoo is the campus humor magazine. I’ve never been involved with it before, but I always wanted to be. We came up with some funny ideas for satirical articles. You’ll just have to wait until the magazine gets published to hear what they are!

Other Things

APO Service Project (Saturday afternoon). A huge group of us (about 20 people) went to the National Braille Press to put braille type stickers on board books for young blind children. We worked for four horus and did 360 books. The lady from NBP was very impressed.

Reawakening (Saturday night). One of 5th East‘s big annual parties. We have Krotus, our Dark God who feeds on our suffering. Since term has started, our suffering has increased, so Krotus must be reawoken with a party, including a “virgin sacrifice” (Crystle ’07, my frosh-year roommate, who seemed to have a good time).

Juggling Club (Friday afternoon). Juggling is fun. I hadn’t gone in a while. I spent a lot of time playing with poi and chatting with Tucker ’07 (and occasionally swinging a poi at him when he made silly comments). If you go to the link I provided and look at the picture, I’m the one on the left, in the marroon jacket, holding the unicycle.

So yeah, that was my week. I’m sure I left out a few things too. Work hard, play hard.