The past week has been ridiculous. so many things going on, so much homework to do, and not enough sleep. Here's a break down of what I did...

E80 Research: Friday 1:00-5:00 pm
Run to 21 Choices: Friday 5:00-5:30pm
API-SPAM retreat: Friday 5:30 pm-Saturday 4 pm
Knocked out: Saturday 4pm - Saturday 6:30 pm (missed a Newspaper I was supposed to be in charge of -_-)
Food + trying to wake up: Saturday 6:30 - Saturday 8:30 pm
More E80 Stuff: Saturday 8:30 - 10:30 pm
Micro-P's lab: Saturday 10:30 pm - Sunday 2:30 am
Sleep: Sunday 2:30 am - 9:30 am
Electronics HW: Sunday 10:30 am - 11:00 pm
Hum reading/falling asleep: Sunday 11:00pm - 3:00 am
Sleep: Monday 3:00 am - 9:00 am
Electronics Office Hours: 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Class: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
Lunch Meeting: 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm
Class: 1:15 pm - 5:30 pm
Dinner/finish up hum reading: 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
~~~~~ OMG I'M ONLY ON MONDAY~~~~~
Class: 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Frustrated with Micro-P's lab: 10pm - 3:30 am
Sleep: Tuesday 3:30 am - 8:30 am
Class: 9:30 - 11:00 am
Fixing/finishing Micro-P's lab: 11:00 am - 3:45 pm

I'm too lazy to type up the rest but you get the point. I think the next few days will be better though.

I'm tired and don't want to be awake at all but we're about to get on busses to go launch rockets. Exciting!

Yes! Now you can enjoy my blog with minimal reading!

It was two of my friends' birthdays so a group of us went out to eat at a Mongolian BBQ place for dinner on a Saturday:



Hah! Look at Rishad's face:


Last Wednesday, it was Prof. Schaffer's birthday. He's one of my fav. professors so my friend Jessica and I had to do something for him (hehehe):




We also made him wear a sash ahhaahahahah. I was eating lunch with him that day:


In my continuum mechanics class, Professor Bassman was up to her usual antics and passed around cups filled with corn starch and water for people to play with. It's an example of a dilatant, non-newtonian fluid (its viscosity is really big with a high shear strain rate, low with a low shear strain rate). Scott Butters had a little too much fun:

Preface: These are my personal experiences. How the HMC workload affects someone is very much dependent on that person's habits. Factors like time management, how good you are at a particular subject, whether or not you're willing to ask for help, and more all play a role. It IS possible to get plenty of sleep and not get that stressed out about things here (but it's pretty rare). Also, I realize that complaining about academic work is silly compared to all the other worrisome things out in the world, but this is really what people talk about at mudd.

So, unfortunately, Harvey Mudd isn't all fun and games. This is a college that expects a lot out of you and you're going to have to work hard. Though it's probably not a completely adequate description of the pains and struggles of HMC, here's a brief overview of some obstacles I've faced here:

-I've gotten tired of work. No, not just tired... I've gotten to the point where I would beg for all the work to stop. There are times when I would have non-stop work for weeks in a row (this doesn't last all year, but it happens every once in a while). Even though I'm interested in math, science, and engineering, there's a point where I just want to leave all that and do anything non-academic. At Mudd, it's not uncommon for academics to consume you. I think it's probably built into the nature of our school.

-I've been completely defeated by assignments. This is something I've really never had to deal with in high school. Also, it was largely non-issue freshman year. However, starting sophomore year, I've had some assignments which have really gotten to me and "broken" me. What does this mean? Well, basically, it usually means having homework assignments with only about 6ish problems...but lasting me 6+ hours. It means doing a problem, finding a mistake, redoing the problem, finding another mistake, redoing it again, etc. ... and then moving on to the next problem and repeating the process (also, it means writing code that doesn't work, but also doesn't give errors, and then sitting around trying to figure out where you went wrong)

-I get disappointed with my grades sometimes. Maybe you already have a feeling of this already but here's the deal: most of the people who come here are at the top of their graduating classes and are used to getting A's with little to no effort. At Mudd, you really have to work HARD to get good grades. And a "good grade" is not necessarily an A, it might be a B. Also, it's pretty common to study hard for tests and get unsatisfying grades on them :(

-Because of an overload on work, I've lost (lots of) sleep. Sleep deprivation occurs often enough at Mudd that students abbreviate it as "sleep dep". It really sucks. The worst that I've ever had to go through was going without more than an hour of sleep at once for about 3 days... during finals week. I was falling asleep during my last midterm. Yeah... that was bad. Maybe I'll talk about it more later.

-Stress and sleep dep plays a strong negative role on your emotions. When I'm stressed out and worried about the massive amount of work that I have to do, it's much easier for me to get angry and annoyed at other people. I become less social and sometimes depressed. Not a great feeling.

So why do I put up with it? Well, even though the work can sometimes take a beating on me, I still really like the things I'm studying. Though not ALL of the material is interesting and some of it is just plain boring to me, I really do have very strong interests in engineering, math, and science. Some of the stuff I'm learning is really really cool and the "aha!" moments of engineering, math, and science are awesome. It's a weird mix of pleasure and pain haha.

In deciding whether or not Mudd is right for you, a big piece of advice I'd give to you is to evaluate yourself and think about how passionate you are with respect to the technical fields (of math, science, and engineering). I think, with little or no interest in the technical fields, you will probably not make it here. With a decent amount of passion, you can make it but it won't be a pleasant experience at all. With a strong passion, you'll make it through and you'll be as happy as you can be at a place like this.

This semester my schedule is awesome:



(I don't even have to meet for E8 yayyyy)

Homework due dates:
- Monday - E85 Labs
- Wednesday - E85 and E83 Homework
- Friday - Art 100 (Intro to Digital Photography) Homework

This probably doesn't seem like much but it's quite a bit. E85 Labs and E85, E83 Homework Assignments can take about 5 hours each. Also, I need to have E80 group meetings to prepare for our labs.

Last semester it suckeedddd cause I had a lot of core classes:

My bad for not updating in like... forever. Here are some videos for y'all to enjoy:

Here's my E80 lab group (minus one of the team members) working on one of our labs. I'll describe E80 in more detail in my next post but here's the basic jist of what we're doing:

The rocket that's in the video has thermistors in it, these are resistors which vary with different temperatures. Basically, you connect a voltage source to the thermistors and use these to get values of temperature with this thing called an RDAS (Rocket Data Acquisition System). The problem is that the RDAS outputs raw data, which is not the same thing as degrees Fahrenheit. That's why we need to calibrate the thermistors by gathering data from both the RDAS and high accuracy digital thermometers, which is what's happening in the video:



Also, I recently went to go see Justice @ The Mayan Theater in LA. It was sooooo amazing and crazy and intense. I was about three people away from the front. Here's some video of them mixing D.A.N.C.E.:

I have some plans for bigger posts soon but I've been running around and doing stuff non-stop so I haven't had too much time to sit down and blog. Right now I'm studying for my E85 (Digital Design and Computer Architecutre) midterm, which is tomorrow. Maybe if I take a study break I'll put something of substance up.

also: I got over my cold really quickly ^.^ yay for airborne (or a cheaper CVS copy)

So I think I'm getting sick which is no good. A bug has been going around the school and lots of people have been getting sick. This is a big fear among students especially because the pace of your workload at HMC doesn't give you much time to be in bed all the time (hah, I have to do a post about sleep deprivation sometime soon).

I hope I get lucky and get better soon. I have some midterms coming up blehhhhh.

Another little tidbit:
There are many email lists for the college which have different subscribers. There are, of course, lists for the entire student body, lists for graduating classes, lists for clubs, and lists for students enrolled in different courses. However, there are also two email lists per dorm. One is for more serious emails about dorm-related affairs. The other is a "dorm chat" list where all sorts of completely unserious emails get sent out. They're filled with anything from strange and gross youtube videos to incoherent banter. There's also a list called "community-l" (all the lists end in "-l"), which is a place where students can have serious discussions/debates about issues that they're interested in. Topics range from the role of diversity at Mudd to the strengths and weaknesses of the Room Draw system. There's currently some discussion on how free speech impacts the Claremont Colleges and what constitutes a "biased-related incident."

So I guess I fail at that whole "post everyday" thing haha.

Here's a little tidbit about dorm life:
Once a week, the various HMC dorms (North, South, East, West, Atwood, Case, Linde, and Sontag) have a dorm barbecue (different dorms can have it on different days). For the barbecue, the dorms get grills, charcoal, lighter fluid, patties, buns, quesadillas, etc. for the dorm residents to make burgers and other food with.

West (the dorm that I live in), has their dorm bbq every Sunday. It's a good way to hang out with other people in the dorm and you get some good, not-dining-hall food (I've made some delicious burgers at dorm barbecue).

If you don't know how to flip a burger, you'll soon find out how.

So my new plan for this blog is to try to post something about 6 times a week, with one of those posts being longer and elaborating on a particular topic. The other posts will be short and sweet. My intent is to meet my goal of catching things that "slip through the cracks," as I've stated before.

Woooo! We'll start with a short one:

So I'm working on my Math 63 (Linear Algebra II) homework right now. I'm a little stuck which has been frustrating, especially because I usually find my LinAl homework to be challenging but very doable. It kind of got to me a few hours ago, when I was getting a little angry about it. I had dinner at the dining hall with cool people though so that lifted my spirits.

Transitioning to Harvey Mudd can be weird because you will inevitably have trouble with technical courses. When I was in high school, I really looked forward to all my math and science classes because I liked them AND because the homework was really easy for me. At Harvey Mudd, it's not rare to find that the technical stuff is really the hardest stuff you'll face on any given night of homework. At times, it will create an extremely defeating feeling (Being the best at something -> Being the worst at something = T_T). In high school, I think I built up a sense of security and comfort through the math and science classes I was good at. Well, Harvey Mudd definitely tore those barriers down and showed me what it was like to be bad at math, science, and engineering classes. Bleh.

Don't worry though, there are many resources out there to help you when this happens. Academic Excellence tutors (special upperclassmen who help with core curriculum classes), regular tutors, your peers, and accessible profs (professors). You'll be fine ;)

... that was a longer post than I expected haha.

So it looks like some students infiltrated the career fair earlier today and set up a table for Aperture Laboratories.

Nice one.

"Who is this kid?":

My name is Michael Ho and I’m a sophomore engineering major with a humanities concentration of art. In addition to finishing up the core curriculum, I’m taking classes in continuum mechanics (solids and fluids), digital design and computer architecture (implementing a microprocessor), design representation and realization (making a tool tray, screwdriver, and hammer), and experimental engineering (launching a rocket and collecting data). Outside of class, I’m involved with the campus through The Muddraker, where I create the layout for Harvey Mudd’s newspaper, DOS Activities, where I plan goofy activities every week, API-SPAM, where I act as a mentor towards Asian/Pacific Islander freshmen, and the admissions office, where I lead tours and blog for all you wonderful prospective students. Finally, aside from all the crazy extracurricular activities, I enjoy live music, photography, sitting at my computer for long periods of time, and going out to eat.

Yay! So that's me.

"What are you babbling about?":

This blog will be chronicling my day-to-day adventures at good ol' Harvey Mudd College (often referred to as HMC or Mudd or life-suck (just kidding about that last one - maybe)). Yes, I know that last sentence had nested parentheses. Whatevs. You can do it in math so it clearly can't be wrong.

Anyways, this'll be a place for you to get some insight on what it's really like to be at Mudd. Hopefully this blog (and the others) will give you a sense of what goes on at this really strange place. From the dorms to the classrooms, from weekdays to weekends, I'll try to give you a taste of the entire Harvey Mudd experience.

"Why should I care about you and your silly posts?":

Geeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezzz. What's with the attitude?

You should care because, if it all works out according to plan, this blog will give you more information about Mudd than any tour, any brochure, any information booklet, any college counselor, or any online college resource site (wait... am I in this category?). This is due to the fact that other resources always fall short of completely describing what it feels like to be an HMC student (a Mudder, as we say it). For example, as a tour guide I know that tours can never be perfect. There are an endless number of student resources, activities, research projects, fun facts about the school, etc. so you simply can't fit it all into one hour. The blog will give me chance to tell you about the tidbits that sometimes slip through the cracks.

But really, all that stuff is superficial. Could you really determine whether you'd be happy or not by knowing the ratio of physics graduates moving on to doctorate studies or industry? If you said yes, I don't believe you and I'll just continue with my point :)

It's really important that Harvey Mudd is a good fit for you and vice versa. If you don't know what you're getting into, you might be very unhappy at Mudd because HMC is definitely not for everyone. This especially includes non-academic aspects of Mudd. For example, you might ask if you would find common ground with other Mudders or if you would feel alienated from the rest of the community. Clearly not an easy question to answer with an informational booklet.

Luckily, you have totally awesome people (us bloggers ^.^) who can help you out in this respect. By chronicling our thoughts, experiences, whatever, you should be able to figure out if you'd love it here or hate it here (or somewhere in between).

If we're not being helpful then PUUHHHLEAAAZZE ask us some questions. I'll try to answer anything you throw at me, even questions which are deliberately made impossible to answer.

Btw, I <3 xkcd (as do many of the people at Mudd):

Okay, I am very tired and need some sleep. Unfortunately, I need to do some research on companies and make copies of my resume for the career fair tomorrow. Arghhhhhasdjf;akjf;jah

Peace out.