Lizard!

My friend Matt and I are living together in a Sontag suite next year. We've been looking into pets for a little while now (Matt wants a pet that he'll have for a long time, and I'm fine helping him take care of it), and we've decided on a blue-tongued skink. This is because blue-tongued skinks are awesome.

Why are they awesome, you ask?

First, they get to be a decent size. They grow to be about 2 feet long. Like this one:



That means they'll eventually get longer than Matt's dog. Wild!

Second, they are omnivores. Their diet is a little over half plant material, and a little less than half meat. This is different from other popular lizards, like the iguana (an herbivore) and the monitor lizard (a carnivore). You can feed them collard greens, mustard greens, mangos, worms, and mice. Neat!

Third, as you may have guessed, their tongues are blue. And unlike other color-named animals (like the "red-tailed hawk", which is really the "reddish-brownish tailed hawk"), it's a really bright blue:



Fourth, they are generally both pretty laid-back and pretty smart. We are pretty sure that the combination of those two factors makes them awesome.


Anyway, we are really excited about getting a blue-tongued skink! We've been doing our research to find out what they eat, what they look like, how long they live (30 years! Matt says he is fine taking care of a lizard for that long), what we should keep them in, and so on. We'll spend about the next month or so looking for good places to get equipment (heat lamps, substrate, food--although apart from things like superworms we can get most of it at a grocery store for humans, tank, UV lamp, sun rock, hiding places...), and then buy it once I have a car (around the 18th of July). We will hopefully be picking up the lizard around the 31st of July, so that will give us two weeks to buy the tank, set it up, test temperatures and humidity, and fix things if we need to.

We are getting a lizard!

The Perils of Cooking Regularly

As I mentioned earlier, I'm on the 8-meal plan. At the beginning of the semester, I was "making" my own breakfasts and lunches, and eating dinners at the Hoch. This wound up working not quite so well. Breakfast was not the problem---I just need to eat a non-zero quantity of food, which is usually a bagel or a bowl of cereal. The problem was lunch. I would make myself a sandwich, or a veggie dog. While these were delicious and nutritious choices, I would wind up being hungry again halfway through the afternoon, when on most days I have class until 5:30 or so. Now, I'm eating lunch at the Hoch, and making my own dinners. Again, I'm using the term "making" fairly loosely. I usually have some kind of pasta + some kind of sauce + some kind of frozen vegetable, or some kind of instant meal from the grocery store. The funny thing is, even with instant food, this is still cheaper than eating at the Hoch. Each meal at the Hoch costs about $10, if you divide the number of meals in your meal plan by the amount of food you eat. A box of cereal, a half-gallon of milk, a few pounds of pasta, some veggies, and some boxed food come out to about $30 a week. My food-cooking system is therefore lazy, but economically sound.

Starting School

And the school year begins again!

My schedule this semester is fairly abnormal. I'm taking two core classes that I've never taken before (since I dropped E&M my sophomore year, I never took it as far as the registrar is concerned), two off-campus humanities classes, one off-campus CS class, and two on-campus "classes" that meet once a week and are worth 1/3 the credits of a normal class. So even though I'm in my 5th semester, I'm not in a full-credit in-major course on campus. On the plus side, this semester increases the number of campuses I've taken a real class at by 3: my logic and computing class is at Pomona, my music theory class is at Scripps, and my history/gender studies class is at Pitzer. If you count PE classes, then by the end of this semester I will have taken a class at every single one of the 5C's.

Other things I am doing this semester:
--I'm the GameSHMC treasurer! That means I'm in charge of buying club video games, club board games, and food for club events.
--I'm running ITR Games, which vaguely resemble tag. We play them in the rather maze-like basement of the academic buildings. When I told the deans that we were holding the first ITR Games a few weeks ago, they asked us to make sure the doors were shut when we were done. In general, the administration here trusts students to not break things, and to tell people when the do. Which means we get to run around in the basement on Friday night.
--I'm grading CS70, the data structures class that I took last semester. It's a pretty big time commitment (about 8 hours a week) but it's a lot of fun. I get to tutor underclassmen! Huzzah!
--I'm also still a CS staffer. One of the jobs of CS Staffers is to name computers when they come in, so that we can keep track of machines when "the third one from the left side of the counter" becomes "the computer we put upstairs." When we got a bunch of new computers the week before school started, I named them all after flowers.

Also, I am living in Sontag, on the 8-meal plan. This means I have dinner at the Hoch and I make my own lunches and breakfasts. Which I am about to do now.

Summer At Mudd

I've been at Mudd most of the summer, working as a staffer for the CS department. (Yes, that's what I did for part of last semester. And I'll keep doing it in the fall.) My big project for this summer was writing inventory tracking software that could talk to a Bluetooth barcode scanner, so that the CS department can keep track of its stuff with minimal effort on the part of humans. I spent about 2 weeks writing the initial software and another 2 weeks working out the bugs, and last week, we declared it initially finished. This is my first really big software project, and I'm really excited that it actually works in the way we intend it to. That's something that's surprisingly hard to do, so this is a big accomplishment for me.

Over the summer, I've been living in Sontag, the dorm I'll be living next year. I had a single for most of the summer, which was about the size of a very large table. On the plus side, I had a suite lounge with a couch and a TV, and I had a kitchen---vitally important when you're off the meal plan, as you are all summer. A few days ago, I moved into my fall room, and another person moved into my summer room. I had a little more than 24 hours to move all of my stuff, and I agreed to take care of a few things (like a set of Guitar Hero drums) for some friends, so my suite is mostly full of boxes at this point. After last Friday, when the last summer resident moved out, I've had the suite all to myself. Since I'd been living with 3 other people for the rest of the summer, this feels pretty weird. To counteract the weirdness, I've been cooking with a friend of mine who has an apartment about a quarter-mile away from Mudd. So far, we've made lasagna, macaroni and cheese, eggplant parmesan, enchiladas, and curry. Our food has been pretty tasty so far, and also creates enough leftovers that we can eat it for two or three nights.

School starts in two weeks, and when it does, my brother will be living in Case as a freshman. I'm really excited for him!

What Do You Learn In CS70?

My parents keep asking me what exactly it is that I learn about in CS70. This question was hard to answer until class last Wednesday. We had an in-class review session where we wrote down topics we'd learned about on sticky notes, and then stuck them on the blackboard and arranged them into categories. (Clicking on a picture will take you to a larger image.)

A Week in the Life

For next week's post, I will answer questions. If you have a question you want me to answer, leave a comment here, or send me an e-mail ( sberghel [at] hmc [dot] edu). I will then answer the question on this blog! If you want me to send you a reply and not put your question here, that's OK too.

I will also talk about jobs next week. Stay tuned.

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In case you were wondering what a week at Mudd is like, here's mine. I'm taking 16 credits worth of classes (essentially 5 + 1/3 classes), and I have two jobs.

Monday:
I have 3 classes--a core math class (which changes every half-semester), a biology lecture, and a CS class on programming, data structures, and code style (referred to at Mudd as "CS70", or simply "70"). I have a dinner meeting for one of my jobs, and then I finish the larger of the two Algorithms assignments, which is due Tuesday. I also meet with my partner for CS70 and do some work. (All work in CS70 must be done in pairs. While this limits the time that I can do my homework for that class, it also means that we can help each other figure out what we're doing wrong. Since the class homework mostly revolves around writing and fixing complicated code, pair programming actually makes the class easier.)

Tuesday:
I have two classes---my algorithms class, and a macroeconomics class. Until recently, I also had a class that met in the late afternoon on Tuesdays only. (That's the 1/3 of a class referred to earlier---there's not a lot of homework, and the class meets once a week for 2/3 of the semester.) I meet with my CS70 partner again, and do more work. I also get started on the smaller of the two weekly Algorithms assignments.

Wednesday:
In addition to my Monday classes, I have another dinner meeting---this time for the class that I'm grading. If my partner and I aren't done with CS70 yet, we work until 11:59 (since homeworks for this class are due at midnight) or until we're finished, whatever comes first. I then finish my Algorithms homework (due Thursday), and start on my math homework if I have time.

Thursday:
Thursday is when my week starts lightening up. I only have two classes, and I have no homework due Fridays. I usually work on my math homework and run errands in the afternoon. At night, I hang out, goof off, or (usually) both. Since some of my friends are seniors who don't have morning classes on Friday, the biggest challenge is to get to bed at an appropriate time for a morning class.

Friday:
I have a math class in the morning, and a staff meeting at noon. My CS70 partner and I start work on the next assignment before dinner. After dinner is free time, which I usually spend hanging out with my friends.

Saturday:
Afternoons are for math and algorithms homework. Nights are for doing many things that are not homework, including going to the grocery store. (Vons, the local grocery store chain, closes at midnight.)

Sunday:
Like most Mudders, I spend Sundays doing work--in this case, math and Algs, since both are large assignments due at the beginning of the week.

The post scheduler appears not to have published my post from last week. That's odd. I'll see if I can recover it after classes today.

I've heard admissions decisions are out! As always, people with questions about Mudd can either leave them on my blog or e-mail sberghel [at] hmc [dot] edu.

Note: I plan on updating at midnight Friday night (technically 0:00 Saturday morning) from here on. This means I can write my blog post either Thursday or Friday night, when I don't have homework to do, and then have Google publish it at midnight. If I decide to write other posts, they would probably go up at midnight on Sunday or Tuesday nights, depending on when I write them.

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I have a summer job! I'm doing staff work for the Computer Science department. Basically, it will be my job to make sure that the computers work, and to fix them if they don't work. There's usually a big "project" that the staff does over the summer, but I'm not sure what that will be yet. If I had to guess, I'd say we would be writing a new inventory tracking system.

I'll know by next week where I'm living in the fall. I have a roommate for next semester, and we want to have a kitchen if at all possible. We're hoping to get an efficiency in Atwood, which is a double with a stove top, a kitchen sink, and a refrigerator and freezer. We're picking a room halfway through when rising juniors (current sophomores) pick a room, though, so we might not get one.

Spring break has just happened, and work hasn't really picked up much since then. The one exception is my Data Structures/Programming class, which has most of its difficult assignments in the middle of the semester. We'd been working on this assignment for 8 hours already, but still couldn't get our code to run until half an hour before it was due. People who have taken the class before tell me that the hardest assignment is next, and then the rest are relatively easy. This should work out nicely, since work in other classes tends to pick up a few weeks before finals are due.

Later tonight, I'm going to the April Fool's ITR games. ITR games, by tradition, are passed down by word of mouth, so the most I'm going to say about them is that they're like a very, very complicated version of tag. The April Fool's games are even sillier than usual.

I might update in the middle of the week with a post about jobs and Mudd, and how the two work together.

New Semester

I guess it's time to start blogging again, now that the semester has begun in earnest.

The trip to England for my Dickens-Hardy class was really fun. We spent our first week in London. My roommate for the trip and I went to the British Museum, Hyde Park, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, and a lot of other places during our free time. The class did a lot of walking tours in London that were Charles Dickens-themed: we got to see the different places that Dickens lived and worked, as well as the places he wrote about. We also spent time wandering around London---we had unlimited-ride tube passes, so even if we got really far away from the hotel, we could get back without walking too far.

We then spent a week in Dorset learning more about Thomas Hardy. We saw the cottage where he grew up, the house in which he lived later in his life, and quite a lot of the landscape that he wrote about. We also got rained on quite a bit, which was part of the fun.

It's very strange being back in California. It's light out for much longer than it was in England, it's always above freezing, temperatures are in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius, it's not raining nearly as much, and I can't spend an hour walking in any direction and then catch a once-every-3-minutes tube to get back home.

This semester is looking to be substantially less brutal than last semester. My hardest two classes this time around are probably CS70 (a data structures / programming design course) and Algorithms. Algorithms is very fun so far---the professor is quite clearly excited about the course material, and his enthusiasm is contagious. My Economics class is looking like it won't be too hard. The Core Math course I'm in right now is enjoyable---it's another class taught by an enthusiastic professor. (I'll be changing courses at the half-semester mark to a new Core Math class with a new teacher.) I haven't been in Biology class more than once thusfar, and therefore can't really make a judgment on the course just yet.

I'm hoping this semester I'll have more free time than last semester, which I spent most of either doing homework or sleeping (but mostly doing homework). We'll see how that goes.

In closing, here is a picture of my tour group at Stonehenge.

Choosing a Major, or, What Can Indecision Do For You?

A few weeks ago was the deadline for 3rd-semester declaration of majors. (Mudd has two deadlines -- you have to declare by sometime in the spring of your sophomore year, but if you want an advisor in your major when you're choosing your 4th-semester courses, you need to turn in your form around the end of October.)

A lot of the people here know what major they want to be by the time they get here. (This doesn't necessarily mean they know what major they're going to be, though. For example, when I came to Mudd, I knew I wanted to be an engineering major. One year later, I had realized engineering wasn't for me, and I declared for CS a few weeks ago.) Not everyone does. (If you want an anecdotal non-representative sample, of my friends here at Mudd who are in my grade, about 1/3 declared for the major they thought they wanted when they were new frosh, 1/3 are deciding between their original choice and another major, and 1/3 are considering a double or joint major with their original choice and another major.) So while a lot of sophomores have stuck with the major they preferred as frosh, a lot more are asking upperclassmen how to keep their options open.

This is both easier and harder than it sounds---it's not particularly difficult if you're trying to decide between, say, CS and Math. Those two majors have a lot of overlap, and you can even have a joint CS-Math major if you enjoy the intersection of the two. However, if you're trying to decide between Chemistry and Engineering, it gets more difficult. The two majors share no classes, and it's strongly suggested that you start preparing for each major early (by 2nd semester in the case of Engineering, or 3rd semester in the case of Chem). This isn't to say it's not doable, but it will be difficult.

There are also people who come to Mudd and then decide on a non-science major. Again, this isn't too tricky to do. I have a friend who recently decided to be a Literature major with a math minor. (At Mudd, you're either a science major with a humanities "concentration"---which is like a minor---or you're a humanities major with a science minor.) The most difficult part, according to her, is meeting with a professor from another campus to discuss your major. Because of the way Mudd is set up, a humanities major is an off-campus major---so my friend is a literature major via Pomona now.

On the other hand, I have a friend (who's a junior) who was a physics major and a math major, and decided to be a CS major sometime around the beginning of this semester. He'd already taken CS60 (the intro-level, non-core CS class), so he didn't need to "catch up." (With its chain of prereqs, you have to start taking CS60 in your 4th semester to finish the CS major without overloading/pain.) So, long story short, you don't have to know what major you are until your 4th or 5th semester, so long as the classes you're taking will "work" for all the majors you want to be.