Adventures aren't only for our students!

Minerva attracts the world's most adventurous students. As it turns out, Minerva also attracts the world's most adventurous professors.
Thanks for helping us on our Questival adventures, Professor Greene!

Bonne Pâques!

I'm writing this from a friend's house in Malibu.

A stage director/singer/broadway extraordinaire just left. He taught me how to sing the cadenza at the end of Think of Me from Phantom of the Opera. Me, a supposed second alto... hitting high F's and having a professional person in the music industry go, "Great!"

That's possibly the most uplifting, exciting, wonderful, great, fun thing I've done all year. It actually made my day. Apparently I can sing pretty well. Apparently I have great tone. Apparently I can sing soprano notes. The world is mine. :)

Awesome photo courtesy Nathalie David, the awesome French lady mentioned below.

Accompanying him were two French ladies (ok, I joke, one French lady and one Belgian - "but it's all the same, right?" we joked). In French, "Happy Easter!" is "Joyeuse Pâques!" but also "Bonne Pâques!" though no one says the latter. Mr. Broadway was trying to learn "Happy Easter!" in different languages, but got really hooked on "Bonne Pâques" — now it's slang for "What's up?"

It's going to happen. Just like wife cakes (à la Zoey, who coined it with Tanna) is going to happen.

That's my night in a nutshell, and it was really, really great. Such a great time. I'm so happy right now, about all of this.

(Shoulder) Standing on Top of the World

Yesterday, I went to a yoga class outside of my dorm. Yesterday, I also sang Rolling in the Deep to a person I'd met only a handful of moments before, but that's another story.

Yesterday, I went to a yoga class outside of my dorm. I had never been able to do a decent shoulder stand before then; this time, I actually didn't lose my balance! It sort of made me feel like I was standing on top of the world – shoulder standing on top of the world, that is.

For the people who don't know, I hack things (no, not in the illegal way). I build things and change them so that they are cooler, more useful, and other positive adjectives. I guess that this is my way of hacking yoga.

Yesterday, I had a whole lot more to write about. But I'm busy a lot. Writing often doesn't happen. I've been waiting for more MHacks snowball fight pictures to come out so that I can include them in my blog, but, for now, I'll just give a quick recap of the crazy hackathon I went to last weekend:

• We had a giant snowball fight (think 100+ people) in the middle of the night. It was my first snowball fight ever, and it was insane. There were Canadians. I was on the smaller team, but we had a shield. I will not say how it turned out.
• My team tried to integrate Google Glass and Myo (an armband that tracks your hand movements based on your muscle contractions) to create a hack that allows operators in control rooms of nuclear power stations to leave the facility during a meltdown, but still control the reactor's temperature to help mitigate (or even prevent) the meltdown. This would make this job a lot safer. It also has other uses––particularly in very hands-on jobs, when there are other things to do, typically done by another person, because the first person's hands are full––but this use was my favorite. This hack didn't work as well as we'd have liked and my teammates ditched me for a lot of the hackathon, which was unfortunate, but, hey... I learned Android in a weekend.
• There was a cup stacking competition. There were also a ton of Apple engineers who ordered so many cookies from Insomnia Cookies that the local Insomnia Cookies place now knows our name. There was also a make-your-own-hot-cocoa station and it was possibly one of the most wonderful things I have ever, ever encountered.

Anyway, that's what my life has looked like lately. Now, to bed.

Si

Si j'étais reine ou magicienne
Princesse, fée, grand capitaine
D'un noble régiment
Si j'avais les pas d'un géant

I'll keep this short and simple:

I went to my high school today for their annual awards ceremony. I couldn't help but feel a sense of surrealism as I was met with its familiarity; it was like being me, and sinking right into me, in a good way. If I were a bunny, I'd have flopped over in comfort (video here, it's adorable).

Afterwards, many people expressed that they thought that I would have won the trophy for most outstanding CSEC student. Perhaps this was my goal last year. But, this year, it has ceased to bother me. I didn't care enough for my exams earlier this year. I cracked a book only at the very last minute, and only to skim the notes I'd taken over the past two years to ensure that I, in fact, had a decent memory map of all these things in my head – that is, if I cracked a book at all, for some subjects. The person who won the aforementioned trophy devoted a lot of her time to studying, and took many extra lessons to improve her test-taking skills. But that's what standardized testing is: a test of test-taking skills.

Currently, I'm building a space-thing. Most of my peers have continued to the land of rote memorization (level two) – sixth form. But I am building a space thing. And that makes me happier.

Given the chance to "prepare" better for my exams, I wouldn't take it. I am happy with the choices I made – they gave me spare time to learn about things I found way more interesting than what we were learning in school, and such happiness afforded by this spare time learning is irreplaceable. I would do things exactly the same way again, without shame.

Currently, I'm building a space-thing. But that's only the beginning of my journey. I am ecstatic that it begins with this, no matter how it ends. I cannot trade this happiness for anything else, because happiness never was and never will be a type of currency.

This is just the beginning. But, someday, I'll have the steps of a giant.

The Road to MHacks V

Yay! I got accepted to MHacks V, one of the top collegiate hackathons in the world. (OK, admittedly, "the world" here consists mostly of North America, just like calling the SF Giants the "World Champs" really means that they only beat out the other US baseball teams. But it's still a massive hackathon with over a thousand people!)

What is a hackathon?

According to Google, "hackathon" is codeword for "collaborative coding party". In reality, thousands of people gather at a venue with their laptops, ideas, Arduinos, caffeinated drinks, and best coding skills to form many groups of 4-5 people and attempt to change the world through technology and programming.

Technology and programming? Change the world? What?
In my last post, I mentioned something I had built at a hackathon, called Lif³ (pronounced "life cube"). Well, let's elaborate.

In nerd-speak, Lif³ is a CubeSat bioreactor which is launched into space with an experiment of the user's choice inside for a time period specified by the user. While in space, Lif³ relays data on the experiment back to the user on Earth in near-real time using cloud-based analytics. This data can include – but is not limited to – temperature, video feed, and frequent pictures of the experiment as it is set up in the cube. Most other data will depend on the specific experiment (e.g. cell count or glucose concentration for cellular cultures).

Translation: Lif³ is a 10x10x10cm cube which can be launched to space in a rocket and grow organisms for scientific purposes. It allows users to conduct experiments in space, without the user actually being in space. All experimental data is measured by the cube and sent back to the user via the Internet.

Tl;dr: This cube fits in your hand and lets you do biology experiments from anywhere.

Lif³ has more applications than just science in space. It can have a huge impact on schools in which larger labs are inaccessible to students, since each student or class can run the experiment in a small, portable environment. The portability of this technology is great, but something the users don't even need to worry about, considering the cube sends all the data to the users in any place anyway.

Want to know more about this weird cube-thing some friends and I made? You can find our website here, but bear in mind that the website isn't completely finished as we're focusing more on building/completing features of the cube.

Lif³ won the wetware category of the Magnitude.io Space Hackathon and was awarded the privilege of a summer 2015 launch to the International Space Station.

More Crazy Inventions: MHacks V
I really want to go to MHacks so I can build more awesome things like Lif³. However, the MHacks organizers were unable to offer me travel reimbursement from San Francisco, CA to Detroit, MI. To this effect, I'm crowdfunding my way to MHacks here. If you have a couple bucks to spare, I'd love it if you could help me get there. (If everyone reading this gave $5, we'd be done in an hour.) Similarly, if you find a cheaper flight – send it my way. Even if you can't spare money, it'd be great if you could pass this campaign around to your friends.

After MHacks, expect an update on what I built. I'd offer periodic updates throughout the weekend, but hackathons are intense, and I will likely have no spare time. I'll try to jot down some progress notes as the weekend progresses, though, so everyone can see what goes into inventing something in 48 hours.

Until then, I'll be brushing up on my Javascript. :)

Reverie and Jubilee

Let me say this slowly.

I am not interested in education – well, that is, until I joined Minerva. Some kids here come from Studio Y, and were working on projects which explicitly involved education. Most notably, one of them was working on something EdTech-related (educational technology), and another was working on figuring out how to teach the least motivated students. I say "most notably" out of convenience/habit and only don't include the third Studio Y-er because I just don't know what she was working on there.

I am not one of these people. My interest in education is still only equivalent to me reluctantly dipping my toe in. At this point, I am interested in education out of necessity rather than passion. You have to be mildly interested in education if you're helping build a university, right?

Well, that's only partially right.

I am interested in learning. This is as selfish as my interests get. I am interested in learning so much that I can sit in my room doing math or learning a programming language all day, without actually noticing that it's been all day and I've in fact forgotten to eat. (I forget to eat often – not because I'm anorexic or I don't want to eat, but just because, when I am doing a task, I am very easily engrossed and compelled to complete it before getting up, because if I leave, I always have an excuse not to finish the task – but that's another story.)

Since I've been here, I've learned a few things. Unfortunately, one of those is not yet "how to feed myself and not eat cereal for three meals". I've learned some statistics. Some gorgeous, gorgeous statistics. If I ever had interest in giving up time that I could be working to do so, all the theoretical concepts – the ones for which we were told, "It's alright, you don't have to memorize these, only generally understand them," – would be plastered all over my dorm room walls. (Perhaps that is the difference between me and a friend down the hall who insists he wants to learn more math.)

But let me get back to my original statement: I am not interested in education.

Through Minerva, I've had the pleasure of meeting the wonderful Eliana Lorch. She stuck around for a couple of days before dropping out to accept her Thiel Fellowship. But in two days she reminded me that I am not interested in education–– in fact, I don't even like education, or edtech, or anything like that.

I like microbiology and genetics. I like knowing that DNA comes from 2-deoxyribose, and that the 5' end goes to the 3' end, and that telomerase makes me happy, though it sometimes makes people sad...

I like math. I don't exactly know what kind of math, but I'm pretty partial to calculus, and I know that I don't like applied statistics. I am not like Eliana, in that way. She enjoys using words like Kaprekar Routine, while I'd rather say things like, "Leibniz rule" and "Laplace transform"...

I don't like complex systems. I like the idea, but I would rather not spend all my time thinking about it when I could be learning quantum mechanics or anything else.

I don't like having an entire class based around communication. I understand that knowing how to communicate effectively is probably important, but I would rather not spend all my time reading an assigned novel that we barely even wind up using when I could be learning about partial derivatives.

I don't like the philosophy of science. I argued with one of the aforementioned Studio Y-ers about this. He was not satisfied with my answer of, "Yes, I get that it's probably important, but I am not excited to learn it." I was not satisfied with his answer of, "What are you talking about? It's the most exciting part of science because it's the most fundamental!"

I like statistics... but only in theory.

I know fairly specifically what I like. I am annoyed that I no longer have time to pursue it because I am always so swamped with assignments that I don't care enough for. (Side note on not caring enough: if you knew me in high school, you would know that I am an absolute perfectionist, to the point where I'd repeatedly re-write any lab assignments that we got to take home until the handwriting looked sufficiently neat. This resulted in me having a lot of scrap paper on which to do math. I only did this for subjects that I cared about. I now only dot my i's and cross my t's for any statistics papers I am tasked to write. My statistics papers get refined, although not as much as I would typically like. The other papers get thrown in exactly on the deadline, slightly aggravated that they aren't better, but also unwilling to spend extra time on them, even if I had the time.)

I am angry that I no longer pursue things I really adore because having all of my classes and schoolwork on my laptop means that I do not have the heart to keep looking at the screen after I am finished. Also, my headphones recently broke, and I do my most fun tasks in the middle of the night, while my roommate would prefer to sleep.

How is all of this related to anything?

Well, this is the weekend before finals week. We explicitly got the weekend off; we were told that students throughout the country were spending all 48 hours of this weekend cramming facts that they would likely not remember in the coming years, and that that was exactly what the Minerva staff did not want us to be doing. So we had no homework this weekend.

Having no homework this weekend made me run around like a chicken with its head cut off. I lazed around the residence hall and proposed ice skating ventures just because I actually did not have a clue what to do with all this free time.

And not instantly being able to fill free time with voluntary learning––as I typically would have been able to do before university––made me annoyed, and a bit sad.

How does Eliana relate to any of this?

Well, she had messaged the entire class this morning letting us know that she was leaving for the East Coast and then Portugal this Thursday, and that she wanted to see us before then. She linked to the same post that I linked to above when I mentioned her, and its details reminded me that I do not need formal education to learn.

When I was only slightly younger, I wanted to be like Jacob Barnett. I also wanted to go to MIT and double major in Molecular Biology and Computer Science. From then on, I decided that I would learn all the math that my brain could handle. I did math for fun in my spare time (and trust me, it was ridiculously fun). I learned new programming languages in the other part of my spare time. I had a lot of spare time. I can't remember doing homework that much in high school. Funnily enough, my math homework never got done in Forms 4 and 5. Ever. Alright, maybe once, but we were assigned such ridiculous volumes of repetitive things that I'd skim the chapter, ignore the problems, then ace the test. That was how I was. All homework except essays and labs got done the morning before the class, if I felt like doing it at all. My IT homework also never got done. I probably did two of the multitudinous assigned readings for the entire two years. I don't know how I placed first in that CSEC exam, because I ratched all the theory answers based on the standard response of "___ makes ___ more efficient". If any of you are teachers reading this who thought I put a lot of time into completing assignments for their class – I'm sorry, but there were genetics and cryptography courses to be taken. It's not that I didn't care for your efforts, but that the work was painstakingly mundane. I literally only passed any of your classes because I spent time learning how to take tests, and reading things about whatever we were studying on the internet. Also because I actually paid attention in class. Lots of it. I had no use for texting people under the desk, or talking to people during class. And because I asked questions. Sometimes these questions seemed oddly tangential or too high-level, but I promise they always made sense in my head. The never-ending series of "How?"s helped me structure information in my brain, even and especially when it was prefaced with, "Well, you don't need to know this for CSEC, but..." Those were my favorite kinds of answers. I promise. (My biology homework got done though. That genetics assignment got done the night we were given it – AKA about a month in advance of its due date. But my high school biology teacher already knew that.)

Learning all the math that my brain could handle did not have any hidden assumptions for the future. There was no clause of this agreement which said that I'd learn all the math that my brain could handle up until I went to university, at which point my exploratory learning process would freeze until further notice.

The guy down the hall that I mentioned earlier has decided that we are going to learn math together now. Our first topic will be partial differential equations. I am not too sure how much this will work because my most productive learning typically takes place in a pitch black room with no one else around. But at least it's some sort of motivation. If not motivation, then accountability. After never needing external motivation to do anything in my learning life, I am now relying on being accountable to someone else for continuing to indulge in something I truly love. It's almost ironic.

I'm going to start reluctantly wrapping this one up, because I have to leave my bed in about eight minutes.

Tonight, Minerva has invited us to some mystery event titled Reverie. It was done via cards emblazoned with the Minerva symbol stuck onto our door (probably by Lauren, our RA) while we were all planned to be at Minerva HQ for a feedback session. Our only instructions were, "Meet in the lobby at 7pm sharp. Dress warmly."

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, reverie is defined as:

rev·er·ie noun \ˈre-və-rē, ˈrev-rē\

: a state in which you are thinking about pleasant things

Full Definition of REVERIE

1:  daydream

2:  the condition of being lost in thought

I am not sure whether this experience has been a reverie, but I am excited to see what they have planned for tonight. I am always excited when I have to play Sherlock to know anything about an event, or when I have to be patient for something.

Let me say this, though: excitement does not always mean that the event will be surreal. Minerva tries very hard to incite surrealism in us, but, so far, for me, it has not worked by their design. I feel surreal only of my own accord. That is one thing that belongs to me. But I am still excited, if only to see what happens.

On Friday at the feedback session, we were informed that those of us who have a median score below a 2 (we are graded on a five-point scale, with a 0, meaning no data, also possible) will be assigned extra work over winter break. This work is actually optional. I do not have a median score below two in any of my classes. I have received probably one two for the entire semester. I have also received a crazy array of fours in my stats class. I am not sure how he grades these things, but I'm not complaining, either. Anyway – I don't have to be worried about having extra work.

But this extra, optional help was framed as a "jubilee". This is in fact help because, if anyone doesn't grasp concepts from this semester, they will be in ridiculous amounts of trouble next semester.

Last night, I learned (from Andrew, our fancy-word guru) that the original meaning of jubilee was forgiveness of all debt.

I have not touched on my maybe-plans to apply for a Thiel Fellowship, the bioreactor in a cube I've been helping to build for the past few weeks, or my wandering adventures around SoMa last night (it involved a trip to Ghirardelli for overpriced ice cream, and getting off the bus a stop early and having to either wait 22 minutes for the next bus or walk up the hill that I took the bus to explicitly avoid because I'm terrible at public transit and since when are there two tunnels on Stockton!), but perhaps that's for a part two, since I am supposed to leave my room in negative eleven minutes.

I am teaching myself how to learn and have spare time again. Life is teaching me how to be adventurous again.

And this is my jubilee.

MOGA & The Beatles

We had our first MOGA (Meditation and Yoga) session of the semester tonight, led by Gabby. No pictures because it was dark, but it was wildly relaxing. It reminds me of when we used to do yoga for Dragon Boat, back so long ago in SJC. Cue the warm fuzzy feelings inside.

Now we're playing Beatles songs while sitting in the common room together. A few of us are just sitting together, listening to Beatles songs, and possibly doing some homework, some of us... and it's just so great and relaxing, too. Ailén knows almost all the words for almost every song that plays. Woah.

I'm just so happy right now. And relaxed (thanks Gabby). And it is just wonderful... :)