apparently its still october

it snowed reasonably hard on monday! snow is always pretty but it’s even more gorgeous when the leaves are changing colors and still on their trees, and the color scheme of the buildings here complements everything really well (think pueblo style). i had my first snowball fight and also saw some cows which were both fun 🙂 heres a pic the cows are so cute

it’s been almost four weeks at truchas and surprisingly i still feel great most of the time. i’ve set up my workspace to be near the kitchen so that every time someone gets food i can talk to them, which has worked pretty well so far. multiple people here have told me i give off “retired person vibes” and i really don’t know what that means but i had literally the opposite impression?? my evenings often get swallowed by whatever activity someone decides to run eg. sometimes the cto of leap motion just decides to give two-hour-long talks for fun, and for the first time in a while i don’t mind that all my time is disappearing

i think it’s not an exaggeration to say that moving here has been the first concrete indication that the best parts of my life are still ahead of me and not back in high school, and that’s been really inspiring. i mean, i’ve always believed this was true, but i never had any real proof that it was feasible, and now i can be sure that it’s possible, perhaps not even that difficult, to create adult environments i’ll love as much as i loved my favorite kid environments

i think my summer job search is basically over 😮 got into a research position at two sigma after 16+ hours of interviewing and i was very impressed with the questions they asked- without going into too many details, i received a lot of interesting modeling scenarios and the wildest algorithms interview ever (essentially we spent an hour using an intro-cs-level question as a case study for all sorts of topics like floating point, arithmetic algorithms, memory allocation, etc.); overall it was the only interview process where i felt like i learned a ton instead of just trying to solve mindless puzzles so i got an extremely positive impression of two sigma from recruiting and will probably sign soon. that being said i still need to decide what i’m doing this coming spring; i’ll talk about my options more in a later post but essentially my preferences have become much less clear. in the past i always assumed i’d go back to mit if 2023s were invited on campus and now i think i’d enjoy a living group similar to the current one more than being at a semi-distancing college campus (not to mention cheaper housing prices and better food 😛 )

i also interviewed with some other places i wasn’t a big fan of, mostly because yan gave me some advice a few months ago which was just to talk to a lot of recruiters at different places to learn about their perspectives on work, school, and industry; as a result there were quite a few companies i applied to mainly to have conversations with employees. a funny side effect of this was that i advanced to some second-round interviews which i then cancelled because i didn’t actually want to go through their application processes 😐 i think the advice was very sound though, eg. by focusing on learning instead of finding jobs i was able to have a very genuine and refreshing discussion with some facebook employees about facebook + tech ethics, and im sure i wouldn’t have gotten those insights otherwise. i could’ve just asked upperclassmen for their opinions but that feels quite different from talking to someone who’s been there for multiple years. i think when your interviewer asks if you have any questions you can get a lot more out of the interaction if you ask the questions you really care about instead of the ones you sort of care about; of course the caveats are that you usually don’t have much time for questions unless you solve the interview problems quickly, and a lot of questions you care about might be too red-flaggy to ask if you actually want the job so your mileage may vary

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school update:

in 5.12 (organic chemistry) we started doing retrosynthesis problems and they’re actually a lot of fun 🙂 that’s definitely my favorite part of the class so far; it’s very puzzle-like. prof johnson taught the first half of the class and i like his speaking style a lot but recently prof danahy took over and her voice is also really pleasant to listen to ❤ 

in 21m.284 (film music) we watched some more cool films

1. east of eden. i’m a bit sad in the sense that east of eden was on my list of books to read and now the plot has been spoiled, but that’s alright i guess. i liked the movie a lot, especially james dean and the expressionist score, and although i don’t think i’m like cal anymore i think i related strongly to him for at least a few years of my life, which made understanding him easier. it’s a cain and abel story and i think cain and abel feels like vague nonsense in the religious context but it feels much more powerful when steinbeck writes the story with ordinary people as the characters.
2. psycho. i thought it was a horror movie but it turned out to only be psychological thriller, making it much less scary than i thought it would be. i mean there were still a handful of brutal scenes, but overall it was far more watchable than the single horror movie i’ve watched (the conjuring). i thought it was very well-made though, from the design of mr. bates to the use of shaky cameras and lighting and such