classes and stuff

it occurs to me that i never said what i’m doing this semester

i’m taking four classes and listening on several others:

• discrete math seminar (18.204) – graduation requirement where we read discrete math papers and practice giving talks. i was assigned several papers on the lovasz local lemma, which is reasonably interesting but not a particularly difficult topic, so i’m not spending much time on this class
• principles of macroeconomics (14.02) – my other remaining graduation requirement. this is mostly a review since i took an economics class in high school, but i wasn’t particularly rigorous in learning economics the first time around so i’m hoping i’ll get a more realistic view this time
• nanotechnology (6.2540) – my favorite class this semester! in lectures we talk about theory for how to observe / measure / build at the nano scale (which, for the first few weeks, has meant discussion of optics and lenses and material deposition technologies). in labs we practice using expensive machines to make things. over the next few weeks we’re building a spectrometer, and i hear in past years people built solar cells and LEDs for their final projects
• program synthesis (6.s981) – this class is pretty interesting but a bit slow. so far we’ve just been covering traditional approaches to synthesis, with some discussion of type theory and related subjects along the way. eventually we’ll get to neural stuff like copilot, and it’ll be cool to see if there are good ways to mix the two
• computer graphics (6.4400) – i’m not in this class but have been showing up to lectures. one of the instructors (justin solomon) is the most engaging mit computer science professor i’ve met so far, so his lectures are worth showing up to. they’ve only been covering foundational math like linear algebra and surfaces so far, but i expect the material to get significantly cooler in the next few weeks. it’s possible i already know more of the content than i expected though
• computer networks (6.5820) – i’m also not in this class, and lectures are at the same time as program synthesis so i haven’t been to any of those and have just been reading lecture notes. i’m interested in this class because networking is the largest remaining black box in computer science where i have absolutely no idea what is going on, and after networks i think i will have a surface-level intuition for every major component of the stack
• interactive narrative (21w.765) – i was enrolled in this class because i thought interactive media was exciting, but quickly realized the kind of interactivity the class focuses on is not really what i was looking for. we also spent a while discussing narrative theory, which i don’t think i’m interested in, so i switched to listener status. i will probably show up to demos and project presentations but not regular lectures, since i think it might be inspiring to see the projects. edit: the professor just told me this is not allowed 😦

aside from that:

• i joined lsc (lecture series committee), which is essentially a club that runs a movie theater inside a lecture hall on weekends. so far i’ve just been making large batches of popcorn and selling them, but it’s been fun learning to use the popcorn machine 🙂 some people in the club also seem pretty cool and very knowledgeable about film, so i’m hoping to talk to them more
• results for the alibaba math contest came out and i did better than expected. i mostly tried the contest just to see if i’m still able to solve problems at a competitive level after taking a break from math for a while, and it’s reassuring to know that the answer is yes
• i finished beyond good and evil and was left very confused. now i am reading thus spoke zarathustra, which is significantly more engaging because it actually has a plot but is still quite difficult to parse. i will stop reading nietzsche after finishing this book, regardless of whether i understand it or not