Sazzly

Hey hey. My finals are over! It hasn't really registered yet, but I'll believe it in the morning I think. I have one more thing to do, a presentation for Expo on a look at Biculturalism from a book I read this semester in my Hispanic Writers in the US class. The book was American Chica, which is an autobiography of a woman who grew up with a Pervian father and an American mother in Peru until she was 10 and then moved to the US. My official title is "A look at Bicultural Identity: a childhood in Peru and the US," and so one of my professors asked me yesterday if I was from Peru :). I'm up to about 7 counts of people asking me if I am Latin American and 1 person asked me if I am Egyptian--and she was Egyptian! And about 8 people have asked me if I am vegetarian, even timbo, who has known me all my life!

Here's some highly entertaining organic food propaganda: http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html

I am near the end of finals, so there isn't much time to blog. However, if you would like to find out about the community service projects I helped organize at Olin (it's called Big Converstations Day, because they thought up the idea of inviting speakers and having the community focus on the big picture, and could never think of a better name, so it stuck). I recommend that you go to the feature story on my school's website. Pretty spiffy, huh. I am quoted - which is something I was sent and revised, of course, rather than actually said out loud ever. And check out the picture gallery! I didn't have time to take my own pictures on the day of the event, but our Olin photographer did, so I'll send you off here!

I am happy to be almost done with this semester! It has been full. I got an internship in the Boston area this summer doing Error Control Codes -- which is applied Abstract Algebra and applied discrete math in general, and also electrical engineering at the same time. For example, when you go to burn a CD, redundant bits are added to the datastream, and a special encoding algorithm is performed so that if there are scratches on the CD when you play it, the bits that it cannot read can be corrected to what it was before! It's also used in wireless communications and GPS. We've been learning about this sort of thing in two of my classes. It's cool stuff, and I'm interested to see if I'll want to find a career in the field somewhere.

This summer, I believe a lot of what I will be doing is coding in C to make simulations and test parameters and coding schemes. My brothers laughed at me when they heard because they have told me many times that I will end up in Computer Science, which I resist!