Survived the first week of classes

Finally, time to catch my breath...

I've had classes arranged such that on Monday I've 5 lectures/tutorials, each 2 hours and stretching from 10am till 8pm. Three classes on Wednesday; this means that for this term I'll be frantically working from Sunday till Tuesday night, and I just finished Round 1.

It's been hard to get back in the right frame of mind for studying; reading scientific papers critically is though enough, but worse still is the Mathematics for Biologists class I'm taking. Biology and mathematics occupy incompatible parts of the brain; our first assignment was a review of high school calculus that I would have taken half an hour to finish 8 years ago, but have been struggling for 3 days since Sunday to work out.

Hooray for the Master's student in statistics living on my floor.

I work better in libraries. I think it's the reminder that there are people around; when trying to work in my room I inevitably turn on MSN messenger. Thus I've been trying out a few libraries here. The Widener, the central university library, had a nice reading room with a tall skylight ceiling, but horrors, the largest academic library in the world keeps office hours. In contrast, the Lamont undergrad library is 24 hours a few days a month.

In the end, nothing compares to that veritable Nest of Nerds, Christ's College library, open 24 hours a day for most of the year.

I've started labwork too. Apparently I have an affinity for Canada, since all three of my past supervisors have been Canadian; Cambridge Part II, the one year attachment in Singapore, and now in my first rotation lab here. Only one of them was French Canadian (Oui Oui! Baguette!), and an ongoing project I've adopted is to understand from firsthand accounts the attempts by Quebec to secede from Canada. Messy, full of controversy and conspiracy, with the classic French vs English rivalry thrown in for humour. I like.

Tired, so here're some pictures for now.

The incoming students of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, 2006. The rhino's one of a pair standing in front of one of the biological buildings; apparently the rhino is our mascot.



Our class, plus a few others, dressed up for the Gala dinner for life sciences students in Harvard. Apparently one of the few occasions in our life here that we get to dress up. Back in the UK we dressed up once every 1 or 2 weeks, huh.



And the undergraduate welcoming ceremony I mentioned previously. Definitely has become part of those students' lives forever.



And here's a martini.

2 weeks in

Ok as of today I've been in Harvard for 2 weeks... A lot of things have happened, and a lot more little things that struck me, so I'll try to give a feel of the place; Note: disjointed entry ahead.

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My class seems like a nice bunch of people; I was just talking to one of them today and we were remarking on how there didn't seem to be any psychos in it, but who knows? One might go all Alfred Hitchcock on us a month into the course. But for now things are great; we're 15 strong, which is somewhat smaller than the 26 of last year. There's a former marine in our class (4 years, wow kinda like having an NSman around but more siong), a coursemate from Part II Biochem in Cambridge (together we represent the undergrad uni with the largest representation) and a good mix of male/female and USA/international. Everyone's friendly, though we observed that the girls in general were more chatty than the guys (mostly shy)? Hmm...

Our department is having a retreat in October, and every year the faculty of my department play a beach volleyball game with the incoming class, as part of the 'bonding' that is supposed to take place in all retreats. Apparently they're REALLY into the game, and take it VERY seriously... they beat the incoming students every year (after all, they have every year to practice, whereas most ppl come in not having played volleyball for decades...and we've barely lived through two). We've been told by our seniors that the faculty tend to have loose intepretations of rules... referees, who are often graduate students, are outranked by worked up professors. Yesterday was our first practice session; we're eating sand for sure.

The university knows its graduate students well; every event they want graduate students to attend is shamelessly advertised with free food. With the past 2 weeks of orientation, most of us have forgotten what paying for food feels like. For example in the first week of September, my department orientation started everyday at 10am with breakfast, followed by lunch at 12pm, dinner at 6pm and often another pizza and beer event squeezed somewhere in between (the pizza boxes during one event would have reached two storeys high). Considering that they also gave us free laptops (I'm typing this on my new Dell, suck on that MIT students =P ) we've been very happy and content; kinda like the cows they feed up before they're lead to the slaughter. Classes and labs start next Monday...

We've had our opening ceremony in Sanders Hall, complete with speech from the interim president of Harvard Unversity and the Dean of the Graduate school of Arts and Sciences. The speeches were ok; I guess I expected something more inspiring. I had passed by the undergraduate opening ceremony a few days earlier, held in the open yard, and that stopped me in my tracks. A choir's singing wafting through the sunny autumn yard, followed by an awesome speech on international relations and Harvard's place as a mover not observer of current and future events... Considering that graduate students are going to be here for 5 years or more, it'll have definitely been nice to have a more uplifting start to our time here.

But we did get a lot of free food.

Harvard's architecture, I think would impress anyone who's not been to Oxbridge. Coming from Cambridge (UK) however, I just keep comparing most of the buildings here to Robinson college... red brick buildings, lacking any of the medieval architecture typical of the older Oxbridge colleges. The place just doesn't strike you as forcefully as Cambridge did, in the sense of finding yourself somewhere totally unimaginable and fantastic. So for friends planning to visit from Cambridge, don't expect too much =P

And I've already met a few who I've not seen in ages: Jean, Shen Han and Herman are here for attachments or exchange programs... apparently I just missed a few others =\

I've spent half my time trying to sort through the admin here; registering for courses, signing up for lab rotations, applying for a credit card, social security number etc. The other half is spent watching the Colbert Report on youtube (hilarious! Why can't we get news like this back home? Hmm well on 2nd thoughts I guess I know why)

Oh and it's great that now all those cool online tools apply to you once you're in the USA, things like typing an address in Google and having it automatically display the address on a map, local tv listings when you type a show into Yahoo! etc etc. Oh plus the fact that Harvard is mostly wireless, and more importantly that my laptop now holds 3 hours of charge (as compared to 25 mins on my old one), it's possible to just sit on the grass in Harvard Yard and chat online with friends.

Just one of the many things I need to remind myself to do NOW and not later. Cos later goes past too soon.

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Oh and in case no one knows yet...the hacker of the post below is "J"...seems like going to MIT really turns you into a computer geek overnight =P

YOUVE BEEN HACKED

KAH YONG TAN YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN HACKED!

MUAHAHAHAHAH!

- MIT HACKER xoxo

First weekend on in Cambridge 2.0

I'm munching on a peach as I slowly write this... imagine that, a fresh, firm peach; saw it at the local grocery and had to have one, just cos it's something I wouldn't usually see in Singapore...

I've been here in Harvard for 4 days now; alternating my time between meeting friends, and shopping to furnish my room.

I think it's interesting (to me) what I have and have not been doing... I've spent a lot of time buying daily necessities, like a wastebasket (not the first thing you realize as a necessity, but you realize it real soon after), clothes hangers, toiletries, cups etc etc... I've forgotten how many things you really need to lead a normal life, and especially interesting are the little things you always took for granted but now realize how important they are... I'm still looking to rearm myself with cutlery and crockery, and start cooking again; man that's something I've missed...

I've NOT seen most of Harvard yet (at least not this time around)... I've not even seen most of the main yard; you know with it being "I'll be here for a long time, and I'll see it sometime anyways"...which is exactly the type of crime I promised myself not to commit again; hopefully sometime this week I'll have time to explore the place proper.

The university compound is actually fairly small, compared to neighbouring MIT... I really hate to admit it, but MIT really just reeks of coolness... like campuswide wireless internet, GPS tracking of their shuttle bus, and just various little things here and there that remind you that you're in one of the few places on earth where geekiness = cool. My university is just stuffy.

Everywhere though I keep getting surprised at the differences between the USA and UK or Malaysia and Singapore... like looking at the wrong side of the road when crossing (that's an accident waiting to happen one day, watch for it), total strangers just talking to you on the street or subway (some guy just sat next to me at a cafe and started telling me about his Vegas job, his private jet plane, all about his racehorses for half an hour... then asked to 'borrow' 5 bucks for the transfer charge for his USD14000 betting slip)...I was especially tickled by the sight of a plane pulling a banner advertising cable TV in the sky; to me it only ever happens in the movies or TV... and the alarm clock I bought uses the mains power as both an energy source and timing mechanism; apparently the Americans don't believe in batteries and quartz crystals...

I've not taken many photos yet, which is a pity as Cambridge, MA is a beautiful place in autumn (my favourite season), but here are a few:


My room! Feature to note: my chair has a rockable bottom, I'm guessing this is the solution to students sitting on two chair legs and falling backwards.








Here's a view of the Charles River from Shireen's (another ASTAR scholar, in MIT) place... hmm my room doesn't quite have the same view; mine oversees a carpark...






Tomorrow's my department orientation, a full week of activites, none of which include real work, so I have to rejoice for now... and tomorrow I'm getting my new Dell laptop (free for my department, haha, so join Molecular and Cell Biology!)