ChapterZero

This Friday I officially stop working with Papadakis’ group. It’s been fun, and I’ll miss it, but I also recognize the need to move on, to clear my palate and rest it before the next meal. In fact, I probably should have made the cut sooner than this. I’ll still be around, since it seems I’m the only one who wants to prepare the Markov Chain Monte Carlo seminar Sometimes it seems the seminar is continuing solely based on inertia, but it’s fun to teach, and getting to help Shikha understand something is a wonderful feeling (because she’s so damn smart, otherwise). Since I read and reread, then write up notes to keep the presentation organized, and all the while worry about maintaining a motivation for every new development, I’m retaining more of this material than I would otherwise. As Papadakis pointed out, this is knowledge that can only serve me well in grad school. We’re up to the good stuff now: I believe I can cover simulated annealing and constrained optimization in the next seminar.

So, the question is: how am I going to spend my first and only month of free time for the past five years, and possibly the next five? I actually want to *not* do any math, or even think about it, but alas that is unrealistic. I will limit myself instead to reviewing vanilla material I should know for grad school– and considering where I’m going and what I’m majoring in, I have a pretty good idea of what that entails: ODEs and PDEs, complex analysis, probability and stochastic processes, real and functional analysis. These are the topics I will tango with for the next month. Other than that, I plan on exercising, doing a lot of hanging out with my friends before I leave, and very little spending of money. Oxymoronic? Maybe, but since I’m not working anymore, this is going to be a low-budget vacation. And of course, I will be planning for CalTech: mostly this entails figuring out what I’ll be eating, and deciding which books to take with me.

Possibly relevant posts:

• My mountain of work (8/5/2005)
• On UCB (5/21/2004)
• Reading, the undergrad way (10/3/2005)