Ill bet you got waylaid!

I’ll bet you got waylaid! DID YOU KNOW? The airport in Portland, Oregon has free wireless. I have discovered this on my way back from a West Coast chemical engineering graduate school of some repute. My return flight through Chicago was cancelled due to Chicago being buried under 20 stories of golfball-sized hail with frogs inside. Or at least thats what I have chosen to believe. So Im flying back to Boston by way of Portland, Oregon and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. No, I dont know why. Perhaps The Madman Who Makes People Fly had something to do with my flight scheduling. Anyway, as I see it, Ive got three things to celebrate: 1. Free wireless 2. Jennifer Hudson just won an Academy Award 3. I am eating french fries dipped into Frosty right now and they are delicious So, to celebrate, tomorrow Im going to update this entry to blog about my CLASS SCHEDULE for this term! In the meantime, Ill be reading Schachnovelle by Stefan Zweig on my overnight redeye (or are those two things mutually exclusive?). Catch you on the East Coast! Word. So, my visit went pretty wellalthough I was a little surprised by how different the schools research philosophy was from that of MIT, I guess after four years it might be nice to get a different perspective on my major. Plus, you cant really beat the weatherI ran up what must have been 2,000 miles of hills with MIT alum Priya 05 on Saturday wearing only shorts and a t-shirt. In February! Anyway, the worst part of the whole ordeal was the 25 hour odyssey it took to get from my hotel room to my bed in Burton-Conner. It took me over 5 minutes to spell the word odyssey correctly. Anyway, as promised, here are my thoughts on my (three) classes this term. Hey, I must be 66% as awesome as Bryan! 10.392J: Fundamentals of Advanced Energy Conversion What a cool name for a class. I feel so smart just being in a class with that name, to be honest. Anyway, so far its just been a review of all the energy and thermodynamics classes that Ive already taken, except kind of stuck together, like maybe spot-welded together. But in the end Joe 08 and I get to write an AWESOME 20-page report together, which should be really fun because hes a junior and still cares about grades! This is also the first grad class that Im taking on purpose at MIT. 10.491 Integrated Chemical Engineering II I found out this weekend that every other school in the country just calls this design or process operations, but at MIT, where all but the hardest classes are designated with numbers, it just sounds so much more fearsome to call it ICE. Anyway, ICE isnt actually as hard as its made out to be. In fact, I wish I could take it for the next 8 semesters; that way I would eventually be in ICE-nine. Oh man, Im clever. But seriously, folks, this class rocks this term. Instead of using some made-up data for our project, were modeling actual coal plants using Aspen and contributing to an MIT Coal Study that will actually be presented to the US Department of Energy by our professor. How bad can that be? 21F.404: German IV OH MAN THIS CLASS IS SO HARD. Seriously, its stomping a mudhole in me. I think the problem is that German I, II, and III were mostly filled with Americans who were learning broken German, and then they all decided to stop taking German, leaving Ling and I stuck with a bunch of native speakers who use the phrase überhaupt nicht like its going out of style. Luckily, I have one more Junior-Senior P/D/F option left. Also, as a point of interest, the Chinese department introduced the streamlined option to prevent native speakers from making everybody feel as depressed as I do, every single day in German IV. See any other interesting classes in the course catalog that you could recommend to me? Guess what? Im not going to take them! Whoooo! Seniors! But do like Marilee Jones said and dont stop working just because you got into MITyou have to wait until you get into grad school before you can start slacking.