Summertime

[insert Beach Boys song here]

As we wrap up the academic year, it's time to look towards our summer plans. If we were in High School, this might entail things from working at the local burger joint to summer school or, if you're like me, Summer Activities like Band Camp.

But, we're in College now.

What's to do around Mudd? First, there's summer math. It's about six weeks long, and covers all of your sophomore year of math. That's a lot of math, really fast. Typical day is lecture from 8 to noon, eat lunch, homework to about 10pm or midnight, depending on abilities and when you start (or later if you're insane), sleep, and repeat. The good thing is the homework is a bit lighter on weekends, i.e. same amount as during the week, so you've got 2 days to hash out to random stuff. Games, hang out, run a D&D campaign, hit the beach, etc. The advantage? No Core math classes sophomore year. There's also research. This year there's research in computer vision (army of friendly robots), software for seismographs, and the usual staff positions. Staff entails doing random jobs, such as fixing the printer or reviewing Clinic papers before they get published, hardbound, and locked away in a shiny cabinet somewhere. Past projects include cornea growth, burning buildings, testing dams, and shooting particles at materials and measuring the dipole moments.

What's to do outside Mudd? Jobs mostly. Internships are really cool. I happen to have accepted an internship at CornerTurn. Small offshoot of some bigger groups whose main goal is to just do Engineering, trying to stay as far away as possible from the bureaucracy and processes of larger companies. They like to build boards and special application stuff, such as this really cool system that can use multiple antennas as one internet connection, giving people on boats broadband without a giant dish on their ship. Had to turn down SpaceX, which would have been working on rockets. Oh well, there's next year. There's also even MORE research. Travel somewhere exotic like the East Coast and do research at some other university. And there's your usual jobs, such as bumming around the parents' house, flipping burgers, and doing community service. One friend helps out at a camp every summer. Insane awesome stories.

Last summer I worked on the Claremont Summer Sustainability Audit, financed by the Council of Presidents. Sounds impressive. Mostly it was an audit to find out how sustainable the Claremont College were in our consumption, utilization, and removal of resources. So, water use, electric use, waste management, the whole bit. A big chunk of the time was spent just getting the data from giant databases and archaic file formatting, but once we had it stuff got really interesting. We then made recommendations, such as switching to less water intensive landscaping and using smarter irrigation methods. Turns out Mudd, Scripps, and Pomona use this cool thing called RainBird which takes weather data and calculates how much water the plants have lost, then replenishes that amount during the next watering. Pretty cool. Also, switching to more efficient lighting like compact fluorescents saves globs of electricity, which is usually the most costly utility. Ironically, water is the least expensive, but it really should be the most expensive since we have to import it all from up north. All in all, some pretty neat things.

The dorms are still open, but only to people who need to live on campus for the summer. So, we all cram together in Sontag, South, Linde, and Case for the summer. This leads to some really cool things, like for our Summer Math we had an awesome suite. Last summer, we had around 12 people on average pooling together for meals. This meant each person cooked or helped cook about once a week for dinner, then we split the costs. Some really cool, and some not so cool, dishes came out of that. Infamous events were when I overfilled the rice cooker, so the rice was all dry. I can cook rice in a pot, but apparently not in a rice cooker. Or the chicken dish with lemon and garlic, except there was way too much lemon. I was pretty bummed since I had to peel and mash all that garlic, five full cloves, and you didn't even taste the garlic. And of course, if the food run didn't make it in time, we defaulted to spaghetti, which was also widely varied. Oh, and that one time some of the guys found out they had never made omelets, so decided to try their hand at it. They got OK at it by the end. They were also the ones who cooked BLT sandwiches for one meal.

Oh, and by the way, apparently Mudd is the only College without a pool. Mudd used to have one, but it got replaced by the new dinning hall. Scripps has a pool, CMC has a pool, Pitzer has a pool, Pomona has a pool. Not Mudd. Word on the street is that they're going to build a new one.