Yoink!

Well, it's now the end of the year.

Some closing up stuff that has gone down. We had awesome performances for the end of the Shakespeare class. Unfortunately I didn't get to take pictures of the performance, but I did get a decent number of behind-the-scenes stuff. Hopefully the college professional photographer got good shots. Also, we got recorded, so maybe I'll get a copy and be able to watch it from not on the stage. Or behind the stage. I mean, I didn't have all that many lines anyways.


^This is indeed Matthew Lawson posing as the Old Lady over Kevin Oelze. In case you're new to this blog, Matthew was my roommate Frosh and Soph years and ended up as Proctor of East, President of Gonzo Unicycle, all-around cool guy, director of the LAC... basically became awesome. Oh, and he brought his trusty staff to graduation.


^Here's Prof. Dodds, who also was the prof for Robotics. We got 4 professors (including the one running Shakespeare) to play the madmen in the play. So awesome. They got the loudest applause besides the main actors.


^Liz Flannery did AWESOME costumes for us. She had help, especially from Glennis here on the right. That's Michael Braly. He was the scheming Cardinal.


Clinic is Done. We've turned in pretty much all our work and it's sealed up in a box. The only thing left was a lovely jaunt up to Oregon on Monday to present at Intel on Tuesday. I was a little nervous because we're showing our work to some of the best digital engineers in the nation. Luckily we got really far. Unfortunately we couldn't send the chip to fabrication due to complications. But, we have pretty pictures of a core of the chip. Also, a young up-and-coming frosh William Koven has volunteered to work over the summer to fix everything up and get it to fabrication. This means fixing up the research group's designs that they wanted to get on the chip as well. Oof. Overall I'm simply relieved it's over even if I am a little bugged out we didn't make it across the finish line. I don't like settling for "close enough."

Robotics went very well. We got the robot to run around and localize where it is in a map. Maybe not the craziest thing to ever come out of a lab, but pretty cool nonetheless. Other fun projects were things like an outfitted Barbie truck that followed directions using a webcam or Roombas using the Wiimotes to follow one another and be controlled. Overall, lots of cool stuff.

Graduation was... nice. Very cool message from the speaker, even if he does have public speaking problems. He did warn us at the beginning of the speech. It was a nice little "the world's a mess, but people are looking for solutions and you guys are now equipped to go out there and kick ass helping fix the world." Not in those exact words of course. Tahir was our student speaker and he had a nice little speech about the 3 tenants of success. Humility, Moderation, and Cooperation. We were actually all pleasantly surprised at his speech skills. In fact, no one noticed that those three tenets spell out HMC until the very end. Very suave. We also had an awesome rendition of the Star Spangled Banner featuring Elaine Shaver on the lead and Matthew, Marissa, Scott, Michael, and Sarah filling in as backups. It was in the style of a barbershop quartet, and was expertly done.

A whole bunch of people came out that I didn't expect for my graduation. Besides the obvious family members there were a few like my Great Uncle and Aunt or some Church friends who surprised us a bit. I'll be writing thank you cards very soon.

Now, I get to prep for the rest of the real world. For example, I have a nice internship in Austin, Texas with a company called Intrinsity. I'll be doing some work in preparation for a Clinic at HMC this next year. We'll be flying out on Sunday to get moved into the apartment. Gotta figure out a good way to pack my computer. After that I'm off to UC Davis for a Masters. I'll be working with Prof. Bevan Baas on some really cool expandable architectures. I'll be living with Michael Braly up there in a nice little house that his parents own. Michael's job this summer is to remodel the place from an office building to a two bedroom house. His dad will be watching out for him. His dad's pretty neat too; he watched one guy remodel their house once and then Mr. Braly did the next two remodelings himself. Sounds a lot like my dad who just picks stuff up so that he doesn't have to pay other people to do it.

Anyways, that's all for now. I'm not sure how much I'll post on this now that I'm out of HMC. But, there's plenty of fun archived stuff if you're interested. Peace out, and Have Fun.

Oh, one last video.

BIG Update

So, sorry I haven't been updating. It's been very, very busy.

First of all, looking ahead. I have accepted a position at Intrinsity, a chip company in Austin, Texas. This means I am currently in serious crunch time as I try to find a place to live in and a car so I can get around. Intrinsity is actually sponsoring a Clinic at Mudd next year, so my job is to set up the stuff for the Clinic. They were hoping that the person they hired would also stick around and actually do the Clinic, but I guess they decided I was good enough. Or they think I'm just that stellar so I overpower that fault. I don't really know.

After the summer I will be attending UC Davis for my Masters. I will be working with Professor Bevan Baas and working on some really cool stuff in chip design. He's been working on a really interesting architecture where the chip is composed of several miniature cores that each do a specific thing. Then, you can string these together to create a processing pipeline. It makes it really fast and low power, especially for pipelined processes like digital signal processing.

Currently, I'm trying to save Clinic. We found out that there's this tool we MUST use to lay the chip out and connect it to the pads. MOSIS, the fabrication group we're working with, claims no one every gets it right by hand routing. So, I get to learn the new tool. I'm getting pretty close, but it's been really hard and I'm still unsure if I can pull this off. Plus, we have to get our Final Report all sorted out and approved, prepare for presentations, and finish wiring up everything for the chip. We don't have a few critical parts, so I'm getting very nervous about this.

We're also really deep into the Shakespeare production. Ironically, this year the class is putting on a play by John Webster, someone who was in Shakespeare's troupe, but isn't Shakespeare. It's a lovely tragedy where every major character dies by the end. Except for the male protagonist's friend. I'm a minor character, so I don't die. I forgot to bring my camera to the coffin building session AND the dress rehearsal. Gr.... Oh, in case you missed it, I helped build a coffin. It's a bit large, but very coffin shaped. It's 1.5 feet high, 6 feet long, and 2.2 feet wide at the widest point. We joke that we could store the Duchess, the kids, and Antonio all in the same coffin.

Robotics has been going... oddly. Due to time issues I haven't logged as many hours as I'd like into the project, and unfortunately have forced one of my team members to pick up my slack. We're trying to get the robot to know where it is using Monte Carlo Localization. I'm implementing the motion and sensor models into the system. We'll be using the IR Range finders to do estimations of how close it is to a wall. Should be really cool once we get it working.

Other than that, it's been fairly OK. I managed to score a 1TB external harddrive for $100 off of Newegg, so I now have somewhere to store stuff before I leave campus. I've been filling it with Anime mostly.

Anyways, that's it for now. I'll leave you with a video that pretty much sums up the stupidity of the Internet comments.

Fading into the Background

Greetings denizens who may or may not really care about what I write.

Apologies for the late(r) post.

In case you haven't been reading the other blogs, Kyle Marsh noted that we have about 4 weeks left in our existence here at Mudd. Which is barely meager enough to elk out the rest of Clinic and all those other fun happy times. Also, Kyle decided to be awesome and make a senior page for the yearbook. I am lame and didn't make one. I was thinking I should send in a semi-joke page due to my limited number of pictures of me, but as usual was too lazy to do even that.

Life is currently slowing down. Or, perhaps it's speeding up. Clinic has finally, at least in my mind, come under a semblance of control. We might actually pull this off. Granted, we're still behind our original schedule, but hopefully the last few risk areas will work out gracefully. I'd explain what they are, but I'd probably bore you since they're a little technical and weird.

On the other hand, I have a deadline on Monday to respond to a summer internship offer at Intrinsity, a chip company in Austin, Texas. The major reason I haven't jumped at this chance is to figure out all the other issues that come with it. Namely thinking about housing and food and transportation. I don't think they'd look kindly on me bringing a sleeping bag and camping out in the office. I also would lack proper nutrition. Plus, it's in Austin Texas which means dry and hot in the summer, at least relative to our temperate SoCal weather. I've been advised an air conditioned car would be appropriate, if not a necessity. And, at the end of the day I'd rather not go into debt due to this internship. In fact, it would be nice if I made a bit on the side so I can pay for grad school.

Speaking of which, I still haven't decided where to go. If you have any cool insights, please let me know.

I've picked back up some of my musical hobbies. I'm prepping for a performance during my church's Good Friday service, except there's no sheet music so I transcribed all the solos and will improv the rest probably. Also, Matthew Lawson, my former room mate, has press ganged me into helping to do music for the Shakespeare play, so I'm still learning to master the recorder in a few weeks. I'm actually not too bad now, but not good enough in my opinion.

Other than that, there's not too much happening. Cya around.

Refresh

I've received word that I might be getting more traffic soon. Something about acceptance letters or something like that. Weird.

Anyways, this is once again late because I am a lazy jerk who doesn't remember to write these things on Friday like I'm supposed to.



Spring Break was... interesting. I managed to cram in 24 Hours of gaming. Well, I actually didn't game all that much since I was organizing and keeping the gaming session going, but I had fun nonetheless. I blame my mom for indoctrinating me to be a good host and deriving pleasure out of making sure others are having a good time. But, that's another story. I then commenced to cram in as much Clinic as I possibly could for the next few days. Thursday evening I went home so that I could wake up at 4 in the morning on Friday and drive to Goleta, CA for an interview with Raytheon. The drive up was actually pretty nice. Two hours of basically empty freeway in the dark of night. The interview itself was pretty fun. I think I impressed them with my awesome Mudd knowledge and ability to problem solve on the spot. I might have to review how I answer questions like "How do you like being the technical lead of your team." To be honest, it's sometimes a very thankless job and I'd rather I only had my own work instead of being the go to guy in the team for help. But, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to make the project work, and I'm more than willing to shoulder the job. Then I had traffic on the way back. So, it took me four hours to get home. Then Saturday I got to watch my brother at his Drumline competition (yeah, he's just that cool). Sunday was church and a nice lunch at my grandmother's for my mom's birthday. Then back to school. And now, more Clinic. Yay!

In other news, I'm in the Shakespeare class. It's a pretty cool class. We get to read several Shakespeare plays, discuss them, and get cool lectures about Elizabethan drama and social issues at the time. For the second half of the semester we prepare and then perform a Shakespeare play. Well, except this year we chose a play by some other dude, but it's very nice olde English. It turns out Matthew Lawson, East Dorm Proctor, my roommate Freshman and Sophomore year, unicycler, LAC supervisor, and in general insanely awesome person extraordinaire is in charge of music. He happens to know I play the flute. So, now I'm learning the recorder. If you have any tips, let me know. I currently sound really stupid. Like, those really bad 5th graders who are being forced to play the recorder and they don't want to stupid. I've been told there is a way to sound really good, and I'd really really like to figure it out.

In yet other news Room Draw is now in effect. Since I'm a graduating senior, I don't have to deal with it. =] Unfortunately, it will consume most people's conversations for the forseeable future. And, being the social guy I am, I'd like to be having conversations with people. I guess I'll have to have topics that are more interesting that the drama of Room Draw. See this post if you're interested.

Anyways, that's all that mattered to me for this post. This is Trevin Murakami, and you've just been filled in.

My Professor Knows Magic

I kid you not.

Just this last weekend, I was bashing my head against a certain bug. It's called an iteration loop error. In Verilog, parts of the chip don't have any delay in them. Since this is a rough simulation, that's usually OK and in the real world (or better simulations) we'll see delays and all is well. Iteration loops occur when there is a signal loop (i.e. a signal is dependent on itself) and keeps changing indefinitely. In the real world, this never happens. But, due to the zero delay in Verilog, it can in simulation.

So, I spend most of Friday, Saturday and Sunday chasing around this bug not only in simulation but in my mind. It appeared to come from the flip flops, a certain digital structure that can capture a value on its input on the rising edge of a clock signal, and hold it as its output until it samples another. Very handy. To hold these values, there's certain loops that, in theory, should open and close and not create a feedback loop. However, I finally gave up and worked on other parts of Clinic and asked Prof. Harris to help me. He suggested adding in delays everywhere, setup the wave, and then bring him over to check them out.

So, on Wednesday, I setup the simulation with delays everywhere, and it appears to have fixed the problem. While this is all well and good, we want to isolate what caused the problem in the first place. Magic fixes don't actually fix the problem. So, with Prof. Harris watching, I start to remove the delays in the Verilog code. Eventually, we get back to code with no delay. Puzzled, I then try to re-create the iteration loop bug. It doesn't show up. I then turn to Julien Massas and ask him to try to re-create the bug, since his code was the first to show the error. It also doesn't exist in his code.

Now, I know we didn't change all that much from Sunday to Wednesday, and I'm very very sure it was still broken on Sunday. So, my only explanation is that the presence of Prof. Harris fixed it. Or, it somehow managed to hide itself in fear of his awesome l337 skillz and will resurface sometime next week, right before our deadlines.

In other news, I'm still searching for what I'll be doing after graduation. Grad apps are in (well, 3 out of 5, the other 2 are due next month) and under review, my resume is floating in databases around the globe, and JPL has declined to offer me a position. One of my physics friends already got into one of his Grad schools, so he's very very happy and much more relaxed. I blame it on his Indian heritage (Asiatic India mind you). Plus, as an engineer I can find work without a grad degree. He can't. So, extra kudos for him being so awesome and way smarter than me.

To close, I'll drop a screenshot of my resume. Just in case you were curious.

Re-Entry

Um, I'm back in school. Just FYI.

As it turns out, it hasn't been altogether a bad week. Robotics is gonna be awesome and Shakespeare is gonna be awesome. Clinic has carried over from last semester (still on the critical path of you screw up the project fails).

So, the real question is what to do about my 3 Hums. One hasn't met yet since the professor is at a conference for this week. However, I know the professor, and it's gonna be on the Philosophy of Science. The second one is about Asian history, specifically the recent modernization and post-colonialism. After all, that's all we Westerners really know since most of the ancient stuff is still being translated/dug up/hidden by the government. Decisions decisions.

Now, the bad stuff. Mostly clinic. I'm currently figuring out a few new tricks to make testing easier in the future. Unfortunately this is a pain to learn and puts me behind on other stuff. Basically, I've managed to overwork myself again. I stayed up very late Friday morning (sun didn't come up while I was awake, so it's not an all-nighter!) finishing some tests. As par for course, I was the only one to get those tests done, mostly because it's the easiest piece to test and I've been ahead of the rest of the team for some time now. I also have to debug a nasty problem that was mucking up everyone's simulations, so that didn't help everyone else progress either. As I said, I'm on critical path, and just barely making my deadlines means the whole team falls behind.

Also, I can't just mess around anyone. That means stuff like Mass Effect and Fallout3 and learning Japanese are back on hold. =[

In other random news, apparently Nvidia has managed to give us 3D vision from our monitors. Basically it uses the same technology that is used in 3D movies today, but created on the fly from your graphics card. The downside is it requires 1) a 120Hz monitor, 2) a GeForce 8 series or better graphics card, and 3) that you wear glasses. Now, the glasses are apparently not the yellow abominations you return after watching other 3D cinema and are apparently pretty stylish. Plus, the Nvidia team apparently to be doing a good job of letting you know what does and doesn't work. Plus there's the disorientation that you're in 3D now. Especially in First-Person-Shooters where we've been trained to think we're looking at a 3D world already with perspective and enemies behind cover 20 yards away. But, it's supposed a pretty sweet gig. Not gonna change your world or make or break new games, but a nice feature that if you have disposable income to spend on, is kinda cool. I don't have that disposable income handy. =]

Here's to an exciting semester! Cheers!

Community Comparisons

Still on break. HMC returns on Jan 19th. So that means one more week to fix all that Clinic stuff I still have to do. Gr....

Anyways, on to the topic of the day: communities. While a loose term, I'm going to reference it in regards to the supportive (or lack thereof) nature of people doing similar things.

Let's start with the DotA community. If you're unfamiliar, DotA stand for 'Defense of the Ancients' and is a WarCraft 3 Frozen Throne custom map. It is also perhaps the single most played WarCraft 3 map, with a huge community, patches, it shows up in competitive leagues, and basically tends to be a big deal. It is based around teams of players each controlling a hero. The goal is to push into the enemy base and kill their super structure, a tree or a throne. As the game progresses, the heroes level up, gain cool powers, and you can buy items to further augment your heroes. The core gameplay though is very micro dependent (fine control of your hero and its actions) as well as team coordination (acting as a team when fighting, allocating who does what, etc.). Team coordination in some ways trumps the micro aspect since 4 heroes attacking 1 hero should win, unless that 1 hero is ridiculously overpowered due to levels or items.

So, here's the crux of the matter. The DotA community is not very supportive of new players. In fact, there are times when people have actually told other players to leave because they were so bad at the game. There's also what are known as griefers, or people who intentionally do things to annoy others. Some of these actions might be intentionally dying to the other team to give them an advantage, or leaving a game in progress (no one new can join and now the team is down a hero). Why? Because people want to win, and DotA is very team dependent, so if you have a bad team people get frustrated. However, in the long run, there seems to be a problem. If you chastise all the new players and get rid of them, what happens? There is no influx of new players, old better players might eventually leave, and now you're stuck with no players. Of course, there's a few really stubborn players who keep playing, and there's definitely some helpful players out there, but in general the community is pretty hostile. Most new players only get better because they are trained by experienced players, usually friends who introduce them to the game. I actually started playing because we have a DotA game night each week at Mudd. I'm still pretty bad.

Now, the HMC community. I tend to cite this as the reason I decided on Harvey Mudd College, and it didn't disappoint. The very concept that it's a high performance school, but everyone lives on campus and the professors are there to teach make an uber combo. Plus there's other perks like the hands-on work and such. At the core, though, I'm a big fan of how supportive the community is. It's a place where if you have questions, someone is bound to know the answer and is willing to explain it to you. I managed to debug and learn about boot failures when my computer went bonkers right before finals week. I've had people explain crazy algorithms to me. I was just interviewing at JPL and explaining what I knew about a CS class that I hadn't taken, and the interviewer thought I had taken the class. I eventually told him that this was just from learning from the CS majors complaining about chunky string and that I didn't know how to fix the problem itself in detail. I've also spent many hours walking others through problems of their own, sometimes in sacrifice of meeting my own deadlines.

Now, it's not all flowers and rainbows. I've mentioned in others posts about the downsides of such a tight community such as if you do something stupid everyone finds out, or that if you're the jerk people end up not liking you can't be anonymous. But, overall, I enjoy the community of Harvey Mudd College. Plus, we have professors who participate in some of the randomest stuff, like dressing up as Santa so we can take pictures with him. Go Prof. Yong!

And now, for no good reason, a video.

Plans for Break

Man, I am failing at the prep blog early game.

Anyways, today it's time to detail plans for Break. This is akin to New Years Resolutions where you make a list, feel good about it, try to follow it for about 1-2 days, then lapse back to your old habits. Unless you're still young and in that malleable age where your parents can smack you around and make you shape up.

So, here goes. (in no particular order)

1) Relax. Probably the easiest to pull off. Make sure I'm not sleep deprived.

2) Work on Clinic. Mind you this is rare. Most people forget about Clinic and spend a week when they get back in the Spring remembering everything. Unfortunately, my Clinic, in my personal opinion, needs a jump start and some serious catch up. To make sure stuff goes smoothly next semester, I'm catching up on stuff I need to do. This mainly means getting my processing element completely built, fixing up the code to describe the entire chip (i.e. stable architecture good. See VLSI gripes from last semester about what unstable architecture does), and maybe even getting to know the layout tools early.

3) Games. I've been doing such a good job repressing my gamer side this semester. I still haven't gone through the massive number of games released this year, even the ones during the summer. So, I need to do a bit of catch up. I even have a copy of Fallout 3 sitting in my room, ready to be installed.

4) Family. In case you didn't know, Mudd kicks us out of the dorms for Winter Break. They are locked down and you have to turn in your key or be fined lots of money. So, we're all at home. Except for the crazies who find an apartment or something, but I don't know any of them. Thus, I find myself at home with family. And, my family is very hospitable. Thus, we will be having gatherings and parties pretty much every day until somewhere in the first week of January. We're also going to take a trip up North (i.e. Sacramento) to see some of the rest of the family. If I'm lucky, Michael and I might even be able to meet up with a professor at UC Davis for a little jaunt.

5) Grad School Apps. I've got many more to do. That means more 2500 word essays about my motivations to join their programs. Whee! Luckily I don't have to fill out pages of how awesome I am and my club activities, unlike my brother for undergrad applications. It's pure grades, Letters of Rec, and Statement of Purpose.

Well, I'm pretty sure I'm stuck with 4 and 5 being necessary. I'm also pretty sure I can get 1 done. It's a question of 2 and 3. 2 should take precedence if I don't want to look at Prof. D. Money Harris and say, "sorry, I let down the team again."

Have a nice Holiday Season all 3 of my readers.

Level up to Freedom

Well, the worst is over. Or should I say yet to come.

First, fun YouTube stuff.



Now those look like really badass freeform maps. Too bad I still have to wait for the PC version.

Anyways, back to reality.

It's finals week. Ironically, I only have two finals left. MicroPs, 6502 Chip Research, and Clinic all ended last week. OK, so Clinic didn't really end, I still have a few items I need to get done over break so that the project can continue on smoothly, but I don't have deadlines of death hanging over me anymore.

The last two finals I have are a paper for Philosophy, and a 1.5 hour final for Great Works of Western Music. Definitely not in the same class as the Clinic Midyear.

I also have grad school apps to finish. =[ UCLA was Monday, the next is due Jan 2 but I want to get it in at least a week early. Just in case bad stuff happens. It's actually weird that the graduate school applications are so much shorter than the undergraduate applications. It's mostly biographical info, letters of recommendation, and your statement of purpose. No pages upon pages of filling out what activities you did or anything like that. It's not a question of you being a leader or an activist. It's a question of whether or not you're a good enough investment for their research.

Looking back, the Clinic didn't go quite as far as I'd hoped. We barely got Rev0 out for our processing elements. We wanted to get to Rev2, which requires two optimization look overs of the schematics. I blame the processes not getting done on time as well as some other fun dynamics. Here's a few rules for surviving:

Rule #1: Start early and expect to fail. This is big. Do NOT ever start the morning before. Ever. It will not work. And then you'll be crying and having panic attacks at 2 in the morning. Believe me, one team member practically broke down every Monday.

Rule #2: When the going gets tough, the tough call for backup. Chances are, other people know more than you. As a matter of fact, I can guarantee you that in a team, each will have special knowledge that is useful to the team. So, if you're stuck, ask someone else to help. Bonus if it takes that person one glace to know what went wrong. In our case, this is often Prof. Harris. We've actually likened him to an extra super mind that just intersects our plane of existence. Lolly is actually convinced one day he'll just phase out of our plane for a little while. Michael and myself designed two major processes, so chances are we know what the problem is. We had to do a lot of "shoulder camping" this semester to help get stuff going.

Rule #3: Take notes. Seriously. Forgetting what we said yesterday may be the sleep-dep talking, but you can avoid it by taking notes. Notes last way longer than your short-term memory.

Rule #4: Stay Alive. This means sleep and be healthy. This is directed at Lolly who was in a perpetual state of sleep-dep and sickness for the second half of the semester. I blame her uncanny ability to commit to way more than she can handle. She sometimes handles it all, but mostly she ends up overworked. Well, I consider it overworked. In theory, if you followed the above rules, this shouldn't be too big of an issue since you won't be spending 20 hours a week on Clinic. You'll just be spending more like 13 hours.

In the other front, MicroPs final project was a success. Julien Dage and I built a MIDI synthesizer. We take the MIDI signals from a keyboard and synthesize music out. Sounds easy, looks easy, isn't so easy. For one thing, the MIDI protocol has some weird special cases. It also is a current loop signal. We want a voltage signal. Oops. Then, we have the problem of how to make music. Huh. We used an interesting system where you can move through a hardcoded table at varying speeds to get different pitches. It saves you lots of memory, which means you can store higher resolution waves. Unfortunately, it wasn't as awesome as we'd hoped due to speed and variable size issues. But, we did make it work flawlessly for up to five notes. Later when they post our presentation videos I can link it. Not too interesting, but it demonstrates it works.

Well, that's all for now. I'll be on break after this week, so expect sporadic updates on my travels and holiday awesomeness.

The End is Nigh!

It's the home stretch. Last few weeks of school. For some, this would be heartwarming. Last few things to clean up, time to go out and start Christmas shopping (Amazon.com, you are one of my saviors), and all that.

Not true for me.

Let's recap.

In Clinic, Prof. David Harris commented last week we had about "6 weeks worth of work, and about 3 weeks to do it". This is also the same guy who casually looks at the problem I've been trying to fix for the last few days and solves it in a few minutes. So, yeah, we're in trouble. The key factor is to get what we call Rev1 done of the schematics. This first involves getting Rev0 done. Rev0 means your schematics simulate correctly (or at least as expected) in Verilog and SPICE. The SPICE simulations barely got up and running last week. And, as conventional wisdom says, these kinds of things are so simple that they'll work the first time. WRONG. Assume everything will fail, plan ahead, then double the time you expect that will take, and you're still probably missing something. Trust me. Something ALWAYS goes horribly wrong. Luckily, I have Schematics simulating in Verilog. Or, at least I did. Some weird bug has arisen and one of my schematics doesn't work anymore. See? Even when you think it's done, it isn't. Gr.... The scary part is I'm perhaps the closest to finished out of my team. As much as I'd like to pat myself on the back, it also scares me how behind we are as a team. I'm usually the person lagging behind. Then again, I crash if I don't get at least 6 hours of sleep, so I guess they get the chance to lap me by doing all-nighters. Not that I advocate all-nighters, just that it's not a viable option for me if you expect me to be cognizant the next day.

Next, MicroPs. I'm building with another student, Julien Dage, a MIDI synthesizer. It takes in MIDI signals from a keyboard and uses wave tables in the memory to synthesize music. Unfortunately, there's a few problems. First, it takes too long to process each individual note we want to play. I think, according to simulation, that I can get 3 notes. I want 8 notes. Options now include tweaking code at the assembly level, re-writing a part of the code to use a faster system, and slowing down how fast we output music. We also are having issues on the analog side of things. Curse that real world and all it's foolish inaccuracies. I demand more binary values!

Next, Hums. Philosophy final paper, Music final exam. Um. Yeah. Not quite as scary, but I still have a few loose ends I have to tie up. These are the only two classes that I'm either on schedule or ahead of schedule. Go figure.

Next, GameSHMC. I'd like to petition for more money for our budget. However, that means I have to prepare a presentation on why we deserve more money for the year.

Next, Family. Right now I'm at home. Thanksgiving was full of good food. Unfortunately, I can't access all the stuff I need to do the above mentioned work. Well, I can access the Clinic stuff, except it takes five times as long to get anything done. On the other hand, I can't snub my family. We've compromised and I'm heading back later today to do more work. Still gotta schedule moving back after this semester is over.

Next, everything else. I have a giant list of games on my door that I haven't played. Heck, I haven't even played stuff that came out over the summer, let alone the stuff people are raving about that just came out like Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead. Oh, and that Red Alert thing. Sorry, I'm not quite as avid a RTS player, although I do love blowing up the computer with nuclear weaponry.

Anyhow, that's where I'm at. No time left and everyone wants me to cash in yesterday.

Back to work.

Sayings Around Mudd

There's a few sayings that are used around Mudd. They're pithy, get across an idea, and while perhaps exaggerated there's a bit of truth.

So, let's look at a few:

There are 3 things you can pursue at Mudd. Good sleep, good grades, and good social life. Pick 2. I think we stole this one from Caltech. Not sure. There's also an addendum that states, "if you're in a sport, that's the 4th choice, but you still only get to choose two." Basically, the idea is that there's a lot to do at Mudd, and you're going to be out of time. In some respects, it's true. I know a few people who really do sacrifice sleep for social life and good grades. I can feel good grades chew out my social life as I prioritize sleep. Then again, most of the time it's more like 2.5 choices. Also, you can switch your priorities around and get a nice blend. Bonus points if good grades just come naturally to you, you crazy smart person, so you can get all three. Speaking of grades, that brings us to the next item.

Take your High School GPA. Subtract 2. That's you new Harvey Mudd GPA. OK, this is NOT true. While HMC is very good at battling grade inflation, we don't destroy everyone and put them into the low B range. I happen to be sitting around 3.0, and I believe a value came out before that we average around 3.3 out of 4.0. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, how ever will I compare with those 4.0 GPAs spewing out of some other college? On one hand, you can't. Some people don't realize HMC's rigor, and will promptly ignore you. On the other hand, it's an advantage. There have been testimony to the fact that many groups actually prefer the HMC GPAs because now they can accurately tell how you did. If you get a bazillion 4.0s, how do you know who's better or worse? Coming out of HMC, they know how strong a 3.0 or a 3.5 should be. Also, these people are not just small startups. We're talking about Sun Labs, UCB, Raytheon, Google. Big groups. Just to put things in perspective, less than 10 students in the 50 years have graduated with 4.0 GPAs.

The odds are good but the goods are odd. One of my favorites. This is mostly from the female side of things. We have about a 2:1 male to female ratio, so as a girl you have very good odds about hooking up if you want to. The problem is the applicant pool is not necessarily full of Tom Cruises. That isn't to say we're all crazy or acne pocketed bottle glasses nerds who get monitor tan. The vast majority of us can operate just fine in normal society, just don't ask us about Star Wars or quantum theory. On the flip side, the guys might seem like they're getting the short end of the stick. However, remember that not everyone you're competing against is that socially able. And, as a bonus, Scripps (an all girl school) is just across the street.

Still no date friday night. Ironically, this is on our HMC T-shirts sometimes. It's placed right after the delta-epsilon proof. This is perhaps the biggest lie ever. As far as social life goes, HMC is pretty vibrant. You should at least be acquainted with everyone in your class, and if you hang around cool places like East dorm, you'll meet plenty of people from other classes as well. On top of that, there are regular social events, parties, and yes people do date. There is actually this weird idea in the 5Cs that we are a party school. Seriously. Yet, we have a lower drinking rate than the other colleges, and a lower rate than the national average. The reason we're known for partying is because we throw awesome parties. One of East's is Funball. We rent a bouncy castle, play awesome dance music, and instead of buying booze we buy loads of candy. Oh, and a funball pit and a cotton candy machine. Other notables would be Wild Wild West, the Suds Party (formerly known as Foam Party), Tax Night, Trick or Drink, Trick or Cheese, and many others. There's this special one that North throws that I can't remember the name of. Club two-something-something. But yeah, we can rock it out all night long if we want.

So, now you know a couple of random sayings and the facts behind them. Cya around.

Searching in the Real World

There's this mythical place where you get paid to do homework and your problems sets actually determine the lives of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. WHOA!

Turns out I need to get into this world soon. I'm a graduating senior (or, at least I hope I've graduating), so that means grad school and jobs. It also means I get to feel really weird about myself.

Allow me to put things in perspective. I have a 3.06 GPA. Cumulative. Floated with some As in humanities classes. Did I forget to mention Harvey Mudd battles grade inflation? Then again, I get to brag about helping build a chip. Twice. Except the first one doesn't work.

Turns out most graduate programs have a minimum requirement of their applicants. Even more interesting is that the cutoff is usually a 3.0 undergrad GPA.

As an extra bonus, I'm interested in chip design and robotics and nanotechnology. Bonus points if you mash all three together. This means I kinda need a graduate degree to progress in the field. I guess I could try being like my dad who worked his way up the ranks and is now the senior systems engineer at his company even though he only has a BS. But, the economy also decided to tank. So, hiding in grad school for a bit isn't such a bad thing.

Then again, what if I don't get into grad school? Don't worry, I'm applying for full time jobs elsewhere! This means spamming my resume and brushing up on my interviewing skills. Oh, and deciding if I'm really interested in moving to Oregon or Texas to nab that job. No offers yet. Here's hoping.

In other fun news, I recently discovered I was building the wrong processing element for the chip for Clinic. Oops. Luckily, everyone else appears to have the correct PE, and it's the simplest of the PEs. Unfortunately the code I currently have doesn't pass the test vectors, so I'm also debugging it now. Oh, and I became head of the microarchitecture, which means I need a full chip in Verilog code by Tuesday. Oh, and I'm heading up the Verilog testing so I need to fix Cadence so it will output Verilog so we can test the schematics. Oh, and there's this MicroPs project I'm working on where we're going to make a MIDI transceiver for a keyboard and generate music. Oh, and there's the debugging of the chip we built last year. Oh, and there's these two other humanities classes I'm in. Oh, and I'm going home for a bit on the weekend.

It's gonna be a busy weekend.

It sounded good on paper....

Today's episode will be covering things you think at first are good ideas, but in reality may not be.

Let's start with a simple one. Pure democracy. Everyone has a single vote, majority wins. Yay power to the people and all that. The only problem is this relies on an informed governed/voter population. Unfortunately, the USA is really really bad at this. We rely too much on the echo chamber of the media for our 30 second sound bites to tell us how awesome this one idea is. So, maybe having smarter people in power would be nice. Problem is, this same population has to vote them in. Oops. Solution, inform your public. Yay mandatory schooling! Just make sure you make people learn. But, that's for another rant.

Here's one closer to Mudd. Clinic. Pretty awesome on paper. You're working with a liaison and as an undergrad you're getting real world experience. Awesome! However, you're trying to solve real world problems while in school. Oh, you mean you forgot you still had to do Hum papers or that lab for the other class? Oops. Bonus points if your liaisons don't actually know what the problem really is. One Clinic team (which will not be named here) has a really cool project. However, we're past the half-way mark and they still don't have a good grasp of the problem. It's a problem that relies heavily on sample data, but they don't seem to have any accurate data. Plus, many times they ask for information, the liaison says "figure it out," they come back and present their solution, and the liaison goes "yeah, that's what we were thinking." As much as I'm a fan for finding things out myself and giving people freedom for creativity, sometimes the optimal solution is already known. Please share. So, be warned that Clinic is a huge undertaking. Probably worth it, I'll let you know at the end of mine, but a giant time suck. Plus, you've got to do it in conjunction with other classes. Unless you were awesome, planned ahead, and don't have many classes during Clinic.

Now, another of my gripes. Diversity. Yay multiple views and experiences. The question then becomes, are we doing things for the sake of diversity? It's become a huge question in the College Application Process if a college is accepting and rejecting people based on nationality or gender. After all, we love having numbers with huge non-white and female incoming classes. Makes the news, good stuff for publicity. However, are you lowering the quality of the incoming class? Cheapening the brand of a degree? This also hurts the minority who have to second guess if they're there because they deserve it or because it was a "diversity" choice. Blargh. FYI, I'm a minority. Unfortunately, Asians have this weird idea that we aren't underprivileged, so we don't give out many Asian scholarships. Also, we're one of the largest minorities in the West Coast schools, so we typically don't get preferential treatment. As the saying goes, UCI is the University of Chinese Immigrants and UCLA is University of Caucasian Lost in Asia. =]

Back to recent events, Halloween was pretty awesome. I hope Kyle posts about his Dr. Horrible costume, because it was made of win. If you don't know what Dr. Horrible is yet, go here. But yeah, I didn't dress up. Thought about it, then decided to be a sleep deprived engineer. Turns out it worked well. =] Other favorites were a Music Pirate, a Hamlet/Westley/Random dude in black with a sword, the entire Evil League of Evil including Bad Horse (another Dr. Horrible reference), a random lady costume as an excuse to wear her corset, and Martin dressed up a Room Draw. Yeah, that thing we're not supposed to talk about. East had Trick or Cheese. Each suite buys Cheese, sometimes crackers too, and you go around sampling cheese. This is the counter to Trick or Drink in West. There was also a group who took tin foil, wrapped themselves up, and went to Chipotle. Chipotle gives free burritos to people who come dressed as a burrito, and since they wrap their burritos in tin foil, well...

Anyways, time to get back to my lab. I'm implementing processor interrupts today. yay!

Lies, more lies, and statistics

Here's some statistics I nagged the Admissions Department to give me. Thanks Raissa!

This post is gonna have lots of numbers and explanations and thoughts. Remember, statistics are trying to condense information into simple numeric values. However, many people have learned the art of exploiting statistics, so you should always be wary of the accuracy and authenticity of this statistics. I honestly believe that the two most important classes you can take are a civics class (understand how our government works please, don't just vote based on your parents) and a statistics class (seriously, where did the newspaper gets these numbers?).

Anyways, Mudd numbers!

Graduation Rate: 80% for class of 2008, oscillates between 77-84%
The 4 year graduation rate is defined as graduating in 8 consecutive semesters. This means it doesn't include anyone who took a semester off. I believe there have been posted numbers of around 86% for graduating in 5 years, but I'm not sure what their definition is of that. It might include 4 graded semesters but 1 year taken off, it might be the 9 semester kids, I don't know.

Freshman to Sophomore Retention Rate: 95% for 2007 to 2008
That's right, 95% of the students who entered in 2007 came back for a sophomore year in 2008. Note that this number needs to reduce to somewhere around 80% in 3 years. In reality, Mudd tends to lose the majority of its students somewhere during Sophomore year. By Junior year people are pretty set, unless they got into a major they don't actually like, and Seniors dropping out is pretty rare. Changing to an off-campus major is more likely, but then again that's also rare.

Breakdown of graduating majors (Class of 2008):
Major      Total %
  
Biology     4 2.37%
Chemistry and Biology   4 2.37%
Chemistry    6 3.55%
Computer Science   20 11.83%
Computer Science and Mathematics 7 4.14%
Engineering    73 43.20%
Individual Program of Studies   0.00%
Mathematical Biology   1 0.59%
Mathematics    23 13.61%
Physics     26 15.38%

Off Campus    5 2.96%

Um.... yeah. Engineers rule. We apparently also like the majors enough (or are too lazy) to make our own major. Also, note that there aren't that many Chemists or Biologists. That doesn't mean the departments are bad, we for some reason just don't have a lot of them. Weird. CS probably stole all of them.

Continued Schooling: 34% for 2008
This is typically around 40%. This includes going to professional school as well as graduate programs like a Masters or PhD. PhDs in Physics are especially high, and kinda required if you want to do something Physics-y with that degree, like be a professor.

Average Debt: $17,957 for 2008
Median Average Starting Income: $65K - $70K for 2008
These two combined are weird. I know for a fact I have way more that 18K in debt. Well, to be fair, they're probably only counting student loans, in which case that's closer to my number, but parental loans tend to be big. So, this statistic out of all of them is probably the most misleading. That isn't to say I have to pay all 40K a year, I do get some nice scholarships and such, but my parents definitely are fronting huge loans to get me through this. Don't forget us Engineers tend to skew the income number, a bunch of CS kids last year got eaten by this 80K paying company, and this number probably ignores students who aren't making anything. I mean, grad student stipend is only around 18K.

Females: 40% incoming class of 2008, 37% graduating class of 2008, 36% current total body
Please note that the last few incoming classes have been getting more and more females in them, so it's not like we're losing females faster than we lost males. Well, we might be, but you can't claim these statistics show that. Note that the incoming class of 2007 had a whopping 42% female class, better than any other major tech school. But, as the saying goes, "The odds are good, but the goods are odd." =] To be fair, the majority of the students can pass off as normal humans in society. Just don't ask them about relativity or anything, and you might never know.

"Top 10% of class:
95% of incoming students who gave a HS ranking are in the top 10 % of their class (mind you 157 out of the 202 gave a rank). Out of the whole class regardless if they gave a rank or not 74% of the students are in the top 10%."

"Top 5% of class:
60% of incoming students who gave a HS ranking are in the top 5 % of their class (mind you 157 out of the 202 gave a rank). Out of the whole class regardless if they gave a rank or not 46% of the students are in the top 5%."
This is for this last incoming class. This is also quoted from the e-mail I got back. Yay for transparency.

National Merit Finalists: 61 out of 202 = 30% of the incoming class
I am not one of these. That's right, I was too lazy (or too stupid) to study for that PSAT test. Come to think of it, did I even study for the SAT....?

Out of State: 35% of the incoming class
This is based on permanent address not citizenship or visa status. I am also not one of these.

International Students:
"This is based on citizenship and visa status not permanent address. So non-US citizens and non-permanent residents, would be 5% of the incoming class. We also have a fair amount of Americans abroad, basically US citizens and permanent residents who are graduating HS outside of the US. That number is 3% of the incoming class."
Go diversity. Oh, did I forget to mention one my Clinic Team members is a French Foreign Exchange Student?

Live on campus all years while attending: 99.6%
Um.... yeah. Everyone is on campus. Seriously. Walk down the hall and bug those upperclassmen, they like feeling important. They also want an excuse not to do their own homework. Also, note you are guaranteed housing all your years on campus. And if the dorms run out, they'll help subsidize a place off campus.

Average Mudd Graduating GPA: 3.2?
OK, the Admissions office doesn't track this, but if I recall correctly there was this other article that posted this number or something close to it. We do indeed battle grade inflation.

And now, for something interesting that got written back to me:
"Usually guide books ask for the most recent year but the thing is they are usually 1-2 years behind by the time they publish. For example the Yale Insider's Guide just asked me for numbers for their 2009 edition. I've given them the statistics for the class of 2012 (folks starting fall 08) and that goes to press and is distributed by early to mid 2009. By the time it's being sold we already have stats for the class of 2013 (folks staring fall 09)."

Cool stuff.

Leave a comment if you want me to go dig up other stuff.

Fall Break

Yeah yea, I know this is late. Not that most people care about my punctuality on this blog anyways.

So, I'm still in the middle of Fall Break. Technically, Fall Break begins after your last class of last week, which for me was Thursday afternoon. It extends until your first class Wednesday.

Luckily, we're not in High School where each teacher seems to think that any kind of break is a good time for the students to work on extra projects. Nope. Most professor have a tendency to go easier and let the students unwind a little during break. Winter break is extra awesome since our semesters actually line up and so there really are no classes that span the break. Unlike High School where Winter Break was the perfect time to work on that History Day Project.

Anyways, you might be asking what kind of stuff we do around here for Fall Break. Well, there's the official events endorsed by the official student organizations, such as today is a Disneyland trip. Since I'm currently writing this, and I don't own a laptop, I'm NOT at Disneyland. Hey, I grew up in Southern California and each year for Band we went to Disneyland. It's lost its appeal. I'll go visit again in a few years.

Then there's those other grassroots things. For example, the East Dorm Purity Test. It's a 500 question survey. For everything that you've done, you make a tally mark. At the end of the test, you count how many "yes" marks you have, divide by 5, and subtract that number from 100. Don't round to the nearest integer. So, higher score is better, or worse, depending on your viewpoint.

There's also my own person event, Extended Crack. If you recall, I organize Crack in the AC. Crack being an addictive item, in this case games, and AC referring to the ACademic computing labs. That's right, AC stands for ACademics. We just happen to localize in the computer labs so we can play games. Extended Crack is a special event every Fall Break where we start at noon and play until people leave. This is not to be confused with 24Hr Crack where players try to game for 24 Hours (noon to noon) with breaks for bathroom and food. Anyways, it was pretty awesome. Our lack of public TF2 accounts restricted TF2 a little, but we had some pretty fun times.

There are also smaller things, such as some people decided to have a slumber party in the dorm lounge. Or, a massive trip down to the Village for dinner. Fun stuff.

And of course, there's that bit of homework that you should do to get out of the way but you keep putting off so you can go mess around. Like Clinic.

Photo Blog: Intel Site Visit

Well, we just had our Site Visit to the Intel Campus up near Portland, Oregon.

To get there, we had to catch a 6:15am flight, which meant we left HMC at around 4:45am.









































We made a wrong turn, and wasted some time, but got to the airport on time for loading.




During the flight, we got to spend some quality time with Professor David Money Harris and go over stuff we were still a little hazy on and some new ideas we were working on. Here is Braly going over some ideas for a floorplan for the chip. Sorry, spacing was tight. That's Julien's head in the background.







Being in the morning, we had a nice sunrise as we took off. =]














More quality time, this time going over the delay calculations. I wasn't sure I did them right, but after a brief talk with Prof. Harris, I was glad I estimated as close as I could get. Made me happy. However, Lolly and Julien weren't quite as comfortable, so they got some time to review the calculations while Michael and I tried to take a quick nap.



























We couldn't take pictures in the buildings, so no pictures of the presentation nor the really cool lab. I also forgot to take a picture of the nice lunch we had. It was thai food and Braly approved of the quality, so it must have been the good stuff.

But we did get to take a nice picture with the whole team and our liaisons. Left to right: Prof. Harris, Julien, Michael, Sanu, Ram, and Lolly.

It is now about 4pm, so after a cool lab tour and more ideas on how to make our chip, such as about five ways to have a backup clock for the chip, we started driving back to the airport. These two knocked out before I did. =]

Due to some traffic, we got to the terminal at around 6:10pm for a 6:35pm flight. So, Professor Harris drove up the rental, we popped out, grabbed our stuff and started to run. Down a flight of stairs, shooting across the street from the parking structure, into the terminal. A quick glance around to find the Southwest terminals, print our boarding passes, dashing to security, and as we scurried to the gate

we realized the flight had been delayed. Probably one of the few times you're ever glad it was delayed.

The weird thing was I was in the back, so I kept thinking how epic this looked, the classic mad dash to the airplane with the Professor in the lead, and I wanted to take a picture. Problem was, I was running at full speed too.

Luckily, this meant a quick dinner. I also joked with Julien, who is a french exchange student, that now he'd had a Quizno's sandwich for breakfast, thai food for lunch, and a burrito for dinner. Michael joyfully added, "welcome to America." Interestingly, Julien has quite the appetite and once we got back to Mudd planned on making a trip to Jay's Place for more food.

Out we leave the terminal.

Oh, and by the way, Lolly really hates pictures of her, so by now she was threatening physical violence on my person if I kept taking pictures.

Chilling waiting for the shuttle back to the parking lot where we stashed the Clinic van.

Back at Mudd, safe and sound, much wiser than we left, and a heck of a lot more tired. It's 11pm in this picture.

And that's that. A full day spent traveling and talking with people way more knowledgeable than us. We did get quite a bit out of it, such as some fun times together and learning about how Intel tests its chips. Oh, and we got to see the teraflop chip Intel built a few years ago. Crazy awesome stuff.

Now I just have to finish the MicroPs lab, a presentation on Haydn, VLSI research, Clinic Verilog code hacking, Cell library components......

filler

I'm busy. Clinic + MicroPs + Research + 2 hums = lots of work.

The fact that I still go to Crack in the AC and WarCrack regularly isn't exactly helping. Well, I guess I have an excuse for Crack in the AC since I run the thing.

Quick update, though, I have my MicroPs lab done in record time. 6.5 Hours. Oh yeah. I even have the thing able to take two buttons being pressed at the same time. I'll try to remember to post pictures.

In the meantime, pictures of research! Research testing the chip we made last semester in VLSI. It doesn't work.... =[

What I've Learned!

Now to share some cool things I've learned so far!

Did you know that an argument can be valid, but not sound and vice versa? Take for example the following argument: "If it is raining, the street is wet. It is raining, therefore the street is wet." This is perfectly valid. It is logically consistent. However, it is not sound since if I look out my window, it is not raining. Soundness requires the premises to be tested to be true and for the conclusion to be true. In the same token, "I am male, I am right-handed, therefore I can type" is invalid, but every statement is true. Fun.

Did you know that you shouldn't inhale the fumes from soldering? Even though the new modern solder has to be lead-free by the lovely new laws in place, there's a very high chance that giant roll of solder you're using still has lead in it. Granted it's pretty inert in the solder, and it has wonderful electrical and mechanical properties, but people freaked about lead in anything and so we've had to remove it. Stupid politicians. But yeah, it also smells really bad.

Did you know that the way we do secure communication on the internet is through encryption? One half of the encryption key is a public key that you broadcast. The second half is then created and sent specifically for your transaction. One the key is setup, you then have to encode and decode your messages, which can take quite a bit of processing power. So, people have figured out algorithms to help try and make this process faster.

Did you know that there is a non-zero chance for a tied electoral college this election year? What would happen is that the house would vote, 1 vote per state. Yay politics!

Did you know that East currently has no TV mounted on the wall? After the renovations, which got cut short because the contractors took too long, the mounting hooks were not replaced on the wall. Initial theory was that they were buried inside the wall, since to upgrade the dorm for the earthquake code the walls got thicker. However, searching for them with magnets has come up empty, so we're guessing they simply haven't bee put back in the wall.

Did you know that this year's Frosh are especially competent at showering people? Here's some pictures from our first dorm meeting to illustrate!






So, here we have people getting showered, and the requisite hug afterward. And finally, DONUTS! After each dorm meeting, we get donuts. Showerers and showerees get first dibs.

Anyways, that's it for this week. Clinic goes and eats more souls now.

What's Important in Life

At least according to Prof. Jacobsen.



In other news, my Clinic will be to make a shiny chip to help speed up cryptography algorithms. Return to the team Michael Braly, adding in an exchange student Julien, and other friend but not on this blog yet Lolly Simoni.

Oh, and Crack starts up today.

Yay for busy school week!

Welcome to the 50th Percentile

or below.

Perhaps one of the most surprising and yet most obvious things about Mudd is that there's smart students here. The obvious factor is, well, quite obvious. It's bragged about, stories are written about it, and the statistics support it. The surprising part is what students do when they get here.

They think it's gonna be like High School.

You know. The place where you're the best of the best. Maybe valedictorian, top 10, National Honors, smartest person around, impressive and gawked over by teachers by your natural insight and talent. Plus, you've probably got some other talent, such as being involved in Band like I was, or art, or a sport, or taking over the student government. You were on top of the class. Maybe a little socially ostracized, but you were excelling nonetheless.

The problem is that everyone at Mudd was the same as you. They all were near the top of their class, they took advanced courses, they have special talents, and they're also here to prove their mettle before stepping out into the real world and dazzling it with their brilliance and awesomeness.

This presents you with some interesting circumstances. Best case, you're still the brightest in the class and breeze through your homework. Lucky you. For the rest, you're not on top of the grades, you're dreaming of As while you shoot for that B and sometimes settle for the C or even the D. You're not admonished with proposals to do extra work or to be on the team for the big project. Next best case is you've still got that special talent. You wow people with your guitar skills at parties or your ability to frag anyone on the net. You dazzle the halls with art or show the competition who's boss on the court.

But then again, maybe you're not. For perhaps the first time in your life, you have to be the average person. Or, even worse, you're the baseline, the minimum passing grade, the straggler.

The question is what to do?

I've mentioned before that you don't want to become the attention seeking jerk who annoys everyone, so here's some alternatives. Be content that you're the 50th percentile of the top 10% of the nation, and perhaps even the world. Improve yourself so you still shine in the areas you want, even if you're not the best. Diversify and pick up new things that interest you. Reach out to others. Do something. Do not sulk about not being the best around.

Personally, I'm somewhere just below the 50th percentile. The thing is I've never quite been on top. I was in low end of the top 10 of my class, but couldn't move up no matter how hard I tried. I never made first chair Flute in Band. In some ways, I always knew I wasn't gonna be on the top. Coming to Mudd solidified that idea. Now I live with Cs on my report card, and I'm OK with them. I've chosen some areas and hobbies that I enjoy, and have diversified my resume. For those who know me, they know I'm quite interested in games. I enjoy games for their novelty, the competition, the balancing, the strategy, and even the critique of games. Even though I almost never top the scoreboard. Perhaps more surprising is that I didn't play many video games before arriving at Mudd. I've also worked on my musicianship. I am still a far cry from my musical peers who can tear up the room with amazing ingenuity and skill. I've decided that I won't give in to failure, and will enjoy myself and do my best while I'm at Mudd.

It all boils down to this: don't sweat it. Yes, coming to Mudd is difficult. It will most likely challenge you. People have been scared away by this. Most people will break down and cry eventually during the course of their education at Mudd. There have been stories of people who had to be forced to come back to Mudd.

However, you are also coming to one of the most accepting community imaginable. You don't have to go out of your way to prove yourself the best. Just do your best and make sure to have some fun along the way. I'm sure you can find yourself a niche if you really wanted. Even if it's just being the person who hangs around the lounge too much.

Oh, and on a brighter note, the two people that I know of who were forced back to Mudd eventually found their place and graduated from Mudd, content and glad they came back.