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fall 2022 in review

Profile picture of Samson ZhangSamson Zhang
Dec 25, 202229 min read


It's that time of year again! Here's a dump of what I did in and out of classes this semester.

Classes

In the spring I wrote about my appreciation for the sense that there was a common scientific method that emerged in my physics, cognitive science and comparative politics classes: of model-making, testing, successive knowledge discovery.

There was far less of this overall feeling this semester, probably because I've moved beyond intro classes to more advanced electives focusing on specific models that have already been developed and tested. This was true for the physics, engineering, politics and two media studies classes that I took: while the physics and engineering classes each had largely separate directions (I enjoyed the latter much more than the former), the two media studies classes and politics class had huge overlaps in their content (namely theorizing about capitalism and ideology), and I enjoyed the way that models bumped up against and intertwined with each other, showing their strengths and limitations.

I wrote that I wanted to learn ethnographic methodologies this semester, but did not end up taking an anthro class that I permed into. Instead, the only methodological learning that stuck with me came from the lab component of my physics class, which I feel like exposed me to the first time to several aspects of real scientific experimentation: time-constrained design, error analysis, communication of results, etc.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this semester's classes, which built on previous paths of exploration (politics, media studies) and opened up new ones (engineering, tech x media studes). Next semester I'm set to dive into engineering and media studies through my classes, but I'm anxious to learn to do fieldwork in both fields (critical ethnography!), and to go deeper into fields like politics, economics and history (or even physics, math and CS) that I've only brushed off of but have many friends deep in.

Without further ado, class recaps:

Engineering 79 at Harvey Mudd: Engineering Systems

Summary: I learned how to apply basic physics in new ways to analyze physical and control systems, showing me what engineering is all about.

I loved this class because of how real and useful the knowledge felt. Like in elementary physics or calculus, when you first learn about how position, velocity, acceleration, force, energy, etc. work and can apply it to situations around you -- I can calculate how long it will take something to fall, and what speed it will have at a given point! -- this class felt like it was continuously giving me tools to mathematically understand how systems behave.

A car suspension has springs and dampers. The force of a spring is proportional to displacement and of a damper to velocity: in physics, you can use these principles to solve for a bunch of equations that describe how the suspension will function. But emphasis is placed on understanding the details of that specific system.

In E79, we solve for similar equations, but both the technique and emphasis are different. Technique-wise, instead of using calculus to solve differential equations, we use Laplace transforms, which make derivative terms linear:

\mathcal{L}[f(t)] = \int_0^\infty f(t) e^{-st} dt = F(s) \\ \mathcal{L}[\frac{d}{dt} f(t)] = sF(s) - f(0) \\ \mathcal{L}[f(t) + g(t)] = \mathcal{L}[f(t)] + \mathcal{L}[g(t)] \\ \mathcal{L}[\alpha f(t)] = \alpha \mathcal{L}[f(t)]
L[f(t)]=∫0∞f(t)e−stdt=F(s)L[ddtf(t)]=sF(s)−f(0)L[f(t)+g(t)]=L[f(t)]+L[g(t)]L[αf(t)]=αL[f(t)]\mathcal{L}[f(t)] = \int_0^\infty f(t) e^{-st} dt = F(s) \\ \mathcal{L}[\frac{d}{dt} f(t)] = sF(s) - f(0) \\ \mathcal{L}[f(t) + g(t)] = \mathcal{L}[f(t)] + \mathcal{L}[g(t)] \\ \mathcal{L}[\alpha f(t)] = \alpha \mathcal{L}[f(t)]

So for an example system, we can take a Laplace transform, solve for

X(s) X(s) X(s)
, and then take the inverse Laplace to solve for
x(t) x(t) x(t)
, all without directly using any calculus:

\begin{align*} \ddot{x} + 4\dot{x} + 25x &= u(t) \\ \mathcal{L}[\ddot{x} + 4\dot{x} + 25x] &= \mathcal{L}[u(t)] \\ X(s)(s^2+4s+25) &= \frac{1}{s} \\ X(s) &= \frac{1}{s(s^2+4s+25)} \\ \implies x(t) &= \frac{1}{25} \big(1 - \cos{\sqrt{21}t}e^{-2t} - \frac{2}{\sqrt{21}}\sin{\sqrt{21}t}e^{-2t}\big) \end{align*}
x¨+4x˙+25x=u(t)L[x¨+4x˙+25x]=L[u(t)]X(s)(s2+4s+25)=1sX(s)=1s(s2+4s+25)  ⟹  x(t)=125(1−cos⁡21te−2t−221sin⁡21te−2t)\begin{align*} \ddot{x} + 4\dot{x} + 25x &= u(t) \\ \mathcal{L}[\ddot{x} + 4\dot{x} + 25x] &= \mathcal{L}[u(t)] \\ X(s)(s^2+4s+25) &= \frac{1}{s} \\ X(s) &= \frac{1}{s(s^2+4s+25)} \\ \implies x(t) &= \frac{1}{25} \big(1 - \cos{\sqrt{21}t}e^{-2t} - \frac{2}{\sqrt{21}}\sin{\sqrt{21}t}e^{-2t}\big) \end{align*}

But even this direct analytical solving using Laplace transforms was rare after the beginning of E79, because there are tons of standard patterns that systems follow that offer shortcuts. A first-order system has the standard form

\dot{x} + \frac{1}{\tau}x = \alpha y(t) x˙+1τx=αy(t) \dot{x} + \frac{1}{\tau}x = \alpha y(t)
, for example: for a step input, we immediately know that the steady state
x_f = \tau \alpha y_f xf=ταyf x_f = \tau \alpha y_f
and the system will behave as follows:



And for a second-order system

\ddot{x} + 2\zeta \omega_n \dot{x} + \omega_n^2 x = \alpha y x¨+2ζωnx˙+ωn2x=αy \ddot{x} + 2\zeta \omega_n \dot{x} + \omega_n^2 x = \alpha y
, we can determine the following behavior based on system parameters:



And this isn't just math -- spring and damper car suspension is a second-order system, and using this math we can immediately figure out the right spring and damper stiffness to handle expected disturbances without being too weak on one hand or overshooting and oscillating on the other.

We also spent time looking at sinuisoidal inputs with Bode plots, which I'll throw in the following slide for:



And proportional/integral/derivative control systems that sit on top of the base physical ones to get desired behavior out of it (see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PID_Compensation_Animated.gif).

I have all these great graphics and notes because 1. the class used a flipped classroom structure with video content that I could easily screenshot and take notes on, and with constant real-world examples (including a lab component where we built real simulated, physical and electrical systems that we could analyze -- as straightforward as a robot with a single motor and some floaties moving up and down in a pool) that gave me an intuitive sense for why the math was useful, and 2. I really enjoyed this class and consistently wrote Postulate notes on the content. Even though it was a lot of new math and concepts I didn't find the class difficult.

The class made me feel a lot better about taking engineering classes and I look forward to understanding and building more engineering systems in the future -- I'm taking continuum mechanics, analog electronics and experimental engineering in the spring.

Physics 101 at Pomona: Foundations of Modern Physics

One-line summary: I loved the professors and got to know my physics classmates, but didn't enjoy the content, leaving me with mixed thoughts about pursuing physics.

The first time I took quantum, at Andover, I remember at some point trudging through a ton of Schrodinger equation math and arriving at an equation that described the shape of electron orbitals -- and they were the shapes of the p- and whatever other orbitals I had learned about in chem! It was an amazing moment that made me feel like all the confusion and tedium had paid off.

This class arrived at the same orbitals, but I felt no joy when I flipped the page of the textbook to see them, only frustration that I didn't really understand how we got there. I can tell you about separation of variables, boundary conditions for particles in different 1D potential wells, and vaguely about spherical harmonics, but I'm not sure how to connect these ideas to any others I've learned about before or will learn in the future.

I did enjoy the lab component, running from 1:15 to 5 PM every Thursday, with a focus on experimentation I hadn't seen before: instead of lab reports we were graded based on notebook notes, capturing the motivation, theory, procedure and results of different experiments only vaguely related to the main class content. I learned more about error analysis than I ever have before: not in terms of rigorous calculation, but about intuitively how to estimate what errors effect results and how much. There were times too when we ignored the given values or experimental design given in handouts (often not tailor-made for the class but taken directly from papers), but it was fine and even encouraged because we knew what we were trying to measure.

Halfway through the semester I stopped doing assignments almost completely, my other commitments preventing me from keeping up with the conceptual and mathematical difficulty outside of class. At the end of the semester both the lecture and lab professors reached out offering makeup opportunities: both tests also had correction opportunities. I really appreciated these leniencies, and think they should probably be made the standard in the first place to encourage learning rather than punishing people for falling behind.

A few weeks into the class I thought I for sure didn't want to take any more physics classes, going to the department chair inquiring about PPA Physics (for which I only needed the intro sequence) and finding out that there was an unofficial engineering track that I would much prefer. By the end, especially having gotten to know other majors, including older ones who were mentors, I wonder if maybe I would enjoy E&M or particle physics or something else after all: I enjoyed putting in time at the end of the semester to actually go through the material with classmates. Furthermore, the class had a "colloquia summary" component where we had to write up summaries of visiting lecturers' talks. I missed these during the semester but made them up using recordings last-minute, summarizing one talk about the circumgalactic medium (the "atmosphere" of a galaxy containing materials for star formation, etc.) and one about biophysics experimentation to analyze the folding of riboswitches (pieces of RNA at the beginning of a transcription sequence that bind with a ligand -- in this case lysine -- to enable or prevent a ribosome from binding with the RNA and translating it into a protein), and you know what, they were really cool! They sparked a sense of discovery and understanding, of truly learning how our world works, that I think I don't find in engineering, which I otherwise enjoy more. So we'll see where I end up!

Media Studies 73 at Pitzer: Technology, Capitalism, and Race

Summary: lectures and discussions that really built up my understanding of capitalism and race, and readings that theorized about the various connections between and complications with these ideas, and the relationships that technology has with them. In short: capitalism depends on the exploitation of labor; race is a construct that plays a huge role enabling this exploitation; and technology is co-productive with society, often functioning to reproduce historical societal ills behind masks of algorithmic or designed objectivity.

At the beginning of the semester, Prof. Esmaeli told the class: "you already know about what's described in the readings. You're just learning the vocabulary that others have used to talk about those things."

Reading Marx -- with a lot of accompanying explanation -- provided the basic theoretical ideas of the commodity, exchange value, surplus value, capital accumulation, primitive accumulation, enclosure, etc. Bonacich provided an outline and abundant examples of how labor is racialized to enable greater exploitation; while Du Bois, Marable, Taylor and others articulated how race consciousness presents sites for understanding and organizing against capitalist exploitation, but also sites where division has been sown to prevent solidarity and deny democracy or autonomy to Black people in America. Harvey outlined the specific capitalist forms of Fordism-Keynesianism and neoliberalism, elaborating on the interplay of the private sector, the state and civil society as outlined by Heilbroner.

Regarding technology, De Lara provided the main idea that stuck with me: that technology needs to be operated within a specific social logic to have an effect on society, and as such can never be analyzed in isolation from analysis of the society it is produced and operates within. Benjamin similarly writes that technology and society are co-productive: technologies only exist because of societal conditions that give rise to their development, e.g. policing and surveillance technology developed for the purpose of surveilling Black and Brown people, and can in turn produce and reproduce social structures. Winner complicates the idea that "knowledge is power," pointing to the importance at the end of the day of real human connections and advocacy in changing people's minds, and the tendency for easy information dissemination channels to further concentrate rather than distribute power. Zuboff outlines the idea of surveillance capitalism, that technologies not only take advantage of but shape our behavior through surveillance for capitalist gain; Browne's Dark Matters I did not get around to reading, but from a skim elaborates on what surveillance actually means and how it can be opposed. Lastly, Benjamin dunks on design thinking and articulates the actual condition for solidarity: "we must demand…not liberatory designs but just plain old liberation." I wrote about that for one of my final essays here.

I'm nowhere near convinced that I understand capitalism, or (especially) its relation to technology. In a competitive market, it's obvious that success depends on increasing worker exploitation. Slavery, migrant labor, workers in the Global South, etc. demonstrate the fundamental role that race has played and continues to play in the development of capitalist economies. But what about the idea of new technologies creating new markets, and the new abundance that comes from innovation, the real rises in living conditions that come about because of them? Google pays their workers minimum wage, but why do they have to? Startups sometimes have some of the best working conditions for their engineers, designers, whoever -- how do I understand the pro-capitalism argument that this kind of growth just needs to be evenly distributed? I can't point to an obvious site of exploitation underlying capital accumulation there.

So I'm left with lots of ideas, frameworks, names, texts to keep chewing on. I wanted to take this class as soon as I saw its title the first time, and it's given me just about everything I've asked for, if not nearly as clean of an answer -- maybe none really exists, at least not that is easily communicable given the texts and academic landscape available. The class complicated and pushed me to more deeply understand ideas from politics, from startup culture, from reading about and experiences with organizing, etc. I also got to know the professor somewhat well, and he has supported many of my other pursuits, and let me into his Contemporary U.S. Media class next semester. This class put possibilities of further learning or work regarding society and technology firmly back on my radar, what drew me to media studies in the first place.

Media Studies 148 at Pomona: Powers of Pleasure

Summary: a quick dive into psychoanalytic theory -- Freud, Lacan, Zizek, Barthes, Mcgowan, hooks -- applied to language and media: a set of answers to "why do we believe what we believe?", especially as it relates to societal power structures and resistance to them.

A class that left me even more skeptical about rationalism and with a renewed appreciation for art, for creative and subversive uses of cultural codes. We know that data and arguments often don't change minds, but stories do. Why? Because our understandings of logic, of truth, of fact are formed and bounded by the very structures of power that we attempt to challenge. Only lived experiences, or irrational art that speaks to what the rational fails (often intentionally) to capture, can break through. That's not to say challenges have to be grand and revolutionary: everyday pleasures are just as much ruptures from the symbolic order.

Pairing well with MS73 (even with overlapping ideas from Zizek), this course provided theory about how capitalism results in alienation from others and from self: through the symbolic order. Just like in MS73, I feel like the main function of this course's readings was to provide vocabulary to describe what we already know (also, in the language of the course, creating new space where this vocabulary caused rupture). The ideas I've heard in a million ways in a million different spaces: questioning revolution, the master's tools, CSWA's storytelling workshop, Stuart Hall's codes, everything is a text. But this course's theories, even if they felt like they sometimes lacked rigor (psychoanalysis as transcending biological and sociological analysis? press X to doubt -- it feels intuitive that they're all eventually convergent, pending further sophistication in all three but especially the latter two), gave me good tools for tying these ideas together and sharpening my own critical lenses regarding politics, language, media, organizing, etc.

And I got to write a nice, very academic-sounding paper about Viet Thanh Nguyen that I enjoyed!

POST124 at Pitzer: Chinese PoliticsSummary:

Summary: what is democracy? What is representation? How do states retain legitimacy and stability? This course continued and grounded discussions of these questions, which I first encountered in Comparative Politics, while also running through a survey of CCP history and contemporary political structures and institutions.

The Chinese state today is a "mobilizational" (as opposed to legal-rational) bureaucracy (Ang) anchored by post-reform "performance legitimacy" (Zhao), or maybe increasingly ideological (Communist and Xi Jinping-specific) legitimacy (as opposed to legal-rational). Its form is determined by a back-and-forth between the power of institutions and the power of personalist leaders (Nathan and Fewsmith), with the former brought about by Deng Xiaoping's personalist-forced technocratic, meritocratic internal reforms decades ago, the result of which has been increasingly meaningful representation of constituents by local officials even in the absence of meaningful elections beyond very local ones (Manion). Chinese history is one of extreme violence, and continuing violence and repression of various forms. Ultimately, this course left me with more questions than answers for what China's future looks like, but it was great to have this curiosity bolstered while learning more political theory applicable everywhere. I'm left especially wanting anthropological/sociological understandings of Chinese society and politics -- closer to lived experience, distrusting of academic rational takes. I have still-vague hopes to study abroad in China in the fall (they need to get a lot less vague very quickly to happen), and will probably spend a good amount of energy trying to understand and engage with Chinese politics for the rest of my life, so I'm very grateful for the foundations this course helped me build.

Not classes

As much learning has happened outside as inside of classes this semester: in fact I skipped classes on several occasions for these commitments. They have kept my learning grounded and helped me feel embedded in campus communities as I figure out my relationships with myself and the people and world around me.

Captaining Mock Trial



I captained one of Pomona's three unstacked mock trial teams this fall, with a mix of returners and newly recruited freshmen.

It was fun to have to figure things out for myself without having a higher authority directly correcting me -- what objections work, what framings stick -- and at the same time pass the knowledge to my teammates, including freshmen who were knew to the whole thing. Running character-y characters and working with Clay on A team gave me opinionated ways to do things that I was happy to carry on.

As in previous semesters, Mock Trial continued to give me an appreciation for team sports (ref. Shafin Diamond). We had pretty bad results our first tournament, and in the second tournament went down 0-4 in the first half, but it felt natural to give pep talks, and amazing things happened when we pushed through when things felt hopeless (4-0 on the second day, sweeping the team whose coach had cost us a round earlier -- and just having really solid rounds). I struggle with my own initiatives requiring training people and getting us to do things together in timely fashion (Undercurrents): Mock Trial and other established student clubs provide me with a model of what successful teamwork and leadership looks like. I can also feel all the disappointments and moments of joy building a new sense of resilience and hope in me: I went from considering quitting in the spring to captaining this semester, and from deciding to quit this season to being stacked on A team again and even convincing a friend to stay for the upcoming competitive season -- building discipline to get through the dreadful parts and, as Muriel puts it, access and create greater joy.

I find myself less enthusiastic about Mock Trial itself compared to last year. I loved the creativity and expressiveness of character witnesses last year, but this year the emphasis is more on scoring points than having fun, and I've been able to dabble more directly in actual acting, music making, etc. elsewhere. If I wanted to get more into law stuff, opportunities also now lie squarely outside of Mock Trial -- the Small Claims Advisory Service, taking classes, etc.

At the end of the day I'm staying for the same reason I joined in the first place and stayed this semester: to get to know and have fun with teammates. It's also a crowd that I don't run into much elsewhere (besides the occasional politics class) and continue to learn a ton from!

AAMP mentoring freshmen



Our Asian American Mentorship Program has been an amazing space for getting to know people in grades above and below who I feel like I should have known in the first place. It's made it much easier to connect with mutuals, get to know upperclassmen and freshmen and overall feel more embedded in the campus community.

It has also been a wonderful space for learning about and practicing care: the trainings, head mentors, meeting structures and more frequently reflect a mindfulness about people's capacities and contributions that is rare elsewhere. The training in particular gave me the vocabulary to talk about emotional labor, mental load, etc., and I was able to do a really cool archives/history project for our first retreat.

I haven't done as much for my own group of freshmen as I would have liked, but it's been fun to cook for them and see them get to know each other and turn out for AAMP events.

It makes sense that AAMP boosts retention of Asian American students, and why the school would fund it. The spirit of the program is centered on joy and healing beyond these metrics, of course, and it's been a great source of grounding and learning for me.

CSWA and Undercurrents: thoughtful solidarity with labor organizing



This semester has seen a resurgence in campus activism. In particular, Pomona dining workers locked in contract negotiations led rallies and eventually a strike, while Pitzer workers fought to fend off a union de-certification petition, with members of the Claremont Student Worker Alliance working hard to support both.

I quit TSL to be more directly involved with student activism, and started the semester going to Prisab, SJP and CSWA events. I actually missed the first CSWA event and thought I might get more involved with Prisab, but with by far the most happening at CSWA I found myself there and not in the other two groups, getting to know student and worker organizers and doing my part clipboarding, making posters, showing up to actions.

The involvement with CSWA and other organizations that I put the most effort into was starting the leftist activism-focused student news publication (idk it's gone through a bunch of descriptions) Undercurrents: what began as an idea I threw around with Reia and Mariana after quitting TSL became one I pitched to club leaders, then one that ran scattered stories on Prisab and CSWA actions, and finally a publication with a consistent and known presence covering labor organizing and a loose list of writers on a firm pathway to helping out, and more than enough important stories to write that otherwise fly under the radar.

All this work does a lot to ground my learning, thinking and being. CSWA is an amazing source of political and practical organizing education, through workshops on strikes, neoliberalism and storytelling; conversations and one-on-ones; seeing union fights and their results happen in real time. A big takeaway, for example, is that changing people's minds and getting them to act has to happen one-on-one, or at least directly: students clipboardoing in dining halls, union reps going worker-to-worker, organizers individually bringing people into the fight. I'm used to thinking abstractly about arguments, ideology, politics, what have you: seeing actual organizing balances this abstraction with on-the-ground experience of political power being built. Directly knowing what the lives of workers here, in nearby warehouses, etc. are like, too, grounds all my understandings about what living in LA or America is like, and the different ways real people are affected by startups, policy, etc. The learning has also practically helped my work: M's simple suggestion to do one-on-ones to get people involved moved Undercurrents from having meetings that nobody attended to having a half-dozen stories in the (admittedly still shaky and leaky) pipeline.

There's so much more to be done. I need to learn to hone my focus and take care of myself, find joy and healing and not just excitement in organizing. When I interviewed Ambrose Brooks, an organizer at Dignity and Power Now, one of the pieces that stuck with me most was when they mentioned the importance of organizers taking breaks when possible, as the recent Board of Supervisors action allowed JusticeLA to do. I've found personal joy in getting to know student and worker organizers: budding friendships with CSWA, SJP and Abolition folks I keep running into, a new sense of warmth and comfort just being in Frary. There's a ridiculous amount that will happen in the spring for Pomona, for Pitzer, for Undercurrents, for SJP, for Prisab. I'll have to work hard to keep up and play the role I want to, but the thought of doing so in community with so many amazing students, workers, faculty and more makes me immensely excited to do so.

The Yappie: wheels are a turning

Since I joined The Yappie it has been an amazing space for diving into journalism and politics: my SJP piece gave me more sense of mission and confidence as a journalist than anything else I'd done. But it was also pretty scattered, with meetings irregular and poorly attended.

Then, I think over the summer, things started to turn around. We restructured into hardlined editorial and business teams, with Shawna, Mary and a cast of new-ish writers driving the production of biweekly newsletters, making for the regular meetings and output so sorely lacking before. Thanks to Dan we got a huge grant from the Gold Futures Challenge (Phoebe Scriven, who had once helped me with Postulate, unexpectedly reappeared here!) and I and our writers started getting paid!

I learned a huge amount from editing for TSL, so I jumped at the opportunity to edit for The Yappie when it arose. Due to the writers and the content, it's been more challenging and at times less satisfying than editing for TSL, but I'm learning a lot working more closely with Shawna and the rest of the team.

Of course my own reporting continues to be incredibly meaningful to me, if slow: like in CSWA, actually talking to people affected by deportation, police brutality, etc. for stories allows me to ground abstract versions of the same ideas, and using that vocabulary and knowledge to actually help and be in greater solidarity with people (who are connected to me! through AAPI identity, by being in California, by being a Pomona alum) gives me reasons to keep learning.

I hope to continue this learning, especially to keep connecting with activists and journalists as I've been able to do so far. I hope to get to know the Yappie team itself better and be more involved in the coming months.

Pomona-AI: remnants of the coding spirit

This semester I was part of Pomona-AI's "p-recommender" project team, headed by a friend I got to know through DataFest. The project: build a recommendation engine for courses. I wasn't planning to do any p-ai or CS projects this semester, but when I saw the description I begged Saatvik to let me in, because I had the very same project idea on my list.

I was surprised when Saatvik made me the data science team lead. Eventually the data science boiled down to having two word vectorization models, GloVe and tf-idf, and accompanying data cleaning and cosine similarity code to pull things together. To be honest, I didn't contribute much to the data science part other than continually trying to standardize the data: Tilo and Alex did an amazing job getting their code to work (while I struggled with Word2Vec 😭).

My biggest direct contribution ended up being, who would have guessed, on the frontend, doing several last minute CSS and Flask patch jobs to pull it all together. There's one big part of the project still left in progress: an interactive point cloud, which I thought would be straightforward but actually had me learning entirely new d3/canvas techniques just to prevent the graph from crashing the browser. It's similar to Tidy Tuesday and my early web dev projects: picking up whole new areas of technical understanding just through buliding.

Ultimately it was fun to get to know some CS folks and to build a cool project that I hope people will use, and that at the very least will be a good portfolio piece. It was a natural way to keep learning data visualization and NLP, trading off speed of learning for the joy (and sometimes stress) of making friends along the way!

Machine shop :D



The last thing I got up to this semester was...carpentry. With my newfound E4 machine shop confidence, I whipped up a pencil case and shoe rack in the machine shop; a last-minute gift box for secret santa in the makerspace; and an ongoing electric scooter project in Estella basement, funded by a Hive grant.

I'm in the very hacky stage of machine shop proficiency right now: I can make things work, but really not how I should -- but I'm starting to understand this. I want to learn to use the table saw, the shopbot, metal CNC mills, to weld. I have projects and commitments that I think will allow me to do this.

Why am I doing this? Honestly, I just love building real, physical things, and being able to do simple woodworking and hardware design is often practically useful. Of course, it will help for my engineering degree too, though I have no idea what I'm going to do with that degree itself. I have pipe dreams of starting a Formula SAE team at Claremont, or doing some real wireless power transmission research -- we'll see how it goes!

Looking forwards

And there we are, semester 3/8 in the bag. It's terrifying how quickly the time is passing by: I'm fast approaching the halfway point of undergrad at Claremont, especially if I end up doing a semester abroad.

Here's the plan for classes next semester:

  • E80, Experimental Engineering: more general engineering theory and a pre-req for many future courses
  • E83, Continuum Mechanics: beam theory? fluid mechanics? stress and such? why is this building standing? Excited for a very practical-sounding class about how physical things work
  • E84, Electric and Magnetic Circuits/Devices: how do electronics work? Like E83, excited to see physics ideas being applied in very practical ways
  • Chin 111, Advanced Chinese: if I'm going to study abroad, I better brush up. This course allegedly involves "extensive reading of modern texts", which is a level I've never reached before, so as long as I'm able to keep up I'm looking forward to this one
  • MS93, Contemporary US Media: another class with Kouross Esmaeli! Looking forward to more media theory -- finally about journalism! -- and knocking a media studies minor prouction requirement out

I would love to take a politics class somewhere in here, perhaps swapping out for an engineering class or Chinese. I'm also not taking any classes with friends I already have, which probably contributes to my sense of loneliness on campus. I'm also once again planning to overload with what are likely to be some pretty hefty classes. All these problems I'll have to deal with and may result in a change or two, but regardless I'm excited for what's to come!

And for not classes:

  • Undercurrents, CSWA, SJP, Prisab: organizing will only ramp up in the spring, and I think Undercurrents has the potential to ramp up to meet and amplify it
  • AAMP: another retreat, checkins with mentees, AAMP snaccs, maybe another semester on community resources -- continuing to do my small part creating healing and joy on campus
  • Machine shop proctor, scooter project: excited to keep getting good at making things in the machine shop, now with formal support, and get to know other engineering kids!
  • Mock trial: on the competitive team! I think (hope) this will actually be a lighter part of the season, with me witnessing instead of attorneying and also not captaining, and I'm looking forward to being with the team and hopefully doing well
  • Yappie: becoming more involved as an editor and continuing to do my own reporting

Another huge list of things to do, that will certainly keep me busy -- but hopefully also be restorative and joyful.

I'm worried that I'm preserving optionality instead of playing to my strengths, and spreading myself thin in the process. Instead of doubling down on journalism, law, software engineering or real engineering, I'm stretched between all of them, my time and energy and social circles all flimsy as a result. If I were just working on Undercurrents, or my scooter, or a Formula SAE team, or p-ai, how far could I go?

It's a thought I'll keep contemplating and perhaps translating to action before the beginning of the semester.

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