brief update

I have to make this one quick: I have homework to do!

The flight back to Boston was uneventful. Who knew the Phoenix airport had free wireless internet access? How awesome.

My dad, brother, and neighbor came into Boston to help me move stuff into my dorm room. Later my dad took me out for some Ikea furniture! My room is wonderful and comfy. I'll try to add some photos later.

Bobby came to visit me in Boston for a few days. We had a great time, and it was so wonderful to see him again after 3 months of separation! Shortly after he left, my dad invited him to come back for Thanksgiving, so we have another 3 months ahead. He leaves for Stanford this week.

Classes have started. I'm taking five this term - the hardest will be physics (waves & optics), and the easiest will probably be my scientific programming class. But the one I'm most looking forward to is my astronomy lab, where we go out to telescopes once a week to collect data for a project of our choosing! I'm also taking a class on the physics and chemistry of terrestrial planets and Spanish 3, which is taught entirely in Spanish. So far things are going well in all of them, but I have lots of homework to get done in the next couple of days!

I think that's all for now. Hopefully I can get a picture post up soon!

life so far

Here's a year's worth of updates! :)


I spent summer 2006 as an engineering intern in the Product Development department of Segway, the company that builds self-balancing gyroscopic scooters. We spent the summer developing and testing prototypes for what was released as the Segway i2, a new version of the "personal transporter" that steers by leaning the handlebar instead of turning the hand grip. As part of our debut for the new product, I attended a conference in Cambridge to meet international dealers and demo it for them. The conference was followed by a barbecue cookout at Dean Kamen's house (the inventor of the Segway, iBot, and a portable kidney dialysis pump, as well as the founder of my high school extracurricular of choice, FIRST Robotics), and I actually got to meet Dean!







At the end of the summer, I attended the freshman pre-orientation trip I had attended the year before, but this time as an upperclassman TA/chaperone. We traveled to Yellowstone National Park and camped out in tents for a week while learning about the park's geological features from some of the world's top geologists.







The fall 2006 semester was interesting; I had moved to a different floor in my dorm, and quickly grew to enjoy it more than I had liked the floor I lived in previously. The people were friendlier and I got to live down the hall from my best friend! I didn't enjoy my classes much, though, leading me to rethink my decision to become a math major.







On the day after my 19th birthday, I went out to see the movie "Happy Feet" with a friend in my suite. The next week we decided to go on another date, and went skating on the Frog Pond on Boston Common under the Christmas lights. Somehow I'd ended up with a new, sweet boyfriend named Bobby!








After finals and Christmas break, I headed back to MIT for the six-week intermediate January term, but I wasn't there for long - just a few days later, I was flying across the Atlantic Ocean to visit Italy with MIT's two ancient history professors and 10 other students! We spent two weeks in Rome and Vatican City, and four days on the Bay of Naples visiting Pompeii, Herculaneum, Naples, and Sorrento. It was a truly amazing experience to be surrounded by people speaking a foreign language, especially one as lyrical and harmonious as Italian, and the professors were both fantastically knowledgeable about their subjects.







We would get up in the morning and enjoy breakfast in our hotel, the Hotel Smeraldo (Emerald Hotel) located near Campo Dei Fiori, then meet up with the professors and head out - usually walking, occasionally by bus - to that day's destination. After walking from site to site and listening to our professors describe life in the ancient Roman Empire, we would be free to go about the city as we pleased, usually planning to meet back at our hotel at a certain time to go out for dinner as a group. (It's a little hard to order food in a nice restaurant when you and the waiters don't share a language!) This gave us plenty of time to explore the beautiful cobblestone streets of the city, grab some pizza italiano for lunch (hopefully before all the shops closed for siesta), shop, or one of my favorite pastimes, sit on the steps of a piazza with a coni di gelato and listen to the sounds of fountains splashing while people-watching!







Vatican City was one of the most impressive and memorable sights I have seen, and after our basic tour with the professors, my roommate and I were lucky enough to visit the Sistene Chapel as well as make our way up what was probably close to 800 steps all the way up to the cupola of St. Peter's Basilica to watch the sun set on Rome and the Tiber River. After sunset we headed back down the steps again and attended Mass in St. Peter's, just to see what it was like since neither my roommate nor I are Catholic. Since it was all in Italian and Latin we did not understand much of the sermon, but it was beautiful to sit back and listen to the priest's words echoing up in the vaulted ceilings of the Basilica.







After a 2-hour train ride down Italy's scenic Tyrrhenian Sea coast through mountains and wide-open fields (as well as past many apartment buildings with orange and lemon trees on their balconies!), we arrived in Napoli and took a smaller local train similar to Boston's T called the "Circumvesuviana" (Latin/Italian for "around Vesuvius") to our hotel in Pompeii called the Villa dei Misteri, or "Villa of Mysteries", named after a well-preserved ancient villa in the city of Pompeii that was once the home of a mystery cult. We explored Pompeii the next day after watching the sun rise over the mountains from our hotel room balcony window, which was a lot of walking! It was amazing to see Roman graffiti on stone walls, and cobblestone roads so well-traveled that there were ruts carved into the rocks from wheels of carts that once traversed the streets. The hunched shadow of Vesuvius was in and out of clouds that day, but whenever it appeared I was impressed by how massive and close to the city it was.







The following day we took the Circumvesuviana to the seaside town of Ercolano, the modern-day city built mostly on top of ancient Herculaneum. Almost immediately on arriving at the excavation site I was struck by how different from Pompeii it looked. While much of Pompeii was decrepit walls that only reached my shoulders, here in Herculaneum there were buildings with intact second floors and roofs! This is because Pompeii was buried primarily by ashfall in the AD 79 eruption, which quickly collapses rooftops, while Herculaneum was buried by a pyroclastic flow - basically a massive landslide of boiling hot volcanic mud and steam down the side of the mountain, which inundates buildings more like a flood than a burial. This meant the mud flowed through the streets and around the buildings and built up on top of itself, allowing much of the roofs and tall buildings to remain intact, as well as many of the interiors! There was even one building which had been built with wooden beams that were carbonized by the hot pyroclastic flow and preserved to this day, looking just like burnt wood. It is truly impressive what can be preserved even in something as destructive as an explosive volcanic eruption.







The following day we took a trip to museums of ancient art in Naples, and then on the way to lunch, my professor was approached on the Circumvesuviana by an Italian woman who taught English at the local college. She asked if our group would be interested in coming to her English class that afternoon to speak English with her students and give them practice! We enthusiastically agreed and after lunch we returned to the college, where the students had divided into groups, and each of us spoke with one group of five or six Italian students for an hour. I immediately noticed that some of the girls in my group spoke much better English than others, and many times they would all discuss in very fast Italian before the girl who spoke English best would pose a question to me. They were interested in where I went to school, what I studied, what I liked to do in my spare time, and my favorite movies and music. One of the girls who was not very good at English spoke Spanish more comfortably, so I got to converse with her a little in Spanish as well! They were all very excited when I mentioned a few bands, especially Aerosmith and the Beatles, which brought on a bout of singing "All You Need Is Love" all together. Even the girls who didn't speak much English knew the words to the song, and they were so happy when I sang along with them. It's amazing how music can bring together people with virtually nothing else in common!







When we went back to Rome, we had one final big dinner together before the program's official end, and then said our farewells as the students had all planned to fly back to the US at different times. My roommate and I were staying an extra two days before heading to the airport together, so we went to a beautiful villa in the north of the city with massive gardens, an art museum housing Bernini sculptures and Raphael paintings, and even a zoo! We loved the art museum and we watched swans float around the lake in the gardens for some time. The next day we visited my favorite location, the Pantheon, for what must have been the fourth or fifth time, and sat on the steps of the fountain enjoying gelato before our last wonderful pasta meal. After dinner we took the bus to the Colosseum at night, which was much more impressive than it had seemed during the day as there were no hordes of rude tourists walking into me and trying to sell me cheap souvenirs! The next morning we finally headed back to the airport and went our separate ways. All in all, it was an experience I will definitely never forget, and I am so glad to have had the opportunity to travel abroad with such knowledgeable, curious, and friendly companions!







Close to the beginning of the spring semester at MIT, my brother came to visit from home and decided to earn some extra credit for his chemistry class by displaying the Ideal Gas Law in front of MIT's Great Dome. I had decided to consider changing my major from applied math to planetary science & astronomy, so I was taking some introductory astronomy classes, and I loved them! One was an observing seminar where we spent three hours one night a week on the roof of the space physics building with 8" telescopes. Even in the freezing cold and wind of Boston in February, and the constant clouds and light pollution we had to combat to see much of anything, I always had fun and it quickly became my favorite class that term. An upperclassman friend in the department took me to work with her one night at an MIT-owned observatory in Westford, Massachusetts, where we spent the night looking at Saturn and various nebulas! It was an exciting experience and soon thereafter I decided to change my major. Valentine's Day was met with an ice-and-slush storm in Boston, so Bobby and I had to cancel our plans to go out for a nice steak dinner (there was simply no way I could walk across campus to the T in heels in three inches of slush!). Instead, just after I changed my major in early March, we went out for a fancy seafood dinner at Faneuil Hall, and got dressed up as planned and both enjoyed it very much.







At the end of March I went to Bobby's house in Cookeville, Tennessee for spring break, where I got to meet his parents for the first time, as well as see his huge yard (full of cows!), the beautiful flowers in their garden, and various other sights, like a waterfall in nearby Sparta called Burgess Falls. We spent a 90-degree day climbing down rocks to sit in its mist! Another day we went to the town park and rented a paddleboat to take out on the weeping-willow-lined lake. It was a fun and exciting spring break and his parents seemed quite happy with me, even though I didn't speak any Chinese and had some trouble eating with chopsticks...








Back at school after break, it was almost time for the annual rite of passage for MIT sophomores: Brass Rat delivery! Brass Rats are our class rings, so called because many are gold/brass colored and all of them have a picture of a beaver on the bezel. The Class of 2009 Ring Delivery was held in the State Room high up in a skyscraper in downtown Boston, so we all got dressed up and went out for a wonderful evening of food, socializing, and showing off our rings with friends!








Toward the end of the semester, there were many events for seniors to celebrate their upcoming graduation. Bobby and I got all dressed up and went with other friends to the Senior Ball, a black-tie formal dance in the Boston Sheraton, and had a wonderful evening with delicious food and fun dancing. It heightened the anticipation for finals to be over so that the seniors could graduate, but I wasn't quite so excited about graduation, as Bobby had decided to attend grad school in chemical engineering at Stanford beginning the next fall, and California's a long way from MIT...







Once finals were finally over, we had a week on campus before graduation, so Bobby and I visited Hampton Beach in New Hampshire and later spent Memorial Day lounging on the grass in the Public Garden. We also visited the New England Aquarium and had a wonderful time being taken out to dinner by all the parents descending on Boston for Commencement weekend!








Finally, or perhaps all too soon, graduation arrived, and I sat in the blazing sun on Killian Court for six hours to watch Bobby receive his two diplomas (one for chemical engineering and one for chemistry). It was a bittersweet sight, but I was very happy to see him so happy, and his parents seemed to enjoy spending the time leading up to graduation with me.







The day after graduation, I was up early and on my way to the airport - my summer job was working for one of my planetary science professors collecting data on a large telescope at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona! I have been working to take pictures with the telescope of the region of sky where Pluto is going to travel over the next several years. The images I take are then analyzed by a computer program to identify stars very close to Pluto's path, and then the exact date and time Pluto will pass in front of those stars is calculated as well. Observing these occultation events allows scientists like the professor I work for to learn more about the atmosphere of Pluto - yes, it really does have one! - by observing how the star's light is refracted as Pluto occults it. My professor was the leader of the team that first observed evidence of Pluto's atmosphere in 1988, and today they are still working to learn more about it today, since the New Horizons mission to fly by Pluto that launched in 2006 doesn't reach the planet (now dwarf planet, I suppose) until 2015! I am now at the end of my three-month stay in Arizona, and it's been a very interesting experience. I have learned so much since I've been here, as well as finally got to see so many things in the Southwest I've wanted to see for so long!







Working at night leaves lots of free time in the day to go sightseeing (if you schedule your sleep right, anyway), so although I didn't have a car, I spent much of June traveling with Mike, an astronomy student from BU who was also working at Lowell, to visit Oak Creek Canyon, Sedona, Meteor Crater, Winslow, Petrified Forest National Park, and the Painted Desert. We also spent a day hiking in a lava tube in complete darkness - you sure need flashlights for that hike! One of the very memorable things for me was to visit the small town of Winslow, located on historic Route 66, and "stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona", just like in the Eagles song!







After Mike left in early July, the monsoon season started, and I saw the first rain I'd seen in a month! Some really impressive thunder and lightning storms build up out here and dump torrential rain down every afternoon, just like clockwork. What was strange about them was seeing big dark grey clouds on one side of the sky, and clear blue on the other! And where there's sun and rain in the same place, there are always rainbows... Unfortunately, all that rain made it hard to observe many nights in July, so I had a lot of free time. One night was clear but there was too much moonlight interference near Pluto for me to get any good data, so I went with another astronomer out to the HUGE telescope (72 inches in diameter - that's 6 feet!) where we took infrared images of Jupiter. I was so impressed that we could easily see the cloud bands and Great Red Spot on our images!







Later in July, several other summer students at Lowell Observatory invited me to go with them to Barnes and Noble for the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows midnight release party! I gladly accepted and that night we had a wonderful time, and with our twelfth-in-line spots we'd reserved twelve hours earlier, we were skipping out the door with our books by 12:06am!







At the end of July, my dad and Josh flew out for a long weekend, and we got to go sightseeing again. My brother and I had never been to Las Vegas, so we drove across the Hoover Dam and visited the City of Lights for two nights (I think that name is much more appropriate for Vegas than Paris - I think it probably uses more electricity in one night than New Hampshire uses in a month!). I got to add another new state to my list of places I've visited when we walked across the state line into Nevada, and was very quickly disillusioned with it, as it was about 110 degrees out and bone-dry! We had to stop in the snack bar and buy several bottles of water to cool off just after walking on the sidewalk, and we were all beet red as soon as we stepped out of the air conditioning again.







Las Vegas was much the same way, so we were very glad for the casinos' air conditioning and spent the daytime inside to see a magic show and check out the amazing mall in the Venetian with a real indoor canal and gondoliers singing in Italian! Josh also liked the Sports Book in the MGM Grand, with its huge wall of TVs and screens with betting odds on every sporting event imaginable, including the 2010 World Cup! At night it was only a bit cooler (maybe 80, still too hot for me) so we walked around outside on the Strip. Easily our favorite outdoor attraction was the Bellagio fountains, although the New York New York roller coaster comes in second for me!








After our excursion in Vegas, we went to the Grand Canyon for a night. So as not to get stuck in traffic at the Hoover Dam again, we drove a long way across the Mojave Desert, down into a tiny corner of California, and then back into Arizona before heading up to the Grand Canyon. Waking up early to watch the sun rise over the Grand Canyon was the highlight of the trip - it was a truly breathtaking sight that I will never forget, and totally worth waking up at 5 o'clock to see. We all wished we had more time to spend exploring the Canyon more, but I think we saw quite a bit of the South Rim for having just one day to visit!








Since the beginning of August, I've been back in Flagstaff, and as soon as the monsoons stopped - as if someone had turned off a switch - I've been able to collect lots more data for the Pluto research team. I've been collecting lots of data, watching the amazing Perseid meteor shower, slowly adjusting my sleep schedule so that I'm awake during the day again, and best of all, taking time to enjoy the beautiful sunrises and flowers I am treated to every day. :)

Testing 1,2,3

This is a test post. Just trying everything out.