Hi again, at last.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting for a while, and for that I do apologize.  Things have been crazy as usual but coming back from study abroad compounded an already busy term, so it’s been hard for me to find the time to do anything but schoolwork.

It’s hard to believe winter term is pretty much over already.  I’ll try to go through and give a brief summary of what went on.

Coming back from study abroad and having those few weeks off was a little surreal.  Everybody warns you about culture shock when you go abroad, but it turns out there’s also “reverse” culture shock.  It was really hard to get back into my normal life after becoming sort of a different person while abroad.  The Office of International Programs is always there for support if we need it, and after a while things just sort of fall into place.

Once the term started, I had to hit the ground running.  I had two very high-level computer science classes this term – Operating Systems and Data Communications and Networking.  Both were quite challenging.  In the operating systems class we have been learning about all the nitty-gritty stuff that makes your operating system work (for those who don’t know, Windows XP or Vista are examples of operating systems), and have had to do some traditional programming projects like the Dining Philosophers and Cigarette Smokers problems.  In the networking class we studied all the theoretical technical components of getting computers to talk to each other.  I also had a Creative Writing class which was fun but time-consuming, and helped me learn a lot as a writer, even if I’m not often a creative one.

Finals are happening this week, and then it’s spring break!  After this term I’ll be officially done with my major.  It’s a little disorienting.  Next term I’ll have three English classes to finish up my minor and then – eek! – it’s off to the real world!

The classes themselves are challenging, of course, but that certainly isn’t everything that’s been going on.  COW had a ton of fun events this term, including going to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and taking a group of students to play laser tag.  I’ve also been working on my honors thesis, which I’ll write more about as I make more progress.

Anyway, that’s a very high-level update of what’s been going on.  Sorry for the long gap.  You should be seeing much more of me as Spring Term goes on.  Thanks!

It’s been a while… I have so much to talk about!

Things have been so crazy on this trip that it’s hard to find time to sit down and write about it.  I’ll try to give you all the short version.

First off, there’s Mongolia.  We had a week off of classes during China’s Golden Week holiday, and a group of six of us took the train to Ulaan Baatar for four days.  Mongolia was an interesting change – for one thing it’s much colder than Beijing, and it’s so much smaller of a town.  Mongolia has one of, if not the, lowest population densities of all countries on the planet, so even their capital city was a size comparable to Naperville.  A lot of people say it’s dirty and ugly, but I thought it had its own charm.  There are very few tall buildings so you can see the mountains and the huge sky wherever you go, and I think it makes the city seem cozy and beautiful.

We went on a few day trips as well to see some of the gorgeous Mongolian countryside and to get an idea of the way Mongol nomad families live.  There are a lot of families who keep herd animals and live in traditional round tents called gers.  On one of the days we got to take a short tour of one of the national parks on horseback, which was quite fun as well.  Not to mention that I got to see camels and yaks!

I’m really glad that I got to take this extra trip in addition to seeing Beijing and Xi’an.  The more places I see, the more I want to go see more someday.  My study abroad experience has been amazing so far.

Since we’ve returned from Mongolia it’s been a little quieter but we’ve been gradually winding down our time in Beijing.  Classes and site visits have taken up a lot of my time.  They cut the total amount of time we take Chinese classes down a bit so I have more time to go visit some of the smaller attractions of Beijing.  We also had a group trip to see a Peking opera, which was fairly interesting but tailored to a Western audience so it wasn’t purely authentic.  I think that traditional Peking opera is really hard for Westerners to understand though, so it was a good introductory experience at any rate.

I can’t believe that our time in China is almost over.  We leave for Kyoto next Friday.  When we first got here I kept wishing that I could go home – I’ve never been so far away from family and friends for so long – but now the time has flown by and I don’t feel ready to leave Beijing yet.  There’s so much left of Chinese culture that I have yet to experience.  At any rate, I’ve still got a week to run around and see everything I want to see, and I’ll be sure to let you know any interesting things I find!

Whew!  Hey everyone!  Sorry for the lack of updates… time has been flying by so fast since we’ve been here.

Well, I’ve been on a number of adventures.  We’ve seen a lot more of Beijing and also took a weekend trip to the city of Xi’an to see the famous Terra Cotta Warriors.  That was an interesting voyage in and of itself.  We took the train there and back, which was a first for me.  The trip is only about 12-14 hours, so an overnight train is really convenient because you can just settle in, sleep, and then wake up when you get there.  We stayed in a hostel, which was also new to me but the place was really cool.  It was like a funhouse of sorts – there were three floors of rooms, all arranged in pretty random patterns with all kinds of courtyards and sitting spaces.  The most interesting thing for us was the cafe inside the hostel that sold all kinds of international food, but specialized in American fare – I can’t tell you how much I missed bacon.

Anyway, Xi’an is an interesting city because it’s a mix of very touristy places and very authentic places.  Beijing is very Westernized and sanitized for the Olympics, so while it’s more like home in some ways it doesn’t necessarily reflect everyday city life in China.   Xi’an is much more “real” until you get to tourist traps like the Big Goose Pagoda, where you have to cross an enormous plaza of KFCs and expensive hotels before you get to the actual temple grounds.  In one part of the city we actually found two KFCs right across the street from each other.  They’re big on fried chicken in Xi’an, I guess.

Anyway, we did get to see the Terra Cotta Warriors, which was pretty interesting.  I can’t imagine living in a place where thousands of years of history is right at your fingertips.  The warriors were built to guard the tomb of China’s very first emperor thousands of years ago.  It’s really pretty incredible, especially after you get a sense of the scale.

While that’s the main attraction, there is a lot to do in Xi’an that most people don’t know about.  I had originally planned to spend a week there, so I had to compress everything into three days.  I went to see the Big Goose Pagoda and the Little Goose Pagoda, which are necessary stops for any visitor, as well as a number of smaller and arguably more interesting places like the city wall  (where I pretended to shoot arrows through the notches in the wall, as pictured below), the Forest of Stone Tablets, the Temple of the Eight Immortals, and the Great Mosque.  Speaking of the mosque, Xi’an has an incredible area known as the Muslim Quarter where there are street vendors galore selling everything you can think of, from meat on a stick and pita-like flatbread to t-shirts and traditional flutes.

Next week is Golden Week in China, which basically means the whole country is going on vacation at the same time.  I’m planning on going with a group to spend a few days in Mongolia.  Hopefully when I return I’ll have a few photos of myself on riding a yak up a mountain, or something.  See you then!

Well, we made it to Beijing!

So much has happened in the last few days that I hardly know how to start.  I guess the beginning is a good place…

The flight in was both really good and really bad.  It was really good in that it was a perfect flying experience.  Everything was on time, there was no trouble going through checkpoints, the airline staff was helpful and friendly.  I’ve heard nothing but good things about Japan Airlines and I was not disappointed.  Even though everything went great, there is really nothing that you can do to get past the fact that you’re basically spending 12 hours in a tin can in the sky.  There is not much to do to keep yourself occupied in one seat for that long, and I happen to be the kind of person who can’t take naps so I couldn’t sleep at all.  We flew into Tokyo first, and then took a plane to Beijing, but that was much shorter and I did manage to pretty much sleep through the whole thing, so that was nice.

Anyway, on to the interesting part!  Beijing is not really what I expected, though I don’t really know what I expected.  In some respects I believe that all cities are the same, and it’s only the people that make them different.  Beijing in particular has  undergone a ton of renovation to prepare for the Olympics, so in our part of town everything looks very much like a Western city.  If you venture into some of the older neighborhoods you can still find some authentic Eastern city life, though.  Beijing is famous for little alleyways called hutongs that are full of tiny shops and groups of men playing dominoes or go, and those are the places where you can see some more authentic Chinese culture.  The people so far have been pretty friendly and helpful, even though I speak very minimal Mandarin.  I am actually surprised by how far the phrases I know have gotten me – hello (ni hao), thank you (xie xie), and excuse me (lao jian).  My accent is horrible, but people get the idea.

We’ve only been here for four days but we’ve already seen some incredible sights.  On our first full day we took a short trip to the Summer Palace, which is an amazingly beautiful city of sorts arranged around a lake with gently rolling hills.  You can take boats across the lake or just wander through the complex, which is full of old buildings.  The only bad part is that I had spent the earlier part of the day taking photos of the city, and my camera battery died, so I have no pictures!  I’m sure we’ll go back, so I’ll post them when I can get them.

The next day we visited Houhai, which is an upscale shopping/tourist area arranged around a small lake near the center of the city.  There are lots of bars and restaurants lining the lakefront and in adjacent houtongs.  One of the major attractions for tourists are the pedicabs, and our group was pretty much assaulted the entire time by pedicab drivers trying to pin us down saying “Hello! Hello! Rickshaw!”  An interesting cultural experience, to say the least.

Yesterday we took another short trip to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.  I think this one was the most fascinating of all, because it gave a sense both of modern and ancient China.  Tiananmen Square is basically a huge open plaza meant to be a gathering place, under the symbolic watchful eye of the huge portrait of Chairman Mao.  While this is a symbol of more modern Communist rule, all you have to do is go through the tunnel under one street and you come out in the Forbidden City, which is as ancient and culturally rich as it gets.  We didn’t get to spend a lot of time walking through it, but we did get to see the huge gates and some of the smaller inner buildings.

We’ve been going through some of these major sites fairly quickly at first with the whole group.  Later, once we’ve gotten a general sense of the major landmarks, we’ll be able to arrange our own trips to spend more time going through the ones we really liked.  I’d personally like to take day trips to all of these places, since the few hours we spent at each can’t do them justice.

I know that we’re going to the Temple of Heaven tomorrow and the Great Wall on Saturday, so keep watching for more news and photos.  Our internet connection in our dorms has been pretty iffy lately, but I’ll post as soon as I can.  Later!

This summer has gone by SO fast. It feels like we just got out of classes yesterday, and here we are in late August already.

I think working full time makes summer go by quicker. I’m always waiting for the next thing – the next meeting, the next step in a project, even just for the end of the day or for Friday – and whole weeks have just flown by. I have only one day left at work, so I’m busy trying to finish up loose ends and prepare to hand my work off to other interns.

We leave for China a week from tomorrow, and I’m starting to get a little nervous. It’s funny how it works. I have basically known I was going on this trip since February or so. I’ve taken a class, gone to meetings, prepared a bunch of paperwork, talked to friends who went before… but the fact that I’m actually leaving is just starting to sink in. It still didn’t seem real at all until a couple weeks ago when I went to Target and dropped $200 on various supplies to take with me. I have always lived at home, so I needed to buy all the little things I need for life all at once. Looking at a cart full of everything from Tylenol to duct tape kind of put things in perspective. I’m going to be gone for a long time!

It’s still very exciting, despite my anxiety. We unfortunately won’t be there in time to see any of the Olympics, but it’s still cool to watch the games and know that I’m going to be in the same place in a matter of days.

Aside from China/Japan preparation my summer has been pretty quiet. I can pretty much only see friends on weekends, since I’m spending long days at work. Several of us will be gone for study abroad this fall and we’ve started saying our goodbyes already. At least we can all talk via Skype, time differences or no. There has been talk about video conferencing COW meetings from time to time, but we’ll have to see how that pans out.

Anyway, now that I’ll be starting my adventure soon you can expect that I’ll be making a lot more posts (with photos!). I’ll try to post soon after we get into Beijing so I can give you some first impressions. Wish me luck!

Hello everyone!  Hopefully you’re all having a lovely, relaxing summer.  Mine’s been pretty busy.

Work is going well, though doing four ten-hour days per week is pretty rough.  Most people do an ordinary 40-hour work week with five eight-hour days, but I thought it would be more valuable to have that extra day to do stuff to prepare for the China/Japan trip.  The extra day is handy, but sometimes it’s hard to get through ten hours a day sitting in a cubicle and staring at a computer screen.

We’ve been able to do a lot of cool stuff for the interns (putting out a newsletter, organizing a picnic, etc.) so it’s been pretty cool overall.  My role as intern liaison (a sort of semi-formal leadership position) has been keeping me pretty busy with planning events and other projects.  My actual work involves testing some projects that I developed during the school year that run audits of database servers to make sure they’re in accordance with some legal requirements.  It’s not the most fascinating work, but the team is really supportive and I know that what I’m doing makes a difference to the business.

As far as preparing for the China/Japan trip, things are coming along quite nicely.  I made up a packing list already, though I’m nowhere close to being ready to pack stuff up.  I just kept going about my daily life and saying to myself, “Oh, don’t forget that you need to bring nail clippers on the trip,” and so on, so I just started writing it down.  All my paperwork and stuff is up to date so far, though I still need to pick up the textbooks for the trip. 

I’ve been kind of trying to learn Mandarin with the help of a friend who went on the trip last year.  It’s a really fun language to speak, but it’s hard to get the sounds right, let alone the tones.  Hopefully I can learn to speak it at least a tiny bit before we leave.  I’ve had more exposure to Japanese so I’m not as worried about that one, plus we go to China first so it’s more pressing that I learn Mandarin now.

We also get some time off for vacations in both places and so I’ve been trying to decide where to go.  I’m pretty sure that I want to go to Xi’an for the week vacation we have in China.  Xi’an is the city with the terra cotta soldiers, though there’s a lot more to see there as well.  For shorter trips I’ve also been looking at Tai’an (a city at the base of one of the holy mountains), Qingdao (the birthplace of Tsingtao beer and a former German territory), and Tianjin (which is a city close to Beijing that travel guides recommend because it’s often ignored by tourists, so you can see “real” Chinese culture).  As for Japan, I’m not quite so sure.  I’d like to go to Tokyo, but travel is much more expensive there than in China and it’s quite a trip to go there from Kyoto.  I will probably take a trip to Hiroshima, but aside from that I don’t know yet.

If there are any major developments in the trip planning or anything, I’ll be sure to post about it.  In the meantime, enjoy the summer sun for me… I’m stuck looking out at it through the window at work!

Whew! Finally, this term is over and I am free for the summer! Well, mostly.

Grades haven’t come out yet but I think that things went fairly well. I’m not pleased with how some of my finals went, but I was so burned out by the end that I think I did the best I could at the time. This was a really rough term and I’m frankly glad that it’s over, though there were a lot of good moments too.

Now, for the summer! I’ll be working full-time to help me save up for my China/Japan trip. We’re supposed to rotate positions within our IT department every six months with our intern program, but I’ll be keeping mine through the end of summer. They figured it wouldn’t be worth it for me to take a new job for three months and leave. I’m excited about that, because the group that I’m in right now (Database Administration) is full of really fun and supportive people and I really like the work that I’m doing. I’m especially happy because being able to devote all of my attention to my work projects is going to make them go a lot faster. I’ve basically been doing the same two projects for the last six months, which is OK considering how little time I’ve been able to spend on them, but now I’ll actually be able to finish them off and move on to bigger and better things.

My schedule is set up so that I have Mondays off and work extra long days on the other four. I need that time to do administrative stuff to prepare for China/Japan (move my bank account to a new bank, check on some stuff with my mom’s insurance, make sure all my IDs are up to date, etc.). It’s still several months away, but the summer always does go by really quickly and there’s a lot left to do.

Well, congratulations to everyone who graduated this year… and happy summer!

Well, everyone, we’ve made it to Week 10.

This has been the most challenging term of my academic career, period. It has been a struggle to keep up pretty much from day one and it’s still not over.

To recap: I have had three full courses and one half-course. Linux Programming and XML Web Services are two higher-level programming classes that required lengthy time investments for weekly homework projects, plus each had a midterm exam. History of Ideas 5 is an honors-level course that required roughly 50-100 pages of reading for each class, plus two 8-10 page papers and a book review (which means the need to take extra time out to read the book). The half-course is my Pre-Study Abroad course which didn’t actually meet very much or have serious day-to-day homework requirements but does involve two major assignments that also require a fair amount of time to complete.

Now, if that was all I had to do, it would probably be a challenging, but not impossible, term. Add on the fact that I work eight-hour days on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Add on the fact that I spend two hours in commute every day. Also, don’t forget that I have a time-consuming and responsibility-laden executive position in COW. Put it all together and you get a normally academically sound honors student who is happily involved on campus who has suddenly become a sleep-deprived, short-tempered wreck who struggles to get her sub-par homework in by deadlines. It has not been fun. I got a haircut on Saturday and my hairdresser mentioned, with some astonishment, that I had some gray hairs coming in. I was not surprised at all.

The most frustrating thing at this point is that it’s week 10 and things ought to be winding down, but I have just as many (if not more) obligations than I have had for the rest of this term. I’m going to have to keep pushing all the way to the finish.

Keep in mind that I am speaking out of sheer frustration right now, because it’s the end of a long weekend and I have only accomplished half of what I need to in this span of time. Sometimes it really seems like an uphill battle that goes nowhere. In truth, after everything is over, I’ll be able to look back and really appreciate the things I have done and learned this term. And, having had terms like this before, I can attest to the fact that these high-stress situations prepare you for future challenges. I am just a little burned out at this point and cannot wait for the term to end already.

Hopefully (and I know I keep saying this) I will be able to spend a minute to go over some cool things that are going on with COW and my personal life. Wish me luck.

Please forgive this post—it is going to sound very geeky and intellectual and not at all like my usual description of fun things I have done. I just had one of the coolest moments in my academic career, and I want to share this with you.

In my History of Ideas 5 (Modern Thought) class, we have an assignment to choose a book off of a short list, read it, and write a short analysis/review of the ideas in it. As a computer scientist and an individual with at least some knowledge in this area, the text I chose was How We Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles. It is probably the most interesting thing that I have ever read, but not for the reasons you might expect.

To avoid going into gory detail, the book is basically about the relationship between physical reality and disembodied information, the connection between science and literature, and a number of other things all surrounding the ideas of cybernetics and informatics (think cyborgs like the Terminator or RoboCop). The most interesting thing to me, though, is the fact that it plays on so many subjects I have touched on in other classes. Yes, it is about technology, and I am in a good position to understand the arguments because of my basic understanding of the way modern computing works. The important part is all of the other subjects it mentions. For example, there are elements from the Intro to New Media course I took last year. We discussed technological concepts like text-based MUDs, cyberpunk literature, and the like and also looked into their implications from a social, psychological and philosophical perspective. That course gave me the basic background on cybernetics and the various arguments and issues surrounding it. That also sounds obvious, given that it is also a course about technology.

Beyond that, however, there are elements from all kinds of other sources. I have always been a fan of science fiction, so there are ideas from texts I have read for my own entertainment (specifically, Neuromancer by William Gibson, Ilium and Olympos by Dan Simmons, and Accelerando by Charles Stross, all of which I highly recommend). There are also ideas that were discussed in my Critical Methods in English course that I took earlier this year, most importantly Lacan’s and Saussure’s discussion of the relationship between signifier (words) and signified (ideas). There was even something from my Landmark Discoveries in Natural Science course last year: we discussed Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific progress as a series of paradigm shifts, and the author of How We Became Posthuman specifically mentions that the progression of cybernetics does not follow a “Kuhnian” model.

My History of Ideas professor refers to this as “echoes.” You take a course and learn about some ideas, then you hear those ideas somewhere else in a slightly different context, and so on. Eventually you start to see the same ideas showing up all the time and you begin to understand how closely everything relates to everything else. It’s a phenomenon that appears to be very common among History of Ideas students in particular. My professor laughingly said that that made us schizophrenic. I personally think that it enriches what I learn and deepens my understanding of ideas, philosophy, sociology—pretty much everything, really. This example in particular shows the kind of synthesis that comes from having encountered so many ideas in several disciplines, and it really emphasizes exactly the reasons why I chose to study computer science at a liberal arts school. I can learn how to program a computer anywhere, but it takes a liberal arts school to show you how what you’re doing shapes the society you live in and vice versa. I find the whole thing absolutely fascinating.

Anyway, that’s the end of my geek-rant. I do have some events and things that I would like to tell you about in the near future, so stay tuned for those. See you later!

Hey folks. There’s a ton going on, so let’s catch up a little.

First, Second City was very fun. I was a little hesitant about it because I didn’t know what to expect, but it turned out to be hilarious. It was a lot like Saturday Night Live with many skits that only vaguely related to each other. It was sort of oriented toward politics and social criticism, but it was so lighthearted and even-handed that I think anyone would enjoy it. The only downside was that we were packed in like sardines (the seating is all chairs around tables or up to bars and everyone was pretty wedged) and our server forgot to bring out the food for about half of our people. I was also nervous because I was sitting at the end of the aisle and was afraid I’d get grabbed to participate in a skit or something (I have bad luck that way) but none of that happened. It was very entertaining and I’d highly recommend it.

Relay for Life was also this past weekend, and I saw several other NCC bloggers there so it will probably be covered extensively. I was the team captain of a group representing COW. It was my first Relay for Life ever and I am SO glad that I finally participated. I lost my stepfather to cancer five years ago and so I like to participate in this sort of fundraiser thing just on principle, but after the opening ceremonies it became clear that it’s much more emotionally significant than “just a fundraiser.” Everything from the survivor lap to the luminarias to the sheer endurance required to finish the relay makes it a way to respect and remember everyone whose lives have been influenced by cancer. It also took a lot more effort to keep walking than I expected. I actually ended up hurting my ankle pretty badly by about 3 AM and had to stop walking, which was really disappointing. They had all kinds of cool stuff going on to keep us occupied though. Some of our COW people painted our faces and we offered to paint other peoples’ to raise money. The organizers put on did a karaoke competition (COW people contributed to two songs), showed Footloose, and ran bunch of tournaments (bean bags, limbo, hula hoops). The individual teams also held some of their own fundraisers, like selling candy or running a putting game. I’m actually really sorry I never did it before, and I am DEFINITELY doing it next year.

Budgets for student organizations are due today too, so that’s been an additional source of stress. COW is in a strange place because, if we keep the same executive board next year relative to this year, all but one member will be studying abroad next fall. We essentially are trying to do as much planning in advance as possible in order to make it easier for whoever takes over the exec board while we’re gone. We have seriously HUGE plans for next year, though. I don’t want to get too specific because nothing is set in stone yet, but every term we have plans for trips to major Chicago team sporting events and some kind of museum, as well as at least one “seasonal” event and at least one event that is designed to piggyback on other major college events to help commuters stay on campus. I’m really excited, even though I’ll have to miss some of it.

We have more interesting things coming up all over the place, so stay tuned. See you next week!