"Drop a class"

So now we're into the fourth week of classes (it was the third when I started writing this post), and I've accumulated so much that I'll split this post into two: personal and... well, the interesting stuff. So after the frantic SATPrep reg preparations of the first week and the work-and-Valentine's-filled second week, then more frantic oh-no-the-program-is-about-to-launch SATPrep work, I decided to drop a class: 6.004, the required lab in Computational Structures. I'd registered for and started taking 6.002 (required lab in circuits) and 6.004 simultaneously, only briefly considering actually going through with both. No, I realized that in order to actually do my UROP this time, and to learn the cool stuff that I'm going to get from 6.863, the kind of stuff that's actually going to make me a viable candidate for NLP work, I'm going to need to........... drop a class. (Around the hall, this phrase has actually become a normal response to anyone who has too much work, and a normal response to me when I say anything at all.)

Regarding my UROP (undergraduate research), and somewhat-related-6.863: it has to be the coolest stuff I've done. I do other classwork only because it is mechanical and pressing. I do 6.863 because I really like it, and I find everything I read so exciting that it takes me twice as long to do any of the assignments for this class because I spend too much time thinking about its applications. What can I say - I have a weak spot for regular expressions now (I even tried them out on 'tyche'; grep and find are my two new friends).

On a non-school note, Nick and I will go to the Bahamas over Spring Break; it looks like the trip won't be prohibitively expensive after all (at least not immediately), which is nice, but it did take us about 7 hours to book the flights and lodging. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that trying to redeem free tickets is next to impossible, especially over Spring break, and especially when trying to do it with two people.

I really will update more often; it's just hard to get into it, and the more interesting stuff piles up here, the less I want to do it - but I think that's just human nature.