Los Angeles

Caltech and Los Angeles

I was not very excited to be at Lake Arrowhead for two and a half days when I could be at Caltech getting used to campus and Pasadena before class started. The talks were all too long and I'm not always comfortable meeting 200 new people all at once. We attended three major seminars, "The Honor Code", "Study Habits at Caltech" and "How to succeed at Caltech" or something like that. Study habits was a scavenger hunt, where we first had to have four people walk on two long two by fours a total of about 50 feet, walking on the skinny part of the board. Throughout the rest of the time, we bobbed for apples, chugged beer (root beer), built lego and balloon structures, dove in a pool for links of steel chain, and completed sudoku puzzles.

I learned that people can be brilliant math and science people without knowing anything about computers. This was news to me.

What was not news to me was the demographic here... Twenty seven percent are women. Nobody I talked to about math had not taken classes at a local college. Many are of Asian descent.

Towards the end of "Frosh Camp" at the Lake Arrowhead resort, upperclassmen presented a series of skits involving rotation. Rotation is during the first week of classes when freshmen are introduced to the various personalities of the eight undergraduate houses by eating two meals over the space of a week at each of the houses, and talking to members afterwards. It supposedly leaves a good enough impression on frosh and upperclassmen that the frosh can be placed in the proper house, which is the social network you are part of for the next four years.

Before the skits, the rules were laid down regarding rotation... basically, don't unfairly bias someone for or against a house. Also, there is a four hour rule, which means that upperclassmen can only take students off campus for four hours. In the past, there have been beach trips to Mexico, I guess.

The first skit was by Avery, which is the newest house. Avery is sort of a "sterile" house as described by some of the freshmen living there now, so I expected the skit they put on to be like the house itself... new, without established traditions, quiet, with white-washed walls... but their skit was possibly one of the most humorous, playing on the diversity of campus and the lack of established traditions.

Page house put on a skit that played on that house's "personality", including talk about kegs that spontaneously reproduce at parties, and the tossing of condoms into the crowd at the end. Page also made as much fun of the other houses as was possible during a short skit, playing on the stereotypes some houses have received.

Ruddock house's skit involved lots of real, although dead, squid and throwing ink at people.

Ricketts house put on a skit that involved lots of swearing, being mad at the administration, anarchy signs, and throwing bottles and cans against the wall while yelling things I didn't understand.

Fleming, Lloyd, and the rest all blended together or weren't understood.

Dabney put on a skit involving a space elephant without shoes, space astronautss, and a space cobbler...

Welcome to Caltech! I hope none of this is confidential or a rotation or Honor Code violation, being that it's a summary of events, I think I'm fine.

Leaving Lake Arrowhead, a few things have been drilled into my head...

• People here care about you. There are UCCs, RAs, medical centers, dean's offices, and countless other places we are encouraged to go when we have problems. I don't necessarily know what the abbreviations stand for, but I know people are there to help!


• Many upperclassmen describe Caltech life as hell. For better or worse, it is very true that many seemed at best apathetic about returning to class, and loved to complain or warn you about everything from food to classes.


• Going to college is anti-climactic after being a Senate Page. Caltech doesn't seem like a big deal. Sure, you have more freedom at college, but you don't work a full time job at the capitol building in addition to taking hard (for a high school junior) classes. And sure, the class size here is small at 215. But by the end of that six months, I felt closer to any one of the 27 pages than to anyone else in my life. I can't help but feeling that that sort of social network will exist at Caltech for me. Any of my page buddies hear me out there? What do you guys think?

But, no matter what.. I sure am surrounded by people who are in a large part like me. I had a conversation with an upperclassman about

rm *

and rerouting

rm --> rm -f -r

when you're deleting lots of directories in the unix shell... and what happens when you accidentally press

rm *

when you're in your root directory. I told myself I wouldn't have conversations like that when I came here, but there I was...

Anyways. Check in later. Watch out for pictures, I'll get a Caltech phlog stream going soon.