Muwahaha Spring Break
6.UAT - Today was the day we presented our non-technical technical talks to high school students. I volunteered to be one of the MIT students to welcome them at 9 am (I figured since I was presenting at 10 am it wouldn’t make that much of a difference). Initially the atmosphere was a bit stiff, but then I got closer to them and talked more personally and they warmed up. Could it be I was working a crowd, in politicspeak? Perhaps, or perhaps I was just being naturally curious and asking the right questions and listening to the responses… It continually amazes me how well I can get along with people (note: in a subset of contexts) when I put my mind to it. In any case, they asked some questions about MIT as well as a few about me (was I single, tacitly asked via “How hard did I find it to maintain a relationship at MIT” and what my SAT score was). After about 40 minutes of interacting/talking I went to set up my laptop for the presentation. The students were from Randolph, MA from (I believe) a math/science school so they were all smart and interested in MIT, a refreshing change from what some MIT students feel about MIT.
My presentation itself went well, especially since a lot of the students there were those whom I had met just an hour earlier. I felt warmly received and even got a couple of interesting questions. The audience responded well to my interactive questions (who has heard of a blog? who has a blog? someone even raised his hand when I asked if anyone was going to start a blog as a result of the talk). I had fun and finished right at about 6 minutes, 15 seconds — perfect timing considering the cut off was 6:30 and my practice talk had run short. The additional slides I had inserted did their job well.
6.033 - Design Project 1, all 10 pages of it, was happily handed in. Recitation was about NAT, network address translation: i.e. how the internet deals with routing to subnetworks. Rinard was interesting and engaging as usual, though this once again a classical recitation as opposed to one replete with skits or guest recitation leaders.
15.053 - More graph theory, this time the max flow/min cut theorem… only I’d already seen it in 6.046 years ago so I just read the slides then started sketching/writing while half-paying attention.
No class tomorrow since both 15.053 and 6.033 felt kind and generous enough to give us the day off.
Weather is finally spring-like with beautiful sunshine :)