Pardon the extroverted introspection.

I have recently realized that a good deal of my friends are college seniors. It’s not like I hadn’t realized until now that they were all a year ahead of me, but it becomes hard to ignore when all of them begin complaining about their theses, worry loudly what they’re going to do next year, and say they would choose a different concentration if they could do it all again. It’s this last one that really got me thinking about my past and my concentration. Would I be a biologist or historian if I had another four years to graduate? I truly think here that the answer is no, but that isn’t to say I wouldn’t do things differently. In fact, I have a whole list of things that I would do differently in my freshman year.

First, I would take easier classes. I came into Harvard a little confused about my academic talents, and I believe these miscalculations still affect my daily life. The first real test I took at Harvard (at least that I cared about) was the physics placement test. The idea was to help you decide if you should take Physics 15a or Physics 16; both cover the same basic material, but 16 covered it with mathematical rigor, and was notoriously much more difficult. I took the test just because I suppose, maybe to prove to myself that I was just as smart as everyone else in my class, or maybe I had this idea that I would actually use the grade to make my decision. I remember not spending too much time on it; it was an AP Physics style test, and was graded in the same way, so I would just look at the questions and answer them. I felt great about it, so when I saw Danny get up and turn it in after about half an hour, I decided, “Why not?” and turned mine in less than ten minutes later. It was only when we got our grades back that I realized my expectations were far off; Danny had received a 5, and I got a 2. Take note, my first failing grade at Harvard. Somehow I chalked the grade up to not preparing enough and being careless, but I wouldn’t make that mistake again! Next time I would be slow and steady and not be caught off guard.

So I enroll in Physics 16, and the night before the first problem set is due, I hole myself up in Lamont library and start shedding some wood. Lo and behold, I am absolutely stumped, and I go back to my room at 4am a man with much lower self esteem than before. Never again would I try to do a problem set all by myself. I started doing the homework assignments in a large group and having people explain to me the method rather than figuring it out by myself. It turns out that in physics, that is half the point, and I may have completely missed it.

So if I had taken 15a, everything would have been perfect? Well, no, but I at least would have been exposed to a gentler learning curve that may have propelled me to doing the occasional problem set with no outside assistance. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to do that, and I think I’m only just managing to go at it alone in Physics 181.

Second, I would not have taken Math 25. The professor was awful, there was too much work, and it turns out I don’t really like pure math. Occasionally I see something in physics that is relevant to the class and am glad I took it, but those moments are far outweighed by how miserable I was while doing those problem sets freshman year (although in the spring, it could have been the fact that I was taking five classes; also a mistake, but there was no way out at that point; I needed and/or am glad that I took those classes).

And I think that’s really it in terms of regrets. I think sometimes I could have worked harder and slept less, and that will always be true. Some people might say I spent too much time in the band or in the glee club, but I know that those two experiences have made my college career bearable. Glee Club gave me so much musical direction when I thought I had finished with serious music, and I met some of my best friends in that group. Band has clearly become a bigger and bigger part of my life, and sometime in the fall I will feel a huge crunch because of it, but I wouldn’t trade that for anything; the Band gave me the first close-knit group of friends I’ve had at school (excluding the blandfill) that didn’t turn out to be a bunch of douchebags, and I would gladly trade a couple points of the GPA or a top grad school for that.

This was pretty heavy, so have a video.

Ian McKellan Narrating the Ducktales theme song

Positive externalities, and the freshness of failure

I’m writing this partially because Tom has been bugging me about writing (it has been a while since I’ve published), and because I want to postpone my post about Owl City, mainly because I think it would decrease our subscriptions by 100%.

I was told the other day that a positive externality is essentially where one person does something, and the cost is only placed on the actor.  Apparently a perfect example of this is participation in sections.  The teaching fellow will ask the class a question, and there will be an awkward silence, sometimes lasting up to thirty seconds.  Eventually someone caves and hazards an answer, or the TF gives the answer and moves the section along.

But actually attempting an answer is the positive externality; if your answer is correct, then you and the class benefit, because you’re forced to explain why your answer is correct, and your peers learn from you; if your answer is incorrect, the TF gets a little concerned and takes pains to explain why your answer is not correct.  Here, everyone benefits, but you “suffer the humiliation” of giving the wrong answer.

I’ve always been a little annoyed by these unnecessary silences, and in the past month I’ve tried to answer the questions when I thought I knew the answer, or when it was a binary question I would hazard a guess, just to move along so that we could learn more.  When I was right, there was never an overwhelming sense of satisfaction.  When I was wrong, I have to say it was embarrassing and definitely was not an experience I wanted to repeat.

This is sort of related to the practice of asking questions in lectures and sections.  This is even more frustrating to me, especially when the instructor specifically asks if the students understand what just happened.  Of course people are going to be confused by something when there’s a slew of facts shoveled on them, but for some reason no one wants to be the person to ask for elucidation.

I know I’m not the only person who doesn’t understand everything, because there have been a couple of occasions where friends in my section have thanked me for asking a certain question because they learned something from it.

I think the “smart questions” are the ones that bother me more actually, e.g. “Isn’t angular momentum just a clever trick, or does it have any deeper significance?” or “Do we prefer Lagrangian mechanics to Newtonian mechanics because the former is more beautiful?”  These are the types of questions that people ask to show that they have absorbed the material so completely that they need to show the rest of the class that they’re wondering about the deeper significance of every result.  Of course the less gifted students pick up on this, and often they scramble for these types of questions so that they can prove that they aren’t part of the lowly masses of students trying to just get by.  It’s a cheap trick to gain the professor’s respect, and everyone involved knows it but ignores it.

This is getting a little bitter.  I’m going to throw something in here to lighten the mood a bit.

So I feel like the issue is that for most of my classmate’s lives, they were consistently the best at everything they did, or pretty damn close.  THEN.  We get thrown into this high-powered environment, suddenly you’re on a level playing field with everyone, and you’re just not that special anymore.  For the first time in our lives, failing is an option, and it’s terrifying.  Eventually we realize that it’s very difficult to fail here, but we are still aware that there’s always someone better than us at what we love to do.  Luckily we can hide our grades from our peers so that there isn’t a direct comparison.  I think that the only place left to really compare yourself to others is in your section, where you discuss your insecurities with your schoolwork.  But here, it’s really easy to not have any questions; why would you ask him to go over that last step if you understood it in the first place?  I believe that the practice of not answering or asking questions is a face-saving technique that most Harvard students have adopted.

Like everything else here, the question-problem is wrapped up in the ego.  People don’t want to expose their inadequacies to their peers, so they hide in silence, implying the answer is so obvious it doesn’t deserve a serious consideration (apologies to anyone who this is actually true for; I’m looking at you, Danny.)

I’m guilty of this ego thing as well (or maybe I’m the only one guilty of it…) but I’m trying very hard to overcome it.  By admitting you don’t know something, you can open yourself up to learning it.  But the way sections are treated now makes it difficult to speak up when you really don’t understand something.

I guess I should include as a disclaimer that this mostly applies to my math and physics sections here at Harvard; for all I know people actually contribute to discussions in humanities concentration courses.

That is all, goodnight!

Final rotation-related post

Disclaimer: I wrote this entry over a month ago, and only just got to it.

Today, while I was with a subset of Glee Club singing for a bunch of rich doctors, Tom and Danny went to see Randall Munroe speak about things at MIT and then got to get things signed by him.  Rather than having a “sign, move, sign, move” approach to things, he actually took the time to speak to everyone a little bit.  Tom and Danny were thoughtful enough to print out a copy of the first blog in this series and bring it to him to have it signed.  Just to be certain, Tom asked him if the graphs really were unrelated, and Randall responded as follows; “There is lots of data in the world.”  (I won’t go on about this, but I really do think this is some of the most important data in the world; it shows we don’t know anything about the universe.  That’s all.)

So that’s that.  I include a picture in hopefully the most meta moment of my series of blog entries (I can’t speak for the rest of the room):

Two mildly related things.

1) Yesterday, I reviewed my physics textbook while walking 2.3 mph on a treadmill.  It worked out very well.

2) On the way back from the reception that we sang out, I ate about a meal and a half worth of hors d’oeuvres and am now about to birth a food baby.  Also, it seems the trick to pronouncing things in French is to ignore all the consonants.

Confirmation

It turns out that Charles was right. Here is an e-mail that was sent to someone in the Harvard Society of Physics Students:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Randall Munroe
Date: Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:25 PM
Subject: Re: the harvard physicists are on to you: (was: Fwd:
[sps-open] xkcd and galactic rotation curves)
To: Jacob Rus

It’s a coincidence, but I swear I’ve seen that graph before. I
remember wishing I could see the error bars and data points.

Best,
Randall

xkcd is so much better than I could have imagined

After doing a lab about galactic rotation curves, the following xkcd comic has gained more meaning for me;

Escalators

If this isn’t explicit enough for you, please compare it to the following;

Shock and awe.

Update (more…)