andymatuschak.org: Journal

Aw, the widdle fwoshies.For the last week, I’ve been going through the very lengthy process of Rotation here at Caltech, which is sort of like fraternities’ rush week at another school. Here at Caltech, social life revolves around one’s House, which acts as a family and huge source of social activity for students. Each House has very distinct personalities and ideas of what’s fun (mine stereotypically enjoys fire, explosions, geekery, and adventure), so for a week at beginning of term, new frosh spend a day at each house, eating dinner and getting to know its members.What I didn’t understand until this year was how things work from the Houses’ side. It’s a huge ordeal trying to meet and remember every one of the frosh!It’s all over now, though, so Blacker has new frosh! It’s very exciting; most fit right in with the Hovse, and I’m sure the rest will change over time—I know I did.It’s important that I spend a lot of time around the Hovse to meet the new frosh and help welcome them into the culture of Blacker, but that’s tough, because as a sophomore, I’m forced to live off-campus this year. My apartment is huge, but it’s about three quarters of a mile away, so it’s tough, especially since I’m not on the Caltech board program. I’ve ended up coming to Hovse dinner (which is about an hour long), as it’s a good chance to connect with everyone and keep up with what’s going on, but since I can’t eat at it, I have to head back to my apartment afterwards to cook for myself, adding on another hour or so. Long nights!Other excitement comes from Fluid Dynamics, the a cappella group I sing with. We managed to impress a whole lot of people at frosh camp, so we had about twice as many people audition this year as last. There was a great deal of fantastic talent, and we picked up six new singers—five of them female—that we’re really excited about. We only had two women in the group before, so with this new crop, we’re near-even with eight guys and seven girls. Even though the new members haven’t really had a chance to learn yet, our sound is already so much richer from the improved balance.Now that rotation and auditions for Fluid Dynamics are over, the workload has ramped up to fill the rest of the time. I’d like to write a number of articles I’ve been saving up as soon as Leopard comes out and I’m no longer NDA’d, but we’ll see how my time ends up working out. Making things worse, I’ve been asked to keep working on my summer research project (which I’ll write about sometime once I’m not NDA’d on that as well) throughout the year. This is nice because it pays pretty well and is an exciting project; it’s unfortunate because it means even less time for Sparkle and my other Mac-ish projects.We’ll see.