06-07 Year in Review

At last, what I had intended to write up for a while now; between work and such (more on that on another post), I just haven't had the time to compile everything together into a massive post. Anyway, on to it!

It was, as they say, a very good year. There was a lot of different things going on, a whole load of new experiences, travel to distant(ish) places, and a sort of "end in sight" with respect to my undergraduate education, and a possible glimpse towards the future. In writing this, I'm realizing that I've covered a lot of this stuff in relative detail in previous overlapping blogs, so I probably won't go into much detail -- maybe some reflection, maybe some captions for pictures: I'm not sure what will go in the rest of this.

Without a doubt, the event of the year was the eight months that I spent over in Germany and the rest of Europe. Of course, almost all of that adventure has been chronicled earlier on my blog, but all in all, it was really good. And to think that I was going to turn the job down!

E-ball was great, again, this year. Good times with my friends in Fizz. I think that I've been really fortunate in finding a program that I mesh well with, and is pretty tight-knit. I can't even imagine what it'd be like in a bigger faculty and not knowing the people that I spend 6 hours a day in class with.

Clearly, I was enamored enough with Europe to return again less than 3 months afterwards! The optETH winter school was an excellent experience; the collection of so many grad students from such a diverse cross-section of physics was really beneficial. Hopefully I'll be going to more of these things after I graduate from here :P

Directing the musical pit band was another totally new experience for me too. I've always been on the other side of the band; this time around, it was a lot of fun working with everyone I had on board, and even to deal with the logistics so that everyone else can concentrate on making good music. I think I'll do it again next year...I really should start planning the lineup!

Fizz Social Night was, as always, a blast. This year we held it at Science World (my suggestion!), which made things a ton of fun -- built in icebreakers! I kind of wish I had gotten involved in running Fizz from the get-go -- it's really satisfying to do some of this stuff for the fellow students and all. Oh well, I'm waist-deep in it all and there's another year left. I've got a lot to do for this! Redesign the webpage, develop the FizzWiki, encourage forum usage...all the while making this sort of development self-sustaining within Fizz. It'll be interesting to see how things pan out by the time I graduate.

We had the first of two senior capstone projects this year. Despite the constant stress, long nights and frustration at seemingly-self-destructing equipment, I think that everyone got a lot out of their APSC 459. I definitely have my lessons to take from this to bring to 479, though -- first off, a clearly defined project! We did the best we could for ours this time around, but the inevitable truth with research is that it is nigh-impossible to set the hard deadlines that are a hallmark of these project management courses.

So, a lot happened this year. I wonder how I have changed from when I wrote the last one of these things. My first instinct is to say that I am starting to look inward more, again -- on the whole, a long-term observation of my own tendencies suggests this is true. I think that I've become a little quieter -- being in Germany for a few months kind of squelched any trace of extroversion that I did have. Go figure...

It will be interesting to see what the coming year holds for me. Suffice it to say that even with all the varied happenings of 2006/07, the near future will be eventful indeed. What do I have to look forward to? Graduation, whatever I end up doing after Fizz, and who knows what else? Those two alone are bound to be momentous in themselves...

I'm going to end this post with a picture that I have posted already: I just think that it captures the many different things that have happened this year, as well as what I perceive to be my own internal state as of now. (I must hasten to add, that this was by no means the top of Harder Klum -- there was still a whole bunch of trail left to climb, at this point...)