The first semester

I've just finished my first semester at Berkeley.  It went very well.  Coming in, I was worried that I wouldn't be up to snuff; I went to a small liberal college and didn't major in Mechanical Engineering.  My first midterms laid that fear to rest—I got the high score in two of my classes and only 5 points off a perfect score in the other. I didn't quite as well on the tests after that, but still well enough for me to feel confident that I will thrive here academically.

I was a teaching assistant for a programming class, and that went pretty smoothly too. I didn't do any actual lecturing; my job was to be in the lab sections to answer questions. Still, it was enjoyable, and I think I did a decent job. I haven't gotten my student evaluations back yet, but I did get an email from one of my students thanking me for my help. So that was nice. Next semester, I will be a teaching assistant again (for the advanced version of the same class), but I don't know yet what it will entail.

The academic news that's really exciting is that I got hired in a lab. And, it was the lab I came here wanting to join. I'll be starting for the spring semester, but only half-time. It looks like I'll be working on software (not surprising given my background). I'll post more on what I'll be doing in the future.

Finally, socially things went really well too. There are lots of cool people here, and I've got a pretty solid group of friends. Among other exciting things that I've done this semester, I climbed half-dome and went surfing for the first time ever. However, there was a definite lack of generally getting off our butts and doing things on the weekend—there's so much neat stuff to see and do in the Bay Area, I feel like we're all missing out—but hopefully I will change that next semester, as I'm kind of the organizer among my friends.

On Monday I fly home to Minneapolis, and then back here on the 2nd. I'm not really sure why I chose those dates, as it's really short and doesn't give me time to go down to Chicago and back to visit my friends down there. But, what's done is done.

As to the frequency of posts on this blog: I'd like it to be higher, but I'm never really sure what qualifies as interesting. I mean, climbing half-dome clearly qualified, but that post got scrapped because I didn't have the photos until about two months afterwards. Anyways, I'll try to update this more often, and I think once I start research I'll have more to talk about.