10am, Sunday, May 11th. I’m standing in front of the baggage check-in kiosks at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport with my huge red suitcase, my handbag, and my laptop bag. Excited shivers run down my spine as I cluch my project notebook closer to my chest. This is it. I’m going to Atlanta, GA, on a trip that I had only dared to dream about since… I don’t know, freshman year.
That’s right, guys. Only a mere week ago I was jumping up and down in disbelief at the fact that I was going to the largest gathering of brilliant young scientists in the world… and now I’m back at home, sitting in my office, exhausted after six days of partying (i.e. nerdfests) at the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair 2008.
… you know, I think I’m going to cry from sentimentality and nostalgia. Seriously.
I have never, in my entire life, had such a good experience as that I have had this week. I have never been as happy as I was this week. I have never spoken to such amazing people, never felt such excitement, never been so thrilled by simply being allowed the opportunity to be in the same room with students around the world just as passionate about science as I am. You know, sometimes I lament about the fact that I wasn’t able to make it here to ISEF sooner in my high school career, but at the same time, I reflect on this idea and you know what? I don’t think I would have appreciated it quite as much. Not only does this, being both my first AND last time, mean so much more to me as a mark of the culmination of my personal development and scientific endeavors… I also got to share this joy and exhilaration with fellow MIT prefrosh! You know who you are ;D
To appease my longing to hitchhike on a plane back to Atlanta (so I can either spend some more time socializing with the ISEFers who still remain or just sit in the GWCC and revel in the awe and sheer wonder of what just took place there), I’ll have to take you all back to review what was definitely the BEST week of my life. Starting tomorrow, I’ll have to skip down Memory Lane and tell all the juicy details, but since I’m dying from lack of true sleep and thus feel terribly drowsy, I’ll leave you with this teaser of an introduction. In the coming days I’ll post a day-by-day anecdote of my adventures - hope it doesn’t bore you all too much!
I’m going to refrain from recapping my entire experience thus far at Intel ISEF - I’ll save that for later tonight when I’m not in a rush and am relaxing on my bed. I will say, however, that I’ve been desperately scouting out the other MIT’12ers that are currently here at the international event! Omar and I, both dejected that Matt Mcgann’s reception ended up cancelled, decided that we’d gather ourselves for a get-together tomorrow at the CNN Center. By way of guest list, I’ve found at least eight of us here, and there could very well be more if we are able to get the news out via word of mouth. Very exciting indeed, but I will confess I do miss people back home. I hear CS class today was very exciting; unfortunately I had to miss every moment of it.
Oh well, I suppose =) Missing CS for a week at Intel ISEF is totally worth it, especially getting to attend that panel this afternoon with the Nobel prize laureates. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get ready for the welcome event tonight at the Georgia Aquarium..!
So back in my stupid noob days in 2003 or so, I put a huge emphasis on the graphical quality of programs and websites and operating systems. I would hate any site that didn’t have flashy backgrounds and complicated fonts and novelty accents like falling snowflakes. In fact, I used to hate Wordpress (back before everyone started developing nice themes for it) because it was too simple and “ugly” for me. I used to hate any program that didn’t have a brilliant interface and brilliant-er abstract classes to implement them (okay bad Java reference).
But nowadays I find myself gravitating more and more towards simplicity, minimalism (I think I use that word and its variants way too much), and down-to-earth text-based programs… which is why I was ecstatic when Paul Baranay told me about MIT’s Athena program Pine:
No seriously, look at it. A text-based e-mail client. Whoa-my-god, IHTFP. I’ve always abhorred Gmail because of it’s AJAX, I’ve hated Hotmail because it’s just a sucky client, I’ve disliked Yahoo because of it’s upgrade from simple HTML rendering to a flashy AJAX interface like Gmail… but this? This is perfect. Stripped bare of all the unnecessary crap that confounds clients like Gmail and Thunderbird (no offense Mozilla; if it makes you feel any better I’m still an FF fangirl), Pine is easy to use and navigate, but still provides the full functionality to send/receive e-mails and only that. I don’t need any flashy options or add-ons. When I open an e-mail client, I want to contact someone, dammit. I want to type in a message and know it has sent. Well, this interface is all that I need.
Damn, I need to get a life.
