I had not believed that Jia-Yan did everything last minute until she slid into her seat on the train (quite out of breath) literally 30 seconds before it pulled out of the station. Impressive. We had a nice girl-bonding session the train ride up. The weather today was lovely as promised (a bit hot, but at least no rain), so the day was full of potential.
Stop #1 was the Engineering Centre [sic], where Jia-Yan showed me all her old haunts. We worked for about an hour on the Solar Car (Jia is still a member of the team) outside in the lovely sun, where I kept insisting that lying in the grass is more fun than sanding (which it is, but needless to say I wasn't invited to come back and work on the car again). Plus we spent about half our "work" time on an ice-cream run for the rest of the team (I was fine with this).
Stop #2 was meeting up with Jia-Yan's (and now my) friend Talia, an MIT alum who just finished her first year of postgrad at Cambridge in materials (she was course 3 at MIT). We ended up at an Italian restaurant near the centre [sic] of Cambridge, where we sat at a table served by a man who puts the wait in waiter. We passed the time by building a heinously unstable tower of all our water glasses (balanced on a stack of one-pound coins). This was probably a horrible idea, but it was more fun than sitting around huffily commenting on how effing long it was taking to get the check.
Talia had to go after dinner/gelato, so we went and met up with Jia-Yan's friend AJ, who did CME the same year as Jia and is actually going to be starting his PhD next year at MIT in course 14 (economics). It was really nice to hang out with someone who wasn't course 6. After a brief jaunt we found a place that was renting out punts (it's hard to get a punt after 5PM here, unless you're specifically going night punting, and plus May Balls are on so it's hard to get punts from the colleges). For those of you who are unfamiliar with punting (and not in the MIT sense), "punts" are small boats you take on the Cam (the river that runs through Cambridge). They are propelled by a long stick that you use to push off the bottom of the Cam (which is really shallow). This makes them very hard to steer, but it's still fun! I punted for most of the trip, and apparently was quite good for my first time ("But I keep running into things" I insisted, "But you run into things less than most beginners," AJ and Jia said encouragingly).
After about half an hour of punting Jia-Yan and I literally sprinted to the train station to catch the last train from Cambridge to Ipswich. On the ride back, we proceeded to have the nerdiest conversation ever about relationships (if you don't like control systems and/or are male, you might want to skip the next section):
Jia-Yan: I feel like I'm the only one who ever analyzes things. I mean, I know why I feel what I feel. Guys feel stuff but they never think about WHY!
Me: OMG, I know. It's like they're a black-box and they have the input and the output but they don't even CARE about finding the transfer function.
Jia-Yan: The data's there, but you have to guess the transfer function.
Me: I know, it's like guys just keep generating Bode plots but it's usually not good enough to get anything useful.
Jia-Yan: And there's no feedback.
Me: Yeah, I wish guys had closed-loop transfer functions.
Jia-Yan: That's why they're so unstable.
Me: I wish making relationships work were as easy as being like "ok, you need to add a lag compensator ASAP."
Jia-Yan: That would be nice.
Me (degenerating into pun mode): Yeah, I think we all have a lot to GAIN from that kind of analysis...
*ensue groan-fest*
My inner nerd is satiated for the time being.
Pictures are up on facebook!
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