samkung's Xanga

Confession

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 13:31:02 GMT

This last semester has taught me something really important. I should forget about going into academia. It's not that I don't have the brain, which I'm a little lacking anyway; it's more about the mind-set and the personality. I'm not one of those people who gets excited reading journal papers on the applications of elliptic integrals of the third kind or obtains pleasure from experiments on finding the variation in spring constants of a microcantilever upon adsorption of some little particles. I do like physics and math, but I'm sure by the end of graduate school I'll study more than I'd like on the subjects. I've seen through the politics of research and academia. It's getting boring. I should just study computational physics at Duke and sell my soul to financial analysis afterwards. Yea, good plan!

Friday, April 14, 2006

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 03:49:58 GMT

The head of admission of the department of physics and astronomy at UNC gave me a call all of a sudden today and asked me if I were to accept their offer, and told me that if not, the offer would go to someone in China immediately. For the first time in...a long time, I felt like a useful person.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 09:20:30 GMT

Ahhh...

The verdict...has been challenged. Rice University is offering good money with nominal work obligation. Plus, it's Houston, a big city! I've been living in this rural village for way too long, would really like to move to a city. However, it's in damn Texas...

Well, I will visit the Rice campus and the department of physics and astronomy this weekend, and see if I really like it or not. Hell yea, a free trip to Houston! I will have to change flights 3 times(!) just from Roanoke, VA to Houston, TX though, which makes it about 13 hours total travelling time. Anyway, I'm excited about the trip and seeing 2 long-lost highschool friends who go to Texas A&M.

So...let the previous verdict be suspended for now. Final decision coming up next week.

The Verdict

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 01:11:02 GMT

Not the best I could hope for, but I'll learn to like it:

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 09:46:37 GMT

All I can say is HOLY FUCKING SHITTTTTT

I accidentially deleted everything in a partition of my hard drive!! It's the partition that holds all my course documents, computer programs for research work, research results, pictures, and music! Fortunately I've backed up stuff here and there before, and part of the partition can still be recovered. But no way in hell I will get everything back in its place.

I was trying to install some software and to get some functions to work in linux.
It was so fucking annoying and frustrating to work in the terminal command window when no expert was around. 4 hours passed and I started going crazy and trying different random stuff with the codes. The next thing I realized was that I just erased everything in my D drive.

No doubt I will lose some very important files, even though some others will be recovered. It won't make a good story in front of the professors. Whether the professors give a shit or not, I still have to redo a lot of work. I'm in deeeeep shit! Goddman it! Haven't been so upset for a long time!

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 08:30:15 GMT

I've been on xanga for more than two years. If you guys haven't noticed yet, most of people's posts about SZSY are all happy memories, best friends forever, great teachers that we miss....shit like that. Today, someone finally said something that makes sense to me. This post is totally a response to what Miss. Yen had to say today. Read her entry of Jun. 9th, 2005 if you wanna make perfect sense of what I'm about to say. If you have done so, feel free to continue here:

OMG, someone finally said something that I can relate to as how I feel about some of the assholes in that place! The brilliant Mr. Yu Jian called me into his office twice and even talked to my father, trying to talk me out of the physics exam (I had two x subjects). But fuck him, I said it to his face that even if I had only one option, I would drop English II and choose physics. Then I gave him a lesson by scoring way above his physics average when some of his most beloved, promising, hopeful genius students scored below average (no offense to those geniuses out there). A lot of other teachers there were fake as hell too. I can't believe they tried to keep you in their office the night before the exam!!! Are you serious???

However, I do miss that place. It's after all the place that defines my adolescence, those most joyful and most painful years. And I'm sure those years wouldn't be any more memorable had I gone to any other school in that city. I do miss a very few teachers there as well. I'm glad you miss Mr. Xing too. I went back to see him this pass winter. Bad news for you, He's back in SZSY. His heading-a-school plan didn't turn out as smoothly as he expected, and Mr. Jin, the evil master, was also begging him to go back, so he did. I'm not sure who do you mean by Ms. Li. I hope you're not talking about Ms. Li Yanjun. She's the biggest cunt in the whole wide world! My first year in middle school was a total nightmare because of her, and I would still have flashback of it nowadays. I wouldn't say this about any one else in the world, but I really wish her a miserable life!

Back to my point. Yes, I do miss that place. Not only because it taught me how to obtain joy from pain, how to deal with complete assholes, how to be a tougher perosn, but in a way, I even appreciate the "principles of education" that Mr. Jin spares no effort to advocate. They at least made those 6 years of my life a little less painful and a little more memorable. I wouldn't say I love SZSY, but I surely appreciate how valuable an education I gained from there.

Every year when the biggest exam in the world comes, I would have a lot interesting thoughts. I would still feel anger at some of those assholes. I would still regret the score 2 points away from my "dream school," even though I really could have taken the exam much more seriously than I did. I can still taste the sweetness of friendship in the hard time, or may I say, Romantism in the battle field. And I would wish those kids tortured by those assholes some good luck. Something I just realized recently is that I shouldn't hate those bastards who exploid the loopholes of the unperfect system. The people who created the system are the only ones to blame. In a world of harsh competitions, moral obligations are neglected from time to time, as long as the laws are not broken. So I actually wanna see a stronger SZSY. I actually want to see them have a successful year. I'm sure none of these would matter to me 20 or 30 years later, but somehow right now I still feel obligated to think in a certain way.

Oh shit, I've written so much just for your comment. I'm using it for my own blog now. Check it later.

Friday, June 03, 2005

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 05:47:34 GMT

Several days ago I was still unhappy about some close friends not even in town for my 21st birthday, and my best friend didn't even call. I had no clue that they were planning on some surprise for the whole time. They definitely had a lot of discussion on this, and apparently some crazy plans didn't work out, like taking me to a strip club, or having a surprise party. So instead of everything else, they got me this today.

This is definitely the most awesome birthday present I ever got. There're lots of other much more provocative pictures in the same directory (they're huge though) in case you wanna check them out. I have to clearify that I didn't volunteer to do most of them. You know you would do many things under peer pressure, so please take it as a good joke.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Sun, 22 May 2005 03:00:31 GMT

OK, almost forgot to mention. I'm turning 21 in a few minutes. The 21st birthday is so very meaningful in this country mainly because you can legally consume alcahol when you turn 21, so it's pretty much meaningless to me in this aspect. Also, you lawfully become a fully responsible adult, but that doesn't apply to me that well either because I'm a foreigner.
I'm not sure if there will be any type "celebration." A lot of friends are not even in town. I'll probably try to have a little nice dinner with people I like, but the usual 21st birthday crazy drinking won't happen.
Anyway, happy birthday to myself.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Sun, 22 May 2005 02:30:55 GMT

This update will be accompanied by pictures, linked to highlighted text.

I was thinking of this update a week ago, but I was living without internet for a week. It’s not that my new apartment doesn’t have internet yet, but it’s because I went to the beach for a week! haha. David (current roommate, mentioned in some posts before) invited some graduates and a few others from physics to his grandparents’ beach house in Nags Head, North Carolina, and we stayed there for 6 days.

Ok, first thing first. Final exams…all went pretty well. I managed to pull off an A after a 47 on the second midterm in Thermal Dynamics because I got the highest grade on the final. Obviously I studied my ass off for that final. Got a 61 on the Mechanics final, but still managed to get an A in the course. Well, for one reason, the final was very hardcore, and for another, I smashed everything else in that class. The three math courses (complex analysis, Fourier series and partial differential equations, probability theory) were much less painful compared to the physics ones (complex analysis was actually painless, the other two were reasonably painful), so no drama was involved. Thus, in conclusion, I got a 4.0 last semester. Yes, those sleepless nights finally paid off.

After the exams, I moved out of the dorm, as mentioned last time, and moved into the new apartment. I’m living with best friend of the moment David (wondering how long it will last before we hit each other in the head) for the next year in an awesome apartment complex. I was lucky to get a good deal for the rent. It’s a big apartment with 4 bedrooms, so there’re actually two other roommates. One is David’s ex-roommate Nick, and the other one is David’s friend Andrew’s ex-roommate Tony, who doesn’t talk to us much because he’s constantly talking to his girlfriend. There’s tremendous distraction just outside of our window, meaning girls in swim suits around the pool! Maybe I’ll get some of those pictures up later, haha.

Then there was a 7 hours’ ride to the beach after I barely settled down in the apartment, and the fun started right there. Well, not much fun for me as always, because everyone except me in college have fun with alcohol. The house was alright. I slept on the couch for a few days, which was fairly unpleasant. The beach was just so-so as well, because the water was still kinda cold. I didn't get too burned because I got last year’s lesson from not wearing strong sun lotion. We helped a mom found his lost 5-year-old boy one day. I was so paranoid thinking that the boy might have been swollen by the waves already because I saw him playing in water minutes before he was lost. No one expected that he was playing hide and seek with his sister and went hide in some beach house’s garage. Oh yea, we went to the Wright brothers’ memorial aka the site for the first powered flight in history, and we did some goofy stuff and some goofier stuff there when other tourists was staring at us weirdly. Of course there has to be more exciting stuff happening with a bunch of college kids going on a trip. So here we go. One guy (I won’t name) told us that he’s into dudes, which was surprising to some of us but reliving to the others. We went crabbing one day, caught a lot of crabs and messed with a water snake (no, I did not freak out this time). We cooked the crabs with beer that night, and I got a rash from just eating the crabs. This is what we did to the leftovers that night after Mike got trashed. We celebrated Travis’s birthday on the 19^th. I was totally aware that I was allergic to alcohol, but you would really want to do some thing when everybody else’s doing it, and that hard lemonade tasted really good when I took a sip. So I just decided to down half a bottle, and deeply regretted the decision 5 minutes later. So I put up a show of monkey-ass face and experienced extreme headache before I experienced some sub-consciousness on the bed. Luckily I was alive again a few hours later, but I missed the cake and the ice-cream. We went to the beach around midnight just for the hell of it. Oh yea, Wacky Jack made me took some of his model shots before he dived into the freezing ocean.

Everybody left yesterday, the 20^th. It was a meaningful farewell for David and me, to Travis, because the three of us were close friends who went through a lot of hard courses together and Travis is graduating and we won’t see him for a long time. I was actually a little surprised at how emotional Travis seemed when we said goodbye, because I don’t think I knew too him well in a personal level yet. Anyway, Travis is one of the kids that largely defy the stereotype of American college kids. He studies really hard and lives what he believes by being a vegetarian. He’s a little weird for a lot of people. I wish I had known him better, or maybe I will some time in the future.

It’s a pity that we never got a group picture of everybody on the trip. We’re probably going back next year, and that will be the celebration of my own graduation.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Wed, 11 May 2005 05:59:12 GMT

I just realized that this may probably be the last night of my 3-year-long dorm life, and I certainly feel that this is some event that’s worth some notes-taking.

For 3 years, I lived in the 2^nd floor of Newman Hall. Even room numbers didn’t change much from year to year: 253 for freshman, 238 for sophomore and 242 for junior year. The building is not a terribly enjoyable place, but it definitely has some sort of characteristics that I feel happy with.

Newman is something they call a “theme house” where the “theme” is internationality. It’s supposed to be a dorm for international students and people who enjoy an international environment, and I actually think the purpose is well fulfilled. I’m sure more than 60% of the residents here are American, but it’s still cool to hear people speaking different languages on the phone, and talk about stories from different corners of the world all the time. However, different cultures may also bring sharp differences that can trigger problems, but that’s also where the fun starts. Anyhow, I feel blessed not having to ever live in a dorm filled with stupid American kids who love to pull the fire alarm for fun and take dumps in the elevators being intoxicated.

My college life basically started off in this dorm. School was easy in freshman year except those stupid English courses, so I didn’t have to concentrate on academics that much and I made no friends in physics, and I thought those kids in physics were very dumb (of course, the smart ones were hidden). My Indian and Turkish neighbors were my best friends back then. They were certainly much more American than I was. They basically taught me a whole year-long course of introduction to American culture, and I kind of enjoyed the feeling of college friendships, which can be very casual, but you can have fun with it all the time. I actually made a couple of really good friends from the group. Roommate is the most important factor in dorm life, especially when 2 and only 2 people live in a room. The two people can be best brothers or enemies for life. I don’t think I need to talk about my freshman roommate any more. Everyone knows how much I hated him. I remember putting up a countdown on the wall by the end of the school-year just to enhance of the pleasure of knowing how little time left that I had to live with that guy.

Dorm life in sophomore year was great. The friends from freshman year stayed and I got the best roommate I could ask for. Several new guys in the building came from Scotland, and it was so damn funny talking to them and trying to figure out what the hell they were saying with the strong accent. I made friends with them as well. The best part was living with a nice funny guy who I agreed on most things with, who I could have intellectual conversations with, and who I shared the affection or distraction of TV. Of course there were occasional frictions, sometimes rougher than the others, but I guess things all worked out fine in the end. I know he probably didn’t enjoy having me as a roommate as much as I enjoyed having him, because he was the nice guy of the room. Well, it was at least nice for me, and I was actually sad to see him move to Scotland, just like a good friend walking out of my life. On the other hand, anything would be much better than that asshole I lived with in freshman year. Maybe I was just too overwhelmed by the sharp change.

Junior year in dorm is boring, very very boring. All my friends in dorm from freshman and sophomore years moved off campus, but I thought it wouldn’t be too bad to give it another year in dorm since I enjoyed it so much the second year. Well, I was wrong. The new people are boring, and most of them are kids right out of high school. I kinda felt being too old for the dorm. But on the other hand, my social circle completely changed. I actually have some friends in physics all along, and became good friends with a few of them in sophomore year, but starting junior year, they’re the only people I talk to. Also, I haven’t been in my room nearly as much as I did for the first two years. Physics and math run my life, and I live a large portion of it in the Robeson hall, home to the physics department. This roommate is very nice as well. Again he’s the nice person in the room, which makes me feel bad, but I can’t help staying up really late all the time to finish homework and projects, which requires me to keep my lamp on and constantly make some degree of noise when he’s trying to sleep. I guess I pay him back by helping him do his physics homework (he’s an engineering major) from time to time. I don’t talk to him much, so I don’t really know him well at all. We have our own group of friends. I guess that makes good roommates as well, but just sort of boring from time to time.

So that’s it for a recall of the not so fabulous dorm life of Sam. Being on soon is the up-to-date story of the final exams and the beginning of the off-campus life. Stay tuned.