Philosophy 101

Course Title: Knowledge and Reality

Syllabus:
Class 1 – Socrates only knew that he knew nothing. We don’t even know that.
Class 2 – Reality doesn’t exist. Prove it.
Class 3 – Is there a God? What’s the negation of “An existent God exists?” And what about Tinkerbell?
Class 4 – Observation is useless, intuition lies, reason is unreliable, science is pointless. Have fun with those chem sets.
Class 5 – There is no free will, no consciousness, and your essay is due. Alternatively, prove it’s not your fault you didn’t turn it is, as your zombie has been attending class up to this point.

Will’s one-liners:

“So there’s this cosmic background radiation, right, which supposedly can give us all the information about all particles some time after the big bang. So we just plug it in and solve for the universe…”

“Okay, I’m not condoning this kind of experimentation, but let’s just say you have a baby on an acid trip…”

“It’s just like that ride in Disneyland!”

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And in unrelated quotation:

- “I’ve never seen you away from your whiteboard.”
- “Yeah, I’m using it a lot this year. Scratch work. I forgot to buy paper.”

 

I’m not going to college…I’m being Institutionalized.

When I was deciding on colleges, I went looking for blogs. Statistics, wikipedia pages, and university websites are good in their own right–but I knew that I wanted to spend my next four (or more…) years somewhere that fit me inside and out. Not having the money to visit all my college choices (except the closeby UCSB and Caltech) I turned to the next best thing: blogs by students expressing their fun and frustrations in university life.

After all those weeks of indecision, I visited Caltech, I loved it, and I chose it.  And then I came back home and waited eagerly through the longest summer ever (my, does Caltech start late!) for it to begin. Biding my time, I looked for websites, stories, livejournals–anything that would give me more details about where I was going.

Very little. And a resounding nothing from female students, which is perhaps understandable since they make up only about 30% of the school’s population.

Call me crazy, but I saw this as a challenge.
*

This blog is for prospective students out there looking, like I did, for a little more intimate view of Caltech; and especially for women looking into this school and wanting to hear a woman’s perspective.

As of this writing, I don’t know if Caltech is the perfect fit for me. In fact, as of this writing, school hasn’t even started yet. I have no idea if I’ll only be able to update once a month, if I’ll have good things to say, if I’ll pass math, or if I’ll drop out and end up a wandering minstrel. That life has always beckoned…

In any case, it’s much more fun for the story to unfold for all of us as I go along. Plus, for entirely egocentric reasons, I do so like keeping diaries of various times in my life.

Without further ado, then (as this is entirely too much ado already), here are my Caltech diaries.