The interviewing process is always so tedious and time-consuming... and FUN!
These here questions came from Sbake. Dankeshöen, Sarah!
Alright, you know the rules of the game: post a comment if you want me to interview you. Naturally, I'll try to ask only funnish questions for you to answer, but there's no guarantee that they also might be a little embarrassing as well :)
1. In your opinion, is college all it's cracked up to be?
Yes and no, with more emphasis on the yes. First of all, the college life is so different from high school, and coming to this school in particular was a huge change in my lifestyle. I never thought that a homework assignment could take more than about 10 hours (and that's even if it was a large paper), but I've found here that physics assignments on average take 20-25 hours, and even the physics profs take about an hour to figure some of those problems out. What makes it more scary (on a daily basis) is that our assignments typically only have 5-9 problems in them, so the time kinda disappears and we're stuck wondering how we just pulled all-nighters without noticing. It's really pretty crazy sometimes.
There is definitely that feeling of freedom that all high schoolers envy and all college students sing about, but that's a pretty double-edged sword, if you really think about it. If you look around your classes at school, or during your all-class meetings, and think about how everyone would behave if there were very few restrictions on them, it definitely puts into perspective what college is all about. It's really a totally different experience, and from what I've seen and heard, most of the stereotypes of college are true: the drinking parties, relationships, all-nighters for homework (or otherwise, as might happen with the first two listed items), the Freshman 15; I've definitely seen it all happen. All in all, college is just a whole different experience, and if you view life as a sequence of learning experiences as I do, college is just another item in that sequence.
2. What is your favorite Disney movie?
Pirates of the Caribbean, hands-down. It's got Johnny Depp, first of all (yeah, I'll admit it freely: if I was gay, I'd have a love affair with him in a heartbeat), an absolutely amazing soundtrack, and it blends all of those aspects of humour, action, adventure, romance, and pirate perfectly. I just can't wait for the next installment (come on, who wouldn't want to see Keith Richards play the part of Jack Sparrow's dad!?)
3. What is the first book you remember reading, and why do you remember it?
It was actually a compilation of Greek and Roman mythology, and it sticks with me the most because my mom and I read it constantly. I never really got into those children's books, but mythology was fascinating. I mean, come on, what 5-year-old kid wouldn't love stuff like The Iliad or stories about Zeus, Ares, Athena and Co.? Let's see... "See Spot run! Run, Spot, run!" or stuff about how Ares would grab some spear, drive it through someone's skull, all the while describing in great detail every new tissue segment encountered by the spearhead? Gotta say, Homer knew how to keep an audience.
4. If you could spend a year studying any language, what would it be and why?
I don't think I could spend a year just studying a language, but when I get around to it I'll be studying either Russian or Greek here at college, followed by a term abroad in a country where the learned language corresponds to the official national language. Neither Russian nor Greek uses an alphabetical system based on Roman characters in the least (if you look at Russian, there are some similar characters, but about half are different than we use in our language), and I figure with my physics background I already have a pretty good grasp of Greek letters.
Still, Greek and Russian are very complex languages to say the least, and their grammatical structures are so different than English that it would take at least a year to even begin to grasp the fundamentals of the language, letalone the nuances. However, then if people say, "It's all Greek to me!" I can respond with, "Oh, really? Because in English..." and be very uppity and smarmy with them.
5. What are you most proudest of in your four years @ OES?
Well, technically I only got two years in at OES, but I'll try anyways...
I'd have to pull the full-on nerd routine on this one and say it was taking 15th place an National Science Bowl my junior year. That experience was absolutely phenomenal, and being up in front of all those people, representing a school that literally came out of nowhere, was wonderful (even if none of them really cared, we got to shake the Secretary of Energy's hand and get our picture taken with him). The entire science bowl experience, actually, was really just amazing... so much knowledge everywhere, not just at OES but from other schools as well (Woodinville, for example, the team that we just barely beat one year and which won easily the next), but that one experience in D.C... wow.
Alright, you know the rules of the game: post a comment if you want me to interview you. Naturally, I'll try to ask only funnish questions for you to answer, but there's no guarantee that they also might be a little embarrassing as well :)
1. In your opinion, is college all it's cracked up to be?
Yes and no, with more emphasis on the yes. First of all, the college life is so different from high school, and coming to this school in particular was a huge change in my lifestyle. I never thought that a homework assignment could take more than about 10 hours (and that's even if it was a large paper), but I've found here that physics assignments on average take 20-25 hours, and even the physics profs take about an hour to figure some of those problems out. What makes it more scary (on a daily basis) is that our assignments typically only have 5-9 problems in them, so the time kinda disappears and we're stuck wondering how we just pulled all-nighters without noticing. It's really pretty crazy sometimes.
There is definitely that feeling of freedom that all high schoolers envy and all college students sing about, but that's a pretty double-edged sword, if you really think about it. If you look around your classes at school, or during your all-class meetings, and think about how everyone would behave if there were very few restrictions on them, it definitely puts into perspective what college is all about. It's really a totally different experience, and from what I've seen and heard, most of the stereotypes of college are true: the drinking parties, relationships, all-nighters for homework (or otherwise, as might happen with the first two listed items), the Freshman 15; I've definitely seen it all happen. All in all, college is just a whole different experience, and if you view life as a sequence of learning experiences as I do, college is just another item in that sequence.
2. What is your favorite Disney movie?
Pirates of the Caribbean, hands-down. It's got Johnny Depp, first of all (yeah, I'll admit it freely: if I was gay, I'd have a love affair with him in a heartbeat), an absolutely amazing soundtrack, and it blends all of those aspects of humour, action, adventure, romance, and pirate perfectly. I just can't wait for the next installment (come on, who wouldn't want to see Keith Richards play the part of Jack Sparrow's dad!?)
3. What is the first book you remember reading, and why do you remember it?
It was actually a compilation of Greek and Roman mythology, and it sticks with me the most because my mom and I read it constantly. I never really got into those children's books, but mythology was fascinating. I mean, come on, what 5-year-old kid wouldn't love stuff like The Iliad or stories about Zeus, Ares, Athena and Co.? Let's see... "See Spot run! Run, Spot, run!" or stuff about how Ares would grab some spear, drive it through someone's skull, all the while describing in great detail every new tissue segment encountered by the spearhead? Gotta say, Homer knew how to keep an audience.
4. If you could spend a year studying any language, what would it be and why?
I don't think I could spend a year just studying a language, but when I get around to it I'll be studying either Russian or Greek here at college, followed by a term abroad in a country where the learned language corresponds to the official national language. Neither Russian nor Greek uses an alphabetical system based on Roman characters in the least (if you look at Russian, there are some similar characters, but about half are different than we use in our language), and I figure with my physics background I already have a pretty good grasp of Greek letters.
Still, Greek and Russian are very complex languages to say the least, and their grammatical structures are so different than English that it would take at least a year to even begin to grasp the fundamentals of the language, letalone the nuances. However, then if people say, "It's all Greek to me!" I can respond with, "Oh, really? Because in English..." and be very uppity and smarmy with them.
5. What are you most proudest of in your four years @ OES?
Well, technically I only got two years in at OES, but I'll try anyways...
I'd have to pull the full-on nerd routine on this one and say it was taking 15th place an National Science Bowl my junior year. That experience was absolutely phenomenal, and being up in front of all those people, representing a school that literally came out of nowhere, was wonderful (even if none of them really cared, we got to shake the Secretary of Energy's hand and get our picture taken with him). The entire science bowl experience, actually, was really just amazing... so much knowledge everywhere, not just at OES but from other schools as well (Woodinville, for example, the team that we just barely beat one year and which won easily the next), but that one experience in D.C... wow.