Saket Vora

Landed at RDU at around 12am last night — flights were slightly delayed at ended up getting routed through O’Hare. No big deal. Flight from O’Hare was half empty, and a college girl from Smithfield who is studying graphic design at Spring Harbor in Michigan ended up in my row too. I’m noticing this kind of thing happens quite often when I fly.

But anyway, I’m walking out to the baggage claim at RDU when Greg and Kelly surprise me! They even had balloons! It immediately put a huge smile on my face. Sachi and Sapana got there later and we headed back to our house and sat and talked and caught up. I got to hear more about how Greg is doing and what Cambridge is like, we talked about Kelly’s plans for the spring semester, about the horrible state of biomedical engineering education, etc. Sachi, Greg, and Sapana broke out the Wii near the end.

Ended up going to bed at 6am and waking up really late today.

Anyway. Going back a week, I think my medical electronics exams went well. He grades on a bell curve, and I’m pretty sure I did better than the average. The statistics exam was simply awful. First, they double-booked the room, so there was some confusion. Ultimately the EE professor forced the freshman chemistry class out of the lecture hall. Owned. The statistics exam was really hard.  No amount of studying would have helped. Nader and I studied a lot the two days before the circuits final, but even that final was so incredibly difficult. The circuits shown to us, and the analysis he asked for weren’t like the kinds of topics we covered in depth in class. I bombed it. Honestly, I’m praying for a B and just move on. No word yet on the project grades.

Update: A- in medical electronics.

So funny story. My dad had booked me a flight home like 2 months ago with some frequent flyer miles that were going to expire soon.  I had thought I was leaving on Saturday. I decided to check my email on Thursday night, and discovered that I was actually flying out Friday at 12:15pm! I booked a shuttle, packed in like 10 minutes. But really, I spent the evening watching SuperTroopers with Luke. Hehe. If I realized it earlier, I would have gone to the campus bookstore and get some gifts. Oh well.

Other than that, it’s good to be home. There is actually a lot I want to accomplish. I wrote about 5 pages in a notebook about my energy idea, then there is the WaterPLUS business plan to develop, I want to contribute some content to the LunarX wiki and Wikipedia (the centennial campus article is woefully lacking), etc.

Gotta give a shout out to a sweet data visualization tool for your Facebook social network: Nexus.  I came across it while browsing visualcomplexity.com, a wonderful site for looking at data visualization projects and techniques. Here is a Nexus graph of my Facebook network: [click on the picture for a larger and interactive view]

Enjoy!

Hope everyone’s finals went better than mine, and have a wonderful break.