A day at UBC - excerpt from an e-mail to my mom

But I'll leave all my personal stuff out. Here's what I wrote to my mom about UBC (since I'm tired of re-typing everything).

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Today, I had a chance to sit in a Science One lecture on Nuclear Physics. It's really cool to have a smaller group of students in the first year, as there's more faculty attention and you get to know more people better. It'd be different from the mainstream science course, though. I also spoke to an ex-Science One lecturer, Dr. Martin Adamson, who shared with me a lot of advice about pursuing a degree in UBC in Biological Sciences. So, I think today I had a very fruitful day out on my own at UBC. I think I'll come by more often.

Dr. Adamson's advice to me was actually not to take any science courses during the summer term (which I initially wanted to, to brush up on rusty knowledge), as he felt confident that anybody with a strong science grounding should be able to catch up with their knowledge when entering university, especially in Science One since there's so much academic support within the program. So if I don't get into MIT or Caltech, but enter UBC in summer instead, I'll probably register for Japanese lessons and other arts courses (like Literature or History etc.). Those would help clear up my electives too.

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What a cool guy, Dr. Adamson was. A pity I didn't take the initiative to take his photo and get his contact. (Almost sounds like robbing him of his identity. Haha!) Still, I'd love to go back and find him in that hell-of-a-maze Biology building (it's really tough to navigate). He gave me quite a bit of information on the genetics course in UBC, as well as some insights into how mathematics could be applied to Biology (aside from Stats, which I've already seen). He actually used partial differential equations to model a population, and through that, I gained quite a bit of an insight into how a Science One class would be conducted. Now that's really cool.

So I end my day with few pictures but a broader tour of UBC. And now I'm going to go back from the Koerner Library, their newest and biggest library that I'm sitting in right now to type my e-mails and this blog entry.

Adios, amigos!