Summer is here: finishing finals, storing all my stuff, and saying goodbye

Finals are over! I did well on all my exams, giving me a much higher GPA then I thought I would have. Somehow I ended up with A’s in everything except physics :-). So you can see that it is not impossible to do well here, and I’m far from being a genius (I thought I would get B’s or worse in all my subjects this term, just shows where putting in some extra effort gets you).

My finals were over quickly, but they were very crammed together. They started on Monday, May 22^nd and ended the next day. I had my two hardest finals, 8.022 (physics II) and 5.12 (organic chemistry) on Monday. 18.03 (differential equations) was on Tuesday afternoon. Luckily I didn’t have a final in my creative writing class. I finished much earlier than most people. My mom came out to Boston to help me pack up everything. I stored some of my things in the dorm, and some right down the street in a storage facility. There was actually plenty of room in Simmons (wish I would have known that before hauling some of my stuff down the street).

On Thursday I spent time with Gus and my mom, and we went for lunch in Boston, then in the afternoon we saw “Over the Hedge” at a movie theatre, it was entertaining and pretty well done. I would suggest going to see it. It was so sad saying goodbye to all of my friends, especially Gus. We'll all keep in touch over the summer.

Now I am finally home! Before flying back to California, we stopped in Texas for my cousin’s graduation. I’ll be flying back again next week for his older brother’s wedding.

I have an internship at Agilent Technologies this summer. I won the internship at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair last year, but decided that I didn’t want to do it last summer. I’ll be working in a lab doing biotech/ chemical engineering specifically with cofactors and enzymes. My mentor even said that I would learn how to use DNA electrophoresis! I’m very excited.

I’ll be doing a write up shortly on my entire first year at MIT: what I learned, what I would do differently, and whether I would recommend MIT to others.

I hope everyone enjoyed Memorial Day weekend!