I could’ve written a post about each of these things or written a post for everyday of the past week. Instead, I condensed them below.

Things I did the last week of IAP (in sort of chronological order):

  1. Dev bonding with KL and AS! This was super fun and really got to know some people better. I also started planning where I’ll be staying during the summer? Hack house west? Really early talks though.

  2. Finishing up Spectacle I had two GSDs on Tuesday and ended up staying up until midnight my time with AW to solve this problem with preventing double submissions. I ended up having to add stuff to the SQL database and discovered that one of the key features that we added two months ago didn’t work. I finally finished fixing the bugs and adding a new database yesterday afternoon (after my 2 hackathons).

  3. Hackathon 1: iMUSE This was a weeklong hackathon with ~30 delegates, half from China and half from the US. I personally had never worked with public policy before so this was a new experience. I was in the technology division and no one else on my team knew how to code so we used a website builder (very disappointing but also I was extremely hosed this week).

    Our idea/product was a combination of a forum and virtual diary, and we envisioned it to be used to foster communication between people from China and the US. I met some people I would’ve never met before, and I learned that Squarespace is a big website-building website so I would say this was a good experience.

  4. EASTD 142 I entered my first first Harvard class – on Zoom. Honestly I was pretty disappointed. Everyone in the class was either an upperclassmen or a graduate student, and I felt that the lecturers I’ve had in my HASS subjects were better than the lecturers there. Maybe this was because it was the first lecture and it was also the first time the instructors were teaching this class as well, so I think I’m going to stick around for one more week before I (inevitably) drop it. Not a lot of work but lecture/seminar is 2:45 long on a Wednesday night.

  5. Watched 2 episodes of the The Haunting of Hill House with Kellie

  6. Hackathon 2: iQuHack Participation here was required by an IAP class I’m taking, 6.s089 Introduction to Quantum Computing. This was the first time I worked with quantum computing.

    I spent almost 24 hours on Sat. and Sun. working on a quantum annealing project relating to vaccine distribution with my team, SK and EP. I spent a lot of time on qBraid, and I even bluescreened a quantum computer (sorry DWave). This was a lot more intense than iMUSE and though we didn’t win anything, I thought it was a rewarding experience. It’s nice to be on the flipside of a hackathon.

    Here’s the Medium article I wrote about the project. Also, check out our repo. Hopefully I have time to fork it and improve our QUBOs in the next 2 weeks.

  7. Not started by the time this post is published: my final homework for 6.s090 that’s due at 8 AM my time on Tuesday.

Note: I don’t drink caffeine.