It’s a bit overwhelming to think that the first month of the semester is over.  In my first month, I have officially not finished unpacking (my floor is covered in clothes and boxes), caught a violent and debilitating form of strep throat, which kept me in bed and out of class for 5 days, and, very successfully I might add, fallen behind in every single one of my classes.  Then my laptop decided it’s life was not worth living, so, I lost everything, including this blog, which I have now rewritten.

As far as classes this semester, I am taking six.  I am going to list them, but not bore the world with their descriptions.  Maybe one day one or two will be featured in a blog, but this entry is going to scrape the surface of each one.  Anyways, I am taking Biochemistry, Engineering Thermodynamics (for ChemBE’s), Differential Equations, The Scientific Revolution, Complex Analysis, and a lab safety course.  So far they all seem to be going swimmingly, beyond the fact that I feel there are not enough hours in the day for me to get my work done, which is a bit of an issue.

This year my sister moved to Ecuador. These are the islands at Cuicocha. So inspirational... In the words of Liz Lemon, "I want to go to there..."

This is semester has really got me reflecting on exactly what am I hoping to get out of my Hopkins education, and, more importantly, what do I want to get out of the last sixty years of my life.  It’s as if my life is a piece of toast, where each corner are the disciplines to which I am trying to devote myself fully.  One corner represents chemical engineering, one corner represents pure mathematics, another represents my love for the humanities, and the last corner represents the essence of my personality (under my opinion); laziness, spontaneity, and indecisiveness.  Now, I am a blob of jelly, everything I can do and accomplish is represented by about a teaspoon.  No matter how thin I spread myself, I can’t seem to cover the toast.  Toast is just not very tasty when there isn’t enough jelly.  If I can’t increase the amount of jelly, my only option is to cut the toast.  But choosing how exactly to make the slice is difficult.

I am finding that the same thoughts are running through my head as those that begin this summer.  Do I really want to be an engineer?  My thermodynamics professor always uses this recurring example of chemical engineers be responsible for engineering the system process that creates cream of broccoli soup.  Not only do I abhor canned cream of anything soup, but I am realizing this course focuses nothing on the statistical mechanics that may be associated with a more classical approach.  But I am coming to the understanding that is exactly what I want to learn.  I want to think about interaction of molecules, not chunks of broccoli.

Often I find my classes rarely relate to each other, and my classes seem to cover the entire board of academia.  Pretty much my brain is all over the place.  I feel I am reaching a threshold of a line that defines useful knowledge from knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

It wasn’t until last week that I begin to catch up on the reading for my history of science course on the Scientific Revolution.  As I sat in my study room deep down on C-level, I began to realize that these characters of the early modern era and myself are two in the same.  During the Scientific Revolution, natural philosophers were faced with an intellectual paradigm.  Would they continue to emulate to characters of antiquity, who sought knowledge for the sake of knowing why?  Or would they reform the way we would understand the natural world through empirical methods and through a mechanized and mathematical view of nature that searched for effective ways to vex nature into being useful for man?

At the moment, I am unsure if knowing how to write an epsilon-delta proof will ever be useful or applicable to engineering.  In fact, I doubt it will be, but I continue to learn how to write them anyways.  I do it because I find mathematics beautiful.  But it’s not the plug and chug style of tedious computation, but rather the concept of a proof.

There is something about a proof that is beautiful and in so many ways the epitome of perfect and absolute knowledge.  It takes something that often seems counterintuitive, cloudy to understanding, and through a series of logical and often cleverly organized statements brings to light something of absolute truth.  After those three little letters, QED, there exists a moment pure and ultimate transparency filled with surprise and awe at what can only be known as sheer eloquence.  Although they often seem simple, to conceive them is a whole other battle.  But I guess that’s a part of their beauty, something that seems inconceivable after only a few lines makes perfect sense.  These moments of clarity occur rarely in my life, so I relish in the moment of each and every one.

Engineering on the other hand, is the epitome of how man makes knowledge useful.  Yet, every successive hour I spend in an engineering course, the more I realize I am loving it less and less.  Sometimes, I find it unbearable.  The problem sets are horrifically tedious, and the equations unpleasant and contrived in comparison to those of theoretical mathematics.

However, this is just a step towards what I came to Hopkins to achieve.  I want to learn, but more importantly put my knowledge to some sort of use.  I want to do research.  I want to go to graduate school.  A large part of me doesn’t want to sell out to industry, but that isn’t a clear-cut part of the plan.  Chemical engineers do more than pump cream of broccoli soup through pipes, and sometimes I forget what these other options are.  I just have to remind myself to remember that there is a sea of options out there, and not all of them boil down to a can of soup.

Learning how to not lose yourself in the height of stressful stretches of time has been, by far, one of the most challenging obstacles Hopkins has presented me.  But I’ve realized, when I look past the challenges, Hopkins has granted me a great gift in the form of an unknown passion.  Before Hopkins, I never imagined continuing onto to study mathematics in this great of depth.

Maybe it’s not about learning how to not to lose yourself.  I really genuinely feel that Hopkins possesses this great mystical power, and if you just let it work its magic, you will find your passions in life.  Moreover, you will pursue them to the greatest degree, even if it means staying up past 4 am, and getting up for those 9 am lectures.  Sometimes there are unexpectated changes to the original plan, but in the end I think everyone finds a part of themselves that they had not known before.

So I guess the dice rolled in a way to hand me a desire to pursue two polar opposites.  It’s a balance I have not really learned how to manage yet.  A part of me is still lost, waivering on this threshold of applicable and abstract knowledge.  Maybe this intellectual paradigm doesn’t need to shift just yet.  After all, it took nearly 250 years for the Scientific Revolution to change the way we practice science and look to understand the natural world, and I have only just begun my sophmore year…