Trinity - Week 2

Cinco de Mayo

Week 2 consisted of getting started on collecting data for my thesis and celebrating May Day and Cinco de Mayo.

On Sunday evening, I skyped with one of my classmate's friends who works on the Hill to get some ideas for my thesis. He was sitting outside in the sun on his porch in DC while we were having a terrible week of cold rain and hail here.

One of my classmates determined that interest was high enough in our group to have a professor teach an optional class on how to use LaTeX, so I went to that on Monday afternoon. LaTeX (pronounced lay-tech) is a document formatting software that is useful for preparing journal articles and papers with charts, tables, or mathematical formulas. It also makes fonts look nicer than they would in a regular word processor due to spacing issues. Creating a document in LaTeX looks like you are writing code/HTML rather than a simple document. It's really cool, but since my thesis is just text, I don't see the need to use it.

I woke up at 5AM on Tuesday for May Day, which I'll write a separate post about. I then went to my day-long class that began at 10 AM, which was followed by a meeting with my advisor. For some reason I decided against taking a nap in between May Morning and class, so it was an early night.

I went to sprint ergs at Wolfson College for the first time on Wednesday. Members of St. Cross row with the Wolfson Boat Club. Sprint ergs consist of rowing 500 meters (which takes around 2 minutes) and then taking a 2 minute break. The boat I plan to join, Women's 3, does this 4 times, while W2 does it 6 times. You are judged by your 'split,' the time in minutes and seconds it would take you to travel 500m. The W2 girls were pulling around 1:50s-2:00s, and I got in the 2:teens. Rowing faster does not necessarily improve your split; a slower stroke with a ton of power can make you travel farther. When you see people at the gym on ergs for long periods of time, they are probably not pushing as hard as we have to do in these sprints -- it's really tiring by the end.

My advisor was conducting a focus group on Friday, so she had me come along so I could see how she conducted one before I started doing my own interviews for my thesis. I missed out on dinner with my friends that Friday night because I had to do my first thesis interview with a Congressional press secretary.  I met up with everybody after dinner to head to the Balliol Megaron, the grad bar, where we organized a massive game of Cards Against Humanity, which is like Apples to Apples with more ridiculous cards, and had a bunch of curious onlookers.

My Canadian friend (and her American roommate) held a Cinco de Mayo party on Saturday night, complete with a pinata. The Brits didn't know what Cinco de Mayo was, and after the invites were sent out, one of the Americans asked when Cinco de Mayo was this year (um, on cinco de mayo...yeah, but when is it?...the fifth of May).