Conservation Impacts on the Global Scale

For my Capstone Project, I have reached out to several scientists, including Jess Adkins, Michael Hoffmann, Clement Cid, Dianne Newman, and Neil Fromer, all of which work at the Resnick Institute of Sustainability at Caltech. I am planning a panel for scientists to discuss their work in sustainability, and so far, I will have Clement Cid, who works on waste treatment and sanitation presenting at Poly, though I might add one more panelist if it would improve the quality of the event. 

It was a pleasure to host Ben, a student from New Zealand this week. While I’ve hosted students from Nirayama High School in Japan for 1 day twice before, I have never hosted a student for a week, so this was definitely a new experience for me. Ben was great to talk to. He shares my interest in science but commented that New Zealand lacks some of the resources the US has in terms of learning science. I talked to him about some tips or ways to access scientific resources online and shared with him some books to look into, and I look forward to communicating with him more on scientific topics. Through our conversations, I also learned more about aspects of New Zealand education and culture. His knowledge on the wildlife was quite impressive and introduced me to some flightless birds I had previously not heard of. For the histories of New Zealand and the US, we drew connections between the founding documents of the two countries and the persecution of the native groups...

This was definitely a good week for Asian American representation in the Poly Community. Following Joe Wong’s comedic presentation, we had four Asian American speakers come present on how they got where they are today and their academic experiences courtesy of the AAA, or Asian Affinity Alliance. Even though every panelist was very successful in their own right, they all had rather nontraditional experiences in education, having switched from major to major and job to job. I found that the panelists had a lot to say about not only their career paths, but also, how their identities as Asian Americans affects their work and thought processes. For some, it was more apparent that they could weave their identity heavily into their interests and professions in the artistic world, and for others, the identity took a subtler role in their success in the form of upbringing or cultural expectations. 

My multivariable calculus class through Global Online Academy (GOA) has been going great so far. I’ve never taken a math, let alone any type of course online in such an environment, so this was a great learning experience for me. While the course material didn’t cover global issues as much, built in to the course were opportunities for making connections with other students, and through those opportunities, I was able to connect with people in different parts of the US, Indonesia, and Slovakia. It was great learning about what my students have been doing outside of school and what led them to pursue multivariable calculus, a course that many students don’t take until college. The answers I got varied based on the individual student interests, concerning students’ pure love for math and in other cases, a willingness to take math to other fields in science or economics. I think this has been and will continue to be a great experience for expanding my horizons, both mathematically and glo...

I can certainly say Joe Wong started the decade off with a bang, just like the illegal firecrackers he  joked about in his presentation.  Joe Wong, an incredible bilingual comedian and chemist by training came to speak to Polytechnic School this past Wednesday. Alex (a fellow global scholar) and I had the privilege of introducing Mr. Wong to Poly. I greatly enjoyed his content and could definitely see how it tied into my heritage as a Chinese American. While his content was laden with comedy, it definitely addressed some more serious issues such as the immigration process to the United States, racism, the traditional Chinese upbringing, and the one child policy. Mr. Wong is younger than my parents, yet he is an American immigrant just as they are, and studied science just like they did. I see how their experiences mirror his and can appreciate how he takes the pain of his past and presents it to the audience in a digestible manner, and his witty, i...

The Brothers Karamazov (which I will continue to refer to as BK for the sake of convenience) has been a great read so far. I’m only about halfway in, but I’ve enjoyed it so far.  There is an element of this book that differentiates it from perhaps all other books I’ve read: it was serially published by Dostoyevsky, which I haven’t seen in any other media other than comics/manga. BK also is very context-laden: with small footnotes scattered all across the text referring to passages in the Bible, poems, plays, other works of literature, and translation notes. There is a staggering variety of characters from different backgrounds and different places where the story goes. In fact, while BK is really known as a novel about a murder and a trial, halfway through the book, I haven’t gotten to that part of the story at all. The story primarily follows the members of the Karamazov family, the loathsome father Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, the passionate and hot-headed Dmitr...