Daily Entries

June 22, 2017
~Flying to Princeton~

I'm currently flying to the Newark Airport on my way to the home I am renting out town PACT. I will try to do daily blog posts of my experience similar to what I did last summer for the Summer Institute of Mathematics at the University of Washington (SIMUW).
I am taking an hour long Uber to my homely destination in Princeton. I am splitting the upstairs of the house with a graduate student doing some sort of scientific research from Cornell (so I hear) and my roommate Kota from Georgia (who is also participating in PACT). However, Kota will be arriving a couple of days later than me and will be driving her car up to New Jersey with her so we can go grocery shopping.

I will have to figure out my dining options for these first couple of days alone seeing as the nearest grocery store is only accessible by car. Luckily, there is a small diner right across the house I am staying in. Hopefully is not too pricy. In the mean time I am planning on keeping myself busy with blog posts, preparing for next year at Carnegie Mellon, and teaching myself R-Studio/Python.

I will try to keep my daily updates more interesting than last summers and stick to the most memorable points of each day (aka I won't write in detail what I ate for breakfast every morning). I also brought my camera along, so I am hoping to incorporate the pictures I take as I write.

I am really looking forward to this program and meeting all the other participants (the hot Princeton summer weather is also a plus). Toodles! Kindly,
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Paris Mielke
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June 23-24, 2017
~Settling In~

I have checked out most of the local diners and a deli, witnessed fireflies for the first time, and met up with one of my future classmates (Derek) for ice cream and dancing in Princeton. I also was able to spend some time familiarizing myself with the grad student I am living with (Coleen). She is a food science major doing research in the wine industry. She even mentioned that she was incorporating aspects of machine learning (ML) in her studies which I thought was pretty interesting because ML is really beginning to expand into all industries.
or lunch, took quick body showers, and rested up before heading to Ocean City with Janine.
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June 25th, 2017

~Meeting the Family~

Today Kota (my roommate), her dad, and I went to buy groceries at Wegmans, pick up the bike that her dad had bought her, get it fixed, and then toured part of the Princeton campus.

We visited an art museum on campus in which I would have spend a whole day in if it were not for Kota's dad having to have been driven to the Princeton Junction so he could catch his flight home from Newark Airport. I will be back to the museum again surely when I have some spare time on campus. Some pieces in the museum that caught my attention were several intricately decorated pages from the Koran, stone sculptures from almost 1000 B.C. in the middle east, a Monet, Adam Warhol pop-art, and my all time favorite, the ancient artifact section.

After we spent a couple hours in the museum we went to Thomas Sweet Ice Cream on the edge of campus, which according to Mark (the house owner) is apparently the worst out of all the ice cream shops in Princeton. I however, did not think it was bad at all.

Later in the evening the house owners returned and had a great night of conversations with them with pretzels, edamame, and ice cream sandwiches. Mark, one of the home owners is a philosophy and policy professor who taught at Princeton University. His wife is a writing instructor for kids. Mark told me about a proof for the existence of God in which I had not heard about before. He said his astrophysicist friend introduced him to it one night as a party. Basically, if we are to believe that the universe is infinite (space is infinite, time is infinite, there is an infinite amount of matter) then there is an infinite number of stars or light producing objects (this is a mental jump which may be argued against) then if this is the case, the sky should look like a solid sheet of light at night.

I am looking forward to the parties Mark and Janine (home owners) are planning with said Princeton astrophysicist. Janine offered to drive Kota and I to Ocean City tomorrow since she is going to visit her cousins. I have never touched the Atlantic Ocean so I am excited to be able to cross that off of my bucket list. I'm already having a lot of fun here. I can't wait for tomorrow!

Kindly,

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Paris Mielke

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June 26th, 2017
~Bikes and Beaches~

Today Kota and I biked along the canal near our house all the way to the Princeton campus (which otherwise is about an hour travel-time on foot). There were plenty of turtles in the canal and a few kayakers. I do not think either of us was planning on biking so far, but I am glad we did (despite having a sore butt for the rest of the day). On our biking journey we ran into Mark while picking up some cool beverages at a hoagie joint (popular amongst Princeton students according to Mark) who then offered to lead us to the seminary he attended for six years. He said he would be meeting up with Coleen (the Cornell grad student we are living with) to show her the seminary library.

Kota and I biked back home for lunch, took quick body showers, and rested up before we began our journey out to Ocean City with Janine.

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June 27th-30th, 2017

Classes ensued, I tried out some sushi places, organized activities for the other participants, played ultimate frisbee, and solved riddles upon riddles with my friends Salil, Joshua, and Zoe.

Lunch by the fountain is really relaxing and I am beginning to develop a nice tan...