When the Washington Post feels compelled to run an AP story about a raucous college party, that story bears discussion.

But before I so much as convey my understanding of the situation, I should preface this by noting that I was about 3,000 miles away from the Bates campus in beautiful Portland, Oregon (where I'm still sitting) when the Incident took place. As such, most of what I know comes from secondhand accounts, so take my summary of events with a grain of salt.

That out of the way, I'll start with a little background.

Most seniors at Bates participate in something called "Senior Week," a collection of outings and happenings designed to celebrate students' imminent graduation in the week preceding commencement. This includes a variety of mostly good spirited — though not necessarily wholesome — activities, such as a barbecue and a pub crawl. It also includes an event I'll call "Revisit Your First Dorm Room," in which, on one night in their ultimate week at college, fourth year students pay a visit to the first year occupants of their first college dorm rooms.

This academic year the graduating Class of 2010 held "Revisit Your First Dorm Room" last night, on 25 May 2010. Apparently this year's celebration — for want of a better term — was more raucous than usual. (NB: "Revisit Your First Dorm Room" is also a convenient way for older students to provide those under the legal drinking age with ethanol.) So raucous in fact that, in order to extricate an overzealous partier for medical care, the college's private security team felt compelled to call in the local police department, who ultimately arrested 11 students.

The Incident has ruffled many students' feathers. Many of my peers feel the local police force could have used gentler methods in their bid to give medical personnel the access they needed and to otherwise restore a modicum of order. I've already received a dozen or so invitations to join various groups and events in re the Incident on Facebook, despite my relatively anemic presence on the social networking site, and indeed a group organized a "Protest Against Police Brutality" on the main quad that took place earlier today.

From what I've read and seen, it does seem clear that the local police could have handled the Incident with more finesse. The amateur videos I've watched point to a certain degree of contempt for students on the part of the police.

Yet this is as much a story about shirked responsibility as it is about police ineptitude.

I and all of my fellow students are among an almost incalculably privileged group. Not only do we live in one of the most stable, prosperous nations on earth, we attend one of the most élite tertiary schools in the world. Moreover, most of us come from extremely privileged backgrounds, both in the context of the world and the more immediate "first world" context where we spend most of our time. As such, I feel we have a responsibility to live up to the extraordinary opportunities we've been given.

Which is not to say we need to become ascetics or take vows of eternal poverty. I probably spent more today at Whole Foods buying a few bits and bobs for dinner than many people earn in a week.

But when some among us escalate a fête to the point that a police officer sustains a fracture in the course of restoring enough order to extricate an over intoxicated peer, those involved ought to accept that they could have acted with more grace as well.

In particular, this sentiment that students were the victims of some horrible example of police brutality seems to me insulting to the people far less fortunate than us who have suffered at the hands of true police brutality. While I don't have a whole lot of facts at my disposal, that I haven't heard any reports of students being taken to hospital in critical condition or with multiple compound fractures suggests to me no one was. At least in my book, a couple of scrapes inflicted in the course of imposing compliance, while obviously something to be avoided, does not compare with the more gruesome fates of others in their interactions with law enforcement.

As mentioned earlier, I don't have all the facts by any stretch of the imagination. But the public perception of the Incident — I was just informed this story made the front page of the Huffington Post — is hardly what I want people to associate with my degree. It would go a long way to improve the optics of the situation, and my own feelings about my peers, if they acted with a hint more humility.

On the whole, I'm quite happy with my experience here at Bates. The criticisms of the institution I've posted on my blog previously are really quite superficial. The economics department could require a little more math, some professors really irk me, and it wouldn't hurt for the dining services people to serve some real bread.

But there is one office so ineptly staffed and managed I almost feel obliged to single them out for the inexcusably bad treatment they've given me in the past three years. Here's to you, Housing Office, for doing a really terrible job.

Before I go any further, I should explain how the college allocates housing to students after their first year. First, the Housing Office divides the student body into three sets by class year (e.g., the set of students in the class of 2013). Then, within each set, the Housing Office randomly orders the students in that set. As such, the seniors-to-be all have better positions than the juniors-to-be, and so on. Finally, over the course of three evenings, the three sets of students queue in our old dining hall and choose their rooms by scrawling their names on giant laminated floor plans of the various residence halls. The process in and of itself is rife with inequities and inefficiencies. I blogged about this last year, at about this time.

So how did the Housing Office inspire this vitriolic tirade?

This year, as in the previous two years I've been here, the Housing Office erroneously grouped me with the class of 2012, not the class of 2011 as they should have. The mix up is not entirely ridiculous, given that I matriculated in the middle of the 2007-2008 academic year, rather than at the beginning with most of my peers. Through, at the moment, thanks to the bevy of Advanced Placement exams I took in high school, I should graduate with the class of 2011 next spring. And even if I take a whole eight semesters to graduate, I would still graduate in the winter of 2011. (That said, after mis-categorizing me for two years, I feel like they should have made a note next to my name.)

Last year and two years ago, however, the folks in the housing office at least made an attempt to fix their errors. This year they obdurately refused to do anything about the issue. And not only that, but they were also less than pleasant (to put it mildly) about the whole incident.

Admittedly, I'm at least partly to blame for this mess. For in the previous two years, I spotted their mistake before they had assigned the lottery numbers, which apparently makes making changes easier. (This too makes me worry. Either they need to use different software or they're even more inept than I make them out to be.)

Even so, I did contact the Housing Office prior to the housing lottery actually taking place. Yet they were unflinchingly unhelpful. Even after I pointed out I had number 2067 (or something thereabouts) last year, versus 2129, which they assigned me this year, they were unwilling to make a change. Their last email to me regarding this subject closed, "There is really nothing we can do to change your class year." Up to that point, it must be said, I was annoyed, but hardly furious.

And in light of that communication, I diligently showed up earlier this very evening for the housing lottery for juniors-to-be. I did, however, arrive a few minutes early to make one last ditch attempt to reap the benefits of my having been here five semesters. It was this encounter that confirmed my belief that the Housing Office needs some significant personnel changes and a serious revamp.

After speaking to a variety of people, I was referred to one woman whose name I really should have taken down. She was so inept, I think she may have dethroned the tech support representative who claimed I knew nothing about using computers and hung up on me, in terms of really horrible interpersonal relations.

I asked her, "Would it be possible for me to at least cut in front of all the juniors?" I thought this a very reasonable proposal, given that I would still have had, in essence, the worst number among the members of the class of 2011. To which she responded by posing a question so idiotic it makes me question the intrinsic rationality of all humanity just to regurgitate it here: "Do you think that would be fair?"

Her tone left no doubt that the question was designed to be mocking, to convey to me the absurdity of my request. But it was her decision, not my request, that was absurd. First of all, the housing lottery is designed to give students a better room with each year. In my case, however, the fact that I actually had a better lottery number last year meant that, at least in the abstract, my room quality would decline over time. Second, if we were to travel back in time three years and apply the same standard the Housing Office used this year then, as a sophomore-to-be, rather than participating in the housing lottery at all, I would have been randomly assigned a roommate and put into first year housing. It just makes no sense.

And beyond that, this woman made absolutely no effort to express sympathy or understanding for my frustration. Did she apologize and point me to the convenient table of refreshments? No. Instead she treated me in the way I would treat an insubordinate three-year-old. As I continued to press my case, making many of the arguments I've presented here, she gave me the, "I'm not going to stand here and argue with you," line in a tone dripping with condescension. It was at that point I dropped my smile, reasonable tone of voice and generally composed demeanor, and closed with my most harshly worded verbal jab of the conversation, "This is absurd."

Most so-called elite colleges and universities, mine included, make a big deal of the fact they treat students like people and not faceless, emotionless blobs of human flesh. And, to be honest, my institution lives up to that standard almost all the time. But in this one instance, they stuck so steadfastly to their formulaic procedure and acted with such inconsiderateness that I feel almost as if my rights have been violated. This experience is really anathema to the whole idea of a liberal arts education and institution: one that is thoughtful, reasonable and that takes logic seriously.

Addendum

There's one part of that story I forgot to mention. At some point in my conversation with the inept woman, I asked her if I could appeal her decision or talk to her superior. In a move worthy of the very worst customer service representatives I've interacted with, she flippantly dismissed even the notion she could be in the wrong with a comment to the effect of, "Let's just say the buck stops with me." (I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of her muddled response.)

I really should go to bed, but I'm so incensed that I doubt I'll fall asleep if I don't put this out now.

But first a little background. I'm not a big fan of "scented" products. I don't want my clothes to smell like "clean breeze" (whatever that is), or my disinfectant wipes to smell like "lemon." At the same time, most products billed as unscented, while not perfumed, still have a scent, usually something I like to call "industrial solvent." Which is why I keep a dispenser of lavender-scented liquid hand soap from the folks at L'Occitane en Provence on hand. It's just scented enough to trick the mind into believing it's not some kind of horrible industrial cleaning agent, but not so scented that I feel my throat constrict when I wash my hands. (Forgive me for not choosing a more "macho" scent or product, but I have a difficult time believing anyone, let alone superficial attractive women, could possibly like — much less tolerate — a product like Axe. Frankly, I'm a little embarrassed I even know what that product is.)

Which brings me back to the story. As I entered the bathroom on my floor to brush my teeth just moments ago, I noticed that I had left my pretentious French soap on one of the bathroom sinks earlier in the day. So I walked over to the sink in question, thinking I would bring the soap back to my room after ridding my mouth of plaque. To my annoyance, however, someone had defiled my soap dispenser by spitting into the dispenser! Needless to say, that perfectly good container of soap is now in a trash can.

On what planet is it acceptable for people to spit into containers of soap? Surely not this one.

As I exited the library yesterday, I noticed a placard on the checkout desk that announced the Bates College library had acquired a Kindle. I'm going to be blunt: I can hardly think of something more idiotic a library could do, save perhaps for burning its collection or committing its binding supplies to the aid of terrorists in a glue stick-powered takeover of the government.

First of all, there's the cost of the Kindle hardware itself, about $260, or enough to buy about 10 "real" books, even at publishers' list prices. So, right of the bat, the library has sacrificed the ability to grow its collection by at least 10 volumes. And any savings associated with the fact that the Kindle can access public domain works, like Pride and Prejudice or Othello, is offset by the fact that the library probably owns at least two copies of such famous public domain works.

Second, there's the huge opportunity cost of buying a book for the Kindle. The nature of Amazon.com's DRM on Kindle books means that only one person at a time will be able to read whatever collection of books the library purchases for the Kindle. Contrast this to the conventional arrangement, in which different books can be lent to different people at the same time. It's as if one particular shelf or stack of the library's collection had to be checked out at all at once, and only one person could check out that stack or shelf at a time.

It would make far more sense, assuming Amazon makes the technology and licensing available, for the library to purchase copies of electronic copies of books and magazines that students who happened to own a Kindle could access, much as Sony does today with many public libraries.

And all this is not to say I don't like my Kindle. It's a great device for linear reading, where one starts on page one and moves sequentially to page n. But the Kindle is a device to read content, not a piece of content itself. People don't go to their local libraries to check out televisions; they go to check out DVDs.

Earlier this week, I dropped a box of crackers, spilling a mess of crumbs onto my floor. As someone who cares, perhaps too much, about tidiness, I immediately sought out a vacuum cleaner to remove the noxious foodstuffs. The first vacuum cleaner I found failed to clean up anything at all. In fact, I'm convinced that particular device made my floor dirtier. And I haven't been able to find another vacuum cleaner in my dormitory to even try. So I've now had a variety of crumbs laying on my floor for more than a few days, something that makes me quite uncomfortable.

As such, I began exploring the idea of buying my own vacuum cleaner. But because I like to buy quality, I have a hard time justifying such a purchase. Even a low-end Miele vacuum runs at least $300 or $400, which seems to me an excessive amount to spend given the size of my dorm room and the infrequency with which I need to vacuum. By my own rough estimates, I would spend less money by paying a cleaning service $20 a week to vacuum for me until I graduate, as opposed to investing in my own vacuum cleaner. Yes, I suppose such a device would probably prove useful for many years to come — the Miele Polaris I looked at comes with a seven year warranty — especially as I transition to a slightly less austere living arrangement.

But this really comes back to a more fundamental question: why doesn't the college provide the residents of its residence halls with proper, working vacuum cleaners? Do they want to encourage students to become slobs? The college has no problem providing all-you-can-eat printing on high-speed laser printers in the library and labs. I can't help but wonder why the College doesn't just provide or tack an extra $2 onto our already absurd "comprehensive fee" to give me the ability to clean my floor.

In the wake of my previous post about the iPad and the inaneness of the Bates IT security policy, I've done some additional research and talked the matter over with more than a few of my peers who are likewise frustrated.

Unsurprisingly, many security experts agree that trying to do client-side authentication makes for an ineffective network security policy. In particular, the Cisco NAC that Bates uses is vulnerable to numerous exploits. At a recent Black Hat conference, for instance, some researchers demonstrated that the Cisco product could be spoofed by simply having the computer assert to the NAC that it had the right antivirus and firewall settings and gain access without a hitch, despite having no anti-virus or firewall software installed. (There are many, many more exploits, which interested parties could easily track down via a simple Google search.)

To me, this means that the client-side network authentication layer is utterly superfluous.

Given that the device effectively does nothing to keep really determined hackers off the network, it essentially just serves to inconvenience and annoy normal people. If Swedish intelligence officials decide they want to join the Bates network to wreak havoc on our course database, they'll have no problem. But Ellen T. Student will panic when she can't connect her laptop to the network to print an important paper due to an authentication malfunction, and John T. Student won't be able to share the latest video of his dog surfing in Nantucket with his cousin from his iPhone.

Not to mention, the college likely spends more than a few dollars to keep this ineffective layer in place. Of course, there's the huge cost associated with the purchase of the hardware and software. But there's also the labor cost of maintaining that hardware and software over time. Further, the college has to hire lots of employees for its technology "Help Desk," largely because no one can figure out how to install the parasitic client-side authentication software and the mandated (and equally impotent) Sophos anti-virus software.

It's almost comical. In the midst budgetary problems, the college continues to spend thousands of dollars to inconvenience people to no benefit, while my professors feel compelled to make fewer photocopies.

This doesn't really strike me as the kind of policy consistent with the very liberal values of the college, nor, as I've written in the past, does foster an open, generative computing environment. Yuck.

I've more or less decided to buy an Apple iPad. On the one hand, I'm convinced it will be an excellent device for the consumption of media. The purported 140 hours of music playback time would be wonderful for the long haul flights I find myself on so often. And I love the idea of having an enormous multitouch web browsing experience. On the other, the iPad has a lot of productivity potential. I'm already in love with the idea of bringing an iPad to meetings for Keynote presentations rather than my comparatively bulky laptop. The folks at Omni Group also set my heart racing when they announced that they intend to port all of their major productivity applications to the iPad. OmniGraffle on the iPad will be sublime, I'm sure.

Bearing that in mind, I've now begun to ask myself whether I should buy one of the standard WiFi-only models or spring for an iPad with a cellular radio. Apple managed to strike a great deal with AT&T — no contracts, low prices — and the device is unlocked.

But as I began to consider the matter more closely, I realized I may need to buy the 3G-equipped model more out of necessity than an occasional desire for ubiquitous Internet access on a third portable device (see iPhone, Kindle).

As I initially considered it, I figured a 3G iPad might be worth buying just in case I ever wanted a month or two of service. I like the idea of popping in an Orange SIM card in Paris and killing time on the train to Lyon or Cannes on a trip to France. But then it occurred to me that the inane Bates network security scheme would prevent me from doing such routine tasks as checking my email on the iPad via WiFi, as is the case with my iPhone and the Bates network. As it stands now, I can only check my email on the iPhone thanks to the spotty coverage provided by the fine folks at AT&T.

Not that our charming IT people make it easy for me to connect to the Bates WiFi network on my phone in the first place. Regardless of the number of times I tell my phone to remember and automatically connect to the auxiliary BatesGuest SSID, it can't seem to pull it off. And when I manage to connect to the network, I'm forced to authenticate in the browser with my username and hard-to-type 15 character mixed-case alpha-numeric-symbolic password every single time. Not once every 24 hours, or even once every hour. If I were to authenticate right now, visit a website and put my phone to sleep, I would have to re-authenticate in five minutes if I decided to open Tweetie.

In case the previous two paragraphs didn't make it clear, I feel strongly that these policies are ridiculous and utterly absurd.

I already have a more or less unfettered Internet connection from the college on my laptop. If I wanted to break into a secure database or launch a cyberattack on the Defense Department, preventing my benign mobile phone from joining the WiFi network won't provide any defense at all.

Of course, the people in IT also like to argue that allowing just any device onto the network creates the possibility that I or someone else will spread some horrible virus to the rest of the campus. But I fail to see how locking devices out of the network does anything to stop this. First of all, as I already mentioned, my laptop, which poses a far greater risk in that regard, is already on the network. Banning my iPhone or iPad does zilch. More importantly, though, most viruses and malware are spread through the Internet! So if I were just to send people on campus a virus-laden email from a cellular modem, just as many computers would be infected. Beyond that, the tightly-controlled environments like iPhone OS are, to my knowledge, not even capable of launching some kind of sophisticated attack.

What rationale do these people have for keeping my iPhone off the proper WiFi network? I say none whatsoever.

I'm sick of being treated like a criminal. Give my iPhone unfettered Internet access!

As I know I've posted before, I generally find the food offerings here at Bates satisfactory, if rarely exemplary. That's not to say there's no room for improvement. This morning, for instance, as I finished the Times crossword, I noticed an insert in my table's napkin holder announcing the upcoming "Adventures in Dining" the fine folks at dining services had scheduled. Adventures in Dining, for the uninitiated, are supposed to be, "The culinary showcase of Bates Dining," to steal a line from the Dining Services website. Usually this means they serve cotton candy, corn dogs or cake with Harry Potter-inspired sprinkles. Or, as will be the case in the next three weeks, some sort of revolting Canadian French fries with cheese and gravy, sausage bombs, and make-your-own Valentine's Day cupcake.

Forgive me if I sound like an elitist food snob, but these are not so much adventures in dining as they are adventures in risk-taking behavior. It hardly surprises me that obesity, heart disease and a host of other diet-related health problems have become more prevalent given that even the wealthy, presumably intelligent students at a top liberal arts college consider French fries with cheese and gravy an adventure in dining, or something that shows off the best of Bates Dining Services at any rate.

Admittedly, the Dining Services people occasionally do something that qualifies in my mind as a true "adventure." A few weeks ago, for instance, they attempted to serve sushi. (Again, forgive my pretense: what they served may have looked like sushi, but it didn't really taste like sushi.) These occurrences are few and far between, however, and even sushi, for the sort of cosmopolitan students that attend liberal arts colleges like Bates, is not really much of an aberration from the beaten path.

So I issue my challenge. How about some real adventures in dining? Why not give lavender-infused sea bass a try, or attempt some kind of savory sorbet? Would cassoulet or real macaroons be such a stretch? And where is that delicious crusty bread I was promised so many times? I've seriously considered joining Eli Zabar's "Bread of the Month" club to satisfy my craving for real, honest-to-goodness bread.

Given last year's focus on sustainable, healthy eating, it's almost laughable that our dining commons serves corn dogs or deep-fried chicken "nuggets" with any frequency. This is an educational institution: paternalism is part of the package. Let's nix these revolting dishes and expose students to the culinarily unexpected.

Forgive me. For I have more venting to do about my econometrics course and professor.

A few weeks ago, we had a midterm exam. Because this professor always seems to find a way to humiliate me and make me feel stupid by way of finding some minor fault in my work, I really spent time studying for this exam. I worked example exercises in the textbook. I worked old exams from MIT's much more mathematically-aware econometrics course. I even worked some problems I felt were relevant from a graduate-level econometrics textbook. And I did fine on those preparatory exercises.

Then, just a few hours ago, I received the results of the examination. I received a C on said exam, measuring in absolute terms. (This particular professor claims to have some scheme whereby he doles out letter grades based on the number of standard deviations a particular student is above the mean.) To me, this says there is something wrong. Exams are supposed to measure how much a particular student has learned in a particular class, no?

Though, I suppose if one defines "class" as the set of lectures delivered by the instructor of that class, then I haven't learned very much in the "class." My professor does little to better my understanding.

On the other hand, I have learned quite a bit from reading the course's assigned text, working problems on my own, and supplementing that with readings from other econometrics texts and journal articles. It doesn't seem to unreasonable to me to say that someone who can prove the Gauss-Markov theorem probably understands it. Yet my midterm results would lead one to think I spend my spare time drooling.

In fact, using the very hypothesis tests that my midterm claims I can't perform correctly, it's fairly easy to show that the grade I received on this midterm is statistically improbable.

I try not to care too much about grades. My working theory is, "If I actually understand the material, the grade will follow," which has worked pretty well over the last seven years. (For the record, I earned an A on my more recent real analysis midterm.) But this econometrics course (and this professor's statistics course, last semester) seems to violate that postulate. So much so that my ability to gain entry to a top-flight graduate program could be jeopardized.

And to think I'm actually paying this professor's salary!

I meant to post this last weekend. But on Sunday — and most of last week for that matter — I was in bed coughing and wheezing with some kind of cold or sinus infection. Fortunately it was not the dreaded H1N1, though my mystery bug was still unpleasant.

At any rate, in addition to coming down with a sinus infection and not writing a blog entry, I attended the annual Harvard debate tournament last weekend. I could spend lots of time ranting about the questionable cases brought against me and my partner (e.g., prosecute a voodoo-worshiper for conspiracy to commit murder?), or even discussing the mobs of young, mostly Asian parents with small children forcing their youngsters to pose in front of John Harvard's statue. But that's not what I'm going to do. Instead, I have to say something about the chalkboards in Harvard's fancy new Northwest Science Building. In a word, the chalkboards are "amazing." In fact they're so amazing, even a team from Yale was willing to admit Harvard had better chalkboards.

While the boards do nothing to fix my principle complaint about chalkboards — the horrible residue chalk leaves on my hands — the boards in Harvard's new lab science building do have some kind of engineered graphite surface that offers two huge advantages over any board I've ever used anywhere else.

First, the boards' surface make it impossible for even the most inept professor or determined troublemaker to make unpleasant noises. No squeaks. No horrible "fingernails on the chalkboard" sounds. It's great. Second, the boards' harder surface make it a chinch to actually write on the board. Whereas even my hands, which spend a dozen hours a week pounding the absurdly heavy action of a Steinway grand piano, have trouble writing on most boards, the boards in Harvard's new science building made writing a breeze.

It has become my new goal to have the chalkboards at Bates resurfaced with whatever miracle material Harvard uses. It's really that good.

I have an exam tomorrow morning, so I need to make this quick so I can keep studying. But, of course, it's the exam that this post is about.

I've mentioned on several occasions my dissatisfaction with my econometrics professor, and the course itself. (It's the same professor I spent time whining about in my posts several months ago related to economics and statistics.) We're using weird statistical analysis software, after three weeks we still haven't done multivariable regressions, and there's no matrix algebra to speak of.

The strangest part of the course, though, is my professor's obsession with having us not only derive equations in class, but also memorize how to perform those derivations. I suppose in some sense this might be called "rigorous," but really it's just a pointless exercise in frivolity. The real derivations — the ones that might actually be worth knowing — use matrix algebra, which, of course, we can't use in this econometrics course because the economics department has what I consider an insufficient mathematics prerequisite.

But back to the exam. One of the "proofs" my professor wants me to be able to recite has to do with showing that a particular estimator is unbiased, which, of course, involves showing that the expected value of that estimator is the value it's trying to estimate. I couldn't remember how exactly to do the proof, so I looked in my notes. I don't know whether I was bored to death, just took bad notes, or the professor didn't do a very good job of explaining the derivation. Whatever the case, I couldn't obtain the information I wanted from my notes. So I opened the course textbook — the one my professor chose — to find what I needed.

It was then that I realized how perverse this course and my professor is. Even the authors of my textbook — two MIT professors — don't think these proofs are worth knowing particularly well. As they put it, "The details are relatively straightforward, but since they are somewhat tedious, we have relegated them to Appendix 3.1" (Econometric Models and Economic Forecasts, Pindyck and Rubinfeld, pp. 63).

I feel like my professor really misses the point when it comes to teaching. The details are doubtlessly important, but it's a whole lot more important — especially in a course that's about economics more than rigorous mathematics — to understand the economic principles behind and the application of the formulas.

Update: Because I'm angry and frustrated, I thought I'd vent some of my other dissatisfaction with this professor too.

Often, in the course of doing these banal derivations, he will make an offhanded comment that one particularly bizarre reformulation of a particular formula would be "the one you'd use if you were a writing software for Microsoft." It's clear to me that he does not understand algorithmic analysis.

The unviolated formulas he has spent so much time tinkering with would, as algorithms, all grow in linear time. And so would all of his reformulations. So, from an algorithmic analysis point of view, neither algorithm is preferable! On the other hand, some forms of the formulas would, from my point of view, be better because they would be easier to maintain and support, always big concerns when one is writing software.

Back to my studying.

After my workout this morning, I popped into Commons to have breakfast. Normally, this is not something I would write about. As evidence, I don't think I've ever posted anything about this aspect of my routine before. But what I witnessed this morning was so strange, so out-of-the-ordinary and so remarkable, I had to write about it. For, when I entered the dining room this morning at around 9:30 AM, all the tables were clean. I'm sure to some this does not seem remarkable or particularly noteworthy. But to me it was a small miracle.

Because I don't like to eat breakfast at 6:45 or dinner at 4:30, I'm never in Commons just after they open, when everything is spotless. So I usually find myself sitting at a table that is, to one degree or another, covered with the remnants of someone else's meal. As something of a clean-freak, this always makes me uncomfortable. I like to eat on clean surfaces.

Until this morning, I never really understood this phenomenon. My fellow students may not know as math as much as I think they should, or share my opinion that pajamas should not be worn in public. But they are definitely not lazy or unconcerned for the welfare of others. When I read stories about people collecting the lids of yogurt containers to help children in need, I usually feel a twinge of guilt for sitting at my desk and trying to understand the Khun-Tucker Theorem instead of raising money to dig wells in Cambodia.

This morning, though, I concluded that some people must be sloppy and lazy. For this weekend is parents' weekend, when parents from all over New England come to see a highly-stylized version of their son's or daughter's college experience. And with parents everywhere — parents who admonish their children for eating like dinosaurs and leaving half-eaten sandwiches splayed on the table — there was hardly a stray crumb to be found. I'm sure the lazy mess-makers fit into a Pareto distribution (so about 20% of the people make about 80% of the mess), but it's nevertheless disheartening. Not to mention, I'd bet money the 80% of us who don't leave partially eaten slices of pizza behind would be much less uncomfortable, or at least less like to contract a nasty virus.

I wrote a panicky blog post last week about the questionable absence of statistical software in my econometrics class. Today, I discovered my intuition (and the course syllabus) misled me into believing something so utterly outrageous. The good news is that my econometrics course will integrate a statistical package into the coursework. The bad news is that my econometrics course will integrate EViews into the coursework.

I have to admit something is better than nothing as far as software in econometrics goes. But why we're using EViews is a mystery to me. As I understand it, most academic research economists use either Stata or R, while researchers in private industry tend to use SAS or R. So, by learning EViews, I'm essentially learning a dead language. It's like learning Sanskrit, but without the redeeming esoteric and historical qualities.

Furthermore, and more importantly, EViews does not allow users to customize and extend the software as readily or as easily as Stata or R. I've never tried to extend EViews, but from everything I've read, it's much less extensible as Stata or R. Both those packages also have thriving user communities, each of which has produced hundreds of useful add-on packages and plug-ins.

The one potentially redeeming quality of EViews is its sugar-coated user interface. I haven't used Stata enough to really comment on its user interface. But I will concede that anyone uncomfortable working in the command line or with object-oriented programming would probably have trouble diving into R.

In most cases, I would praise the package with the superior user interface and more gradual learning curve, and bash the package that takes some time to master. When it comes to more professionally-oriented software, however, I put much more emphasis on flexibility, extensibility and robustness. Professional software can't omit important features for the sake of simplicity — if a researcher needs a feature, the feature needs to either exist or be easily added.

Still, I do feel better (if marginally so) about my econometric course. The idea of being confined to datasets of five observations was frightening.

Today I was humbled. Humbled by the first day of my ballroom dance P.E. class.

A part of me wants to attribute my seeming inability to perform even the most rudimentary dance step to poor instruction or poor choice of music. But something tells me I have only myself to blame.

To be sure, I didn't expect to walk out the first class with the ability to do much of anything. At the same time, though, I didn't expect that the first class would be so totally disorienting. The dance du jour, a simple swing, comprised a whole four steps, yet, at least for the first fifteen minutes, I was wholly incapable of placing my feet where they needed to be in time with the music. Something about that seemed particularly embarrassing, given that I'm a reasonably good at playing the piano. It was like finding myself suddenly unable to play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" or add seven and seven.

Close to a mental breakdown, I spent the two hours immediately after the class locked in a practice room playing Beethoven sonatas. I can't think of a word that really captures just how comforting it was to hear music, and not some garbled mess of hisses and squeaks, coming out of that piano.

I suppose the quality of my footwork has nowhere to go but up. Yet I can't help wishing my first foray into the wild world of ballroom dance had gone just a little more smoothly.

Sometimes I have to wonder whether my econometrics professor has been following developments in his field over the last two decades. I say this because he seems to have no intention of teaching me or my classmates how to use Stata, R, EViews or any other statistical computing environment.

I'm more than a little worried. Half the goal of most undergraduate econometrics courses is to teach students how to use a statistics package. In fact, two of the most popular introductory econometrics textbooks — Jeffery Wolldridge's Introductory Econometrics, and James Stock and Mark Watson's Introduction to Econometrics — include Stata datasets and integrate the software into their various lessons. Fortunately, I'm enough of a computer nut that I've mastered the basics of R, and I can use Stata without too much difficulty. But it really shouldn't be the students' onus to both determine they to learn Stata and teach themselves the package. There's a reason we're paying as much as we are to be here!

No doubt my professor would respond to my criticism with the facile assertion that one needs to understand the math underlying econometrics, as opposed to the more practical aspects, like using a statistics package. To some degree, I would agree — economists should know what a BLUE is, for instance. Shunning statistics software in its entirety, however, makes it extremely difficult to analyze all but the smallest datasets, which are uninteresting and much less useful than their beefier brethren.

Needless to say, it takes every ounce of my self-restraint not to stand up in the middle of an econometrics lecture and declare a fatwa.

***

On the other end of the enjoyment spectrum, I have nothing but praise for my first history course at college, The French Enlightenment. It is, by the professor's own admission, more of a "great books" course than a traditional history course, but that's fine with me. The reading list looks promising, and the professor is fantastic.

I just finished René Descartes' Discourse on Method for tomorrow morning. I like René, even if he comes across as mind-numbingly arrogant and egocentric. (His arrogance seems even more pronounced in the original French, though that may have more to do with the fact that 17th century French looks so much more archaic than the English translation than anything about the man.)

I'll write something about my other two courses — Real Analysis and Intermediate Macroeconomics — soon.

Today was my first day of classes for the Fall 2009 semester. I'll write more about them as I find time. For now, I just want to make sure the world knows how much I dislike my econometrics course. It is not a good sign when the professor asks you to show you can compute an arithmetic mean "step by step."

Just for kicks, here's my writeup of the first homework assignment for the course. The wording needs a nip and tuck, and I'm sure there is at least one trivial error that I need to fix before I submit it on Friday morning. The point, though, is to demonstrate just how insane and backwards my professor is. I don't use a calculator (or Mathematica) as a crutch. I use it because I already know how to add real numbers and I want to focus more on understanding the material I haven't understood since middle school.

PDF of my Homework

(If you don't know how to add numbers and need to reference this for your homework, don't forget to cite your source!)

I have devoted so much time on my blog to bashing textbooks I thought it was time to lavish one with praise.

While I cringed at the cash register when I paid for Miklós Bóna's "Introduction to Enumerative Combinatorics," I have few qualms with contents of the (overpriced) volume. Unlike most textbooks, which dumb down the material with colorful pictures and so-called "real-word applications" in cute colored boxes, this textbook dishes the concepts out straight. It is to most textbooks what a shot of espresso is to a double soy chai chocolate cinnamon lemon ginger latte with whipped cream.

The author also has a subtle sense of humor that permeates the explanations, examples and exercises. Take this gem from page 83:

It's not quite as entertaining as a performance by the local improv troupe. It is, however, far better than a dry example involving boxes and tokens of various colors, or an example that tries too hard by including gnomes, unicorns and other fanciful — but entirely unfunny — creatures and features.

As a relatively new text, the book does have a few typos here and there. But these do not outweigh the benefit provided by the clarity of writing, lack of superfluous fluff and colorful style. If the publisher knocked about $150 off the price tag, it would be perfect.

Yesterday I took the second of three exams in my statistics course. While I felt reasonably well prepared for the exam when I sat down to take it, I realized—about three minutes after handing in my work—that I had incorrectly answered the first part of the first question on the exam. Unfortunately, this probably means I also answered the second, third and fourth parts of the question incorrectly.

Of course I have no one to blame but myself. Perhaps I should have triple checked my work. Perhaps I should have done more studying. Perhaps I shouldn't have eaten that cookie before the exam. Still, I feel a certain indignation.

For whatever reasons, I find my professor's lectures do virtually nothing to improve my understanding of the subject matter. (Anecdotal evidence suggests I'm not alone.) Worse still, I find the assigned text for the course (which I blogged about last week) difficult to understand and lacking in depth.

Not one to just give up, I did some research. Professors Charles M. Grinstead (Dartmouth) and J. Laurie Snell (Swarthmore) provide a fantastic introductory probability text online as a free download. I also bought myself a copy of Professor Morris H. DeGroot's (CMU) excellent introductory statistics textbook, Probability and Statistics from Amazon.com. I also owe a big thank you to the folks at MIT's Economics Department, who have published a set of lecture notes for their economics statistics course, 14.30, on OpenCourseWare. Armed with those tools, I have essentially been teaching myself basic statistics and probability, including a raft of material that my professor and the assigned textbook don't so much as allude to.

On the one hand, this approach has provided me with a great deal more material to digest and enjoy than I would have seen otherwise. At the same time, these two—arguably superior—texts do not put the same weight on certain subjects as my professor or the assigned text, which, as I have now discovered, leads me to over study some subjects and under study others.

Which leads me back to my indignation.

It drives me crazy that I will receive a lower grade than other students because I have difficulty following the style of teaching my professor uses, and have taken steps to go beyond the course's purview to master the subject as a consequence. In some sense, I'm being punished for learning too much.

More than that, though, this problem underscores a more fundamental problem with the Bates Economics Department's quantitative course requirements. To their credit, unlike many other schools, our economics department requires students take two quantitative courses—probability and statistics, and econometrics—rather than one course that mixes together probability, statistics and econometrics in a single semester.

But while many people speak highly of the econometrics half of the sequence, I have yet to find a student with the same amount of praise for the statistics half. At least from my perspective, the statistics course would be much, much better if the course had a math prerequisite—single variable calculus is a must for the study of continuous probability distributions—and were a more in-depth study of the material.

To his credit, I suspect my professor chose the awful textbook he did because, unlike many other, more modern texts, it include a fair number of "proofs" of various mathematical properties. Unfortunately, most of these "proofs" aren't really proofs, in a mathematical sense. That, and the text omits some standard mathematical conventions for dealing with probability and statistics. The first few chapters, for instance, don't even mention sets (in the mathematical sense) when treating probability theory.

That and both the exams tested my ability to memorize formulas, not my ability to use the formulas as tools to reach meaningful conclusions, which should be the goal of an economics and statistics course. (By comparison, the exams I studied with on MIT's OpenCourseWare, taken from a 2006 section of 14.30, provided a formula sheet that could easily have represented the answer key for the exam I just sat.)

Writing the course evaluation for this class will be a real treat come April.

Earlier this evening I participated in the annual Bates College housing lottery. The supposedly efficient process was—and, assuming they don't have some brilliant, massive overhaul planned, is—far from efficient. I would also argue the process is also incredibly inequitable. But that's a more subjective question.

Ideally the housing office would simply charge students higher prices to live in the dorms with higher demand and lower prices to live in the dorms with lower demand. I like the idea of some kind of auction. Of course, this would price some students out of certain buildings, creating the possibility of a chasm between students with more money and those with less money. It seems understandable, from the perspective of harmony and equality, that surpluses and shortages are not cleared out with an auction-style mechanism.

Still, the method the school has chosen to mitigate the potential haves-versus-have nots issue is far from satisfactory. Students who value certain rooms more than others can't express their preferences in a meaningful way.

It seems to me that the College should give every student some number of virtual "Bates Points," a sort of virtual currency. The College could easily restrict the exchange and resale of the Points, eliminating or at worst mitigating the possibility of wealthier students exploiting other students without the same financial resources. These points could be redeemable for a variety of scarce resources, housing included.

The College uses completely random lotteries to allocate a number of scarce goods. Students don't receive a parking space automatically: they put themselves into a parking lottery. Seats in popular classes don't go to students who value the seat the most: they're distributed at random to those who put themselves into the pool for the seats. (Granted, the class selection process isn't quite as unjust as some of the other lotteries: student can appeal the outcomes.)

Presumably, some students value having an on-campus parking space more than having first pick in the housing selection process. And I suspect other students value priority in class choices more than having an on-campus parking spot.

We should simply give every student a fixed, equal number of Points at the beginning of each school year. I have my doubts about giving more senior students more perks purely on the basis of seniority—more senior employees in the "real world" generally make more than their more junior colleagues because they have more experience and are thus more valuable—but it wouldn't be too unreasonable to give more senior students more points.

Then, students could use their points in an auction to pick their rooms, parking spaces, classes and other scarce resources. This could all be done online, eliminating the need for an multi-day, multi-hour process that requires compensating an untold number of employees and volunteers. Students could simply log on to the Internet, put in bids on rooms they wanted and repeat. As soon as no one outbids a given student after some sort of waiting period, say 24 or 48 hours, the student receives the room and the number of points they bid is deduced from their accounts. No mad rush, no huge staff to coordinate and pay, and students have a more meaningful way of expressing their preferences. More students receive rooms they want, or rooms closer in quality to the rooms they want.

This system also helps mitigate the problem created by students who choose a room and don't return following semester, depriving others students from a room one of them might have wanted. In this system, if a student decides to take the semester off or goes abroad unexpectedly, the room would just go back on the market. Other students interested in the room could put in bids on the newly available room, and, presumably, it would go to the person who valued it the most.

My system would probably work best if students have a wide variety of ways to dispense their points. If there aren't enough places to spend them, it's easy to conceive of a situation where the market fails to clear because too many students decide to allocate the same number of points to a given room or parking spot. A simple proof of concept software implementation of the idea could be a very good spring break project.

Of course, at least on the housing side, this is really just a symptom of a deeper problem. As one College executive—who shall remain unnamed—put it, many of the residence halls on campus don't meet "modern standards." The brand new residence hall I'm living in this year boasts, among other amenities, network infrastructure that copes with modern Internet use patterns. The heated competition for certain rooms would not be quite as heated if there weren't such a huge chasm between some rooms and others.

Even if every room had casement windows and hand carved walnut furniture, though, this system would still reduce the stress students experience and the number of people required to assign students to one room or another. I hope someone with power reads this.

It has been quite awhile since my last post. I can't say why. I'm no busier this semester than the last, aside from my discouraging hunt for summer employment. It goes without saying that now is not a particularly good time to be in the market for a job in finance.

But I digress. This semester I'm taking economics 250, a course in probability and statistics with economic applications. It's the first of two classes in quantitative methods for economists.

In an effort to calm students' outrage at textbook prices, my professor for economics 250 assigned "Statistics for Economists" (1972) by Ralph E Beals as the textbook for the course. On face, this is an absolutely brilliant idea. As my professor put it, the rules of probability haven't changed in the last 30 years. Thus, it makes no sense to spend $150 on a modern text when an older text, which is ostensibly the same, can be had for less than $20.

(As an aside, the Beals text was made available to students at a price of $17 in the form of a bound photocopy. I'm not sure who in the College's legal department approved this idea. Ralph Beals is still a living, breathing professor at Amherst, which means the textbook is still under copyright and will remain so for 70 years after his death.)

Of course something rather dramatic has changed over the last 30 years that pertains directly to statistics for economists: the price of computing power. According to data from the Dallas Fed, the price of 1 MHz of computing power in the 1970s was somewhere around $368,000 in 1970s dollars. Today, even looking at a relatively expensive computer, such as the new unibody MacBook Pro, the price of 1 MHz of computing power is only $0.41. Not to mention, it's much easier to program using an IDE and C than punchcards.

As such, most modern probability and statistics textbooks (and thus most probability and statistics courses) make extensive use of computers to run simulations and do data analysis.

This aspect of the text is not a problem per se. A professor could certainly augment the text with other material to make sure students leave the class with a working understanding of modern statistics software.

My professor, however, has chosen to subject the class to a hodgepodge of "simulations" in Microsoft Excel. As much as I love Microsoft's spreadsheet application, it's really no substitute for a real statistical analysis environment, such as R, Stata or SAS. And, given the limited scope of the simulations in Excel, students without any experience using Microsoft Excel learn how to use only a small set of relatively less useful tools in the software.

Running simulations can be extremely instructive if they're done well. But when it takes a half hour to setup a simulation with an n=100—a task that might take a few minutes even for the most inexperienced R programming—the simulation loses its pedagogical power. It makes it difficult, for instance, to illustrate the Central Limit Theorem.

In just a few minutes with Mathematica, for instance, I managed to whip up a dynamic, interactive simulator that ran anywhere from 1 to 100,000 Bernoulli trials and plotted the results in real time. I could then drag the n slider from 1 to 100,000 and watch as the PDF of the binomial distribution looked more and more like a normal distribution. And it only took a dozen or so lines of code! It's not rocket science!

I also take issue with the text at a more intrinsic level. Unlike most college-level probability and statistics courses, it does not require that students have even a little exposure to calculus. This confines the text to speaking about continuous probability distributions in vague generalities. Integrals are referred to as "shaded areas under the curve." Important subjects, like the Poisson, Beta and Gamma distributions are, as far as I can tell, not even mentioned in the text.

Once again, the best intentions do not necessarily produce the best results. I might be more forgiving of the text's lack of applications using modern software if my professor were more tech savvy. Unfortunately, he is not. This is not a problem per se. But it is annoying when I have to go out of my way to teach myself how to use R and Stata rather than consulting my professor or the assigned textbook.

Image courtesy of chotda via flickr

Finals week is almost upon me and the rest of my fellow students. In recognition of this fact, our dining services folks have put together a special menu for part of next week to cater to students' desire for comfort food. But I must say, I don't find any of their comfort food very comforting.

Generally, our dining services folks do a reasonably good job of providing reasonably good food. It's not Per Se by any stretch of the imagination, of course. They still haven't served up so much as a loaf freshly baked bread, and most of their attempts at ethnic food do nothing but befuddle my taste buds. Nevertheless, I would argue our dining Commons offers fare considerably better than the food I've tried at other schools.

Here, however, I have to wonder what the director of dining services was thinking. Next Wednesday, for instance, Commons will have a make-your-own burger and quesadilla bar. While I don't object to burgers or quesadillas in general, I have never thought of either plate as "comfort food." I think of them more as convenience food, invented, or at least popularized, by fast food eateries for busy Americans on the go. Precisely the kind of food that has led this nation to become the world's most obese. It's also food I generally equate with stress, not relaxation.

The menu also troubles me because it seems a direct contradiction to the whole "Bates Contemplates Food" initiative that has influenced events on campus all year, following the donation of $2.5 million to the College for the express purpose of improving nutrition. I feel like we should have more arugula and pan-seared halibut, and fewer hot dogs and chicken "nuggets."

So, what would I serve for dinner during finals week? In the event someone with the power to influence dining decisions reads this, I would love a nice French pot roast, braised in the oven for several hours in red wine with aromatic vegetables and a blend of Provençal herbs and spices.

Two weeks ago I sat the second of two semester exams in my introductory microeconomics course. (That the economics department here would not exempt me from EC 101 is another story.) This morning, the grades for that second semester exam went online. As much as I discount grades for their imperfect ability to gauge performance, I did happen to take a look, expecting that the grade would be at or around what I had predicted.

To my great horror, I received but 76 of the 90 possible points on the exam. (That's about 84%, or a B.) In and of itself, that number is not terribly terrifying; worrying, yes, but nothing life threatening. No, I find this number particularly irksome because I have a strong feeling that at least 14 of the 14 points my professor deprived me have everything to do with the bizarre pseudo-math my intro economics class employs. In other words, Bates College's woefully inadequate math requirements for economics courses have the perverse side effect of deflating my grade.

I can understand that not everyone has the opportunity to take calculus in high school. But I can't understand why it's so unreasonable to require anyone taking any kind of economics course to be, at the minimum, concurrently enrolled in a calculus course. In my annoyance with the current economics curriculum, I popped over to MIT OpenCourseWare and took a look at their introductory microeconomics course. I doubt a student could receive anything better than a C on the first problem set without at least a basic understanding of single variable differential calculus.

Some people I have raised this point with argue that, if I'm as smart as I claim to be, using simplified formulas to do numerical analysis in economics should be easy, and thus have a positive effect on my grade. After all, isn't simple addition, multiplication and division easier than differentiating functions?

I can't argue with the fact that it's easier to compute the marginal cost using a formula that takes the sum of two values and divides it by another. While I would scarcely call taking the derivative of a function and plugging in a value difficult, it is at least relatively easier than the previous method.

On the other hand, not using calculus requires me to fundamentally change the way I think about problems. Take the method I must use to calculate marginal cost. Rather than receive a nice differentiable total cost function, I am generally provided a total cost table with a few quantities and their corresponding levels of total cost to the firm. Something that looks like this:

Now, given this table, to find the "correct" marginal cost at 2 units of output, I would take the difference in total cost between 1 unit and 2 units of output and divide that by the difference in production:

(404-401) / (2-1) = 3

To find the marginal cost using the magic of mathematics, I would take my improvised total cost function, differentiate and find the value of the differentiated function at 2 units:

TC(Q) = Q²+400
TC'(Q) = MC(Q) = 2Q
MC(2) = 4

(I realize that this total cost function does not satisfy some important first- and second-order conditions that a total cost function should. I just don't feel like spending the time to cook up a perfect function for the sake of illustrating this point.)

Note that the two methods produce different answers! This is due to the fact that the first "correct" method is essentially just an extremely crude approximation of the second value discovered with basic tools of mathematical analysis. And it's not the only approximation I could use either. The derivative at 2 could also be approximated using (0, 400) and (2, 404), or any number of other points around the one I want the derivative at. Which begs the question: why bother teaching people a method that's only trivially easier, but which introduces such huge differences in understanding and such a huge error in calculation?

Perhaps fittingly, economists generally define irrational behavior as behavior in which an actor makes a systematic error in his or her thinking.

In my desperation, I have considered using B-splines to construct differentiable functions through the points provided in one table or another to free myself from the confines of basic arithmetic. (Apparently even linear functions are too complicated for my microeconomics class!) The only problem with that, of course, is that any answers I find using that method will probably not be equal to the numbers someone would find using the prescribed methods.

I can only hope that intermediate microeconomics, which I've signed up to take next semester, employs some real numerical analysis. That, and I really hope that my potentially bad grade in microeconomics doesn't send to bad a signal to future employers and graduate programs.

When I lumbered out of bed this morning and hobbled to the bathroom to shower, I did not expect to spend ten minutes waiting to bathe. But I did. I spent at least ten minutes waiting idly for the poorly engineered, "environmentally friendly" combination of plumbing and water heating apparatuses to deliver water warm enough not to give me frostbite. This, like the cell phone problem I wrote about on a previous occasion, epitomizes the lack of thought people give to supposedly environmentally friendly ideas. It also underscores just how stupid our supposedly intelligent buildings are.

Even with a specially-designed low-flow shower head, I wasted at least ten or twenty gallons of water waiting for hot water. While I doubt the state of Maine has a shortage of fresh water, wasting that quantity of water seems contradictory to the aim of making a shower more environmentally friendly. It also raises the possibility that the hot water heating system operates inefficiently, and thus wastes energy, if it takes just under ten minutes to feed hot water into the shower.

The solution, as I see it, lies with intelligence. If the water heating system in my dormitory had a bigger, better, faster brain, it could undoubtedly save tremendous amounts of energy without sacrificing my time or my comfort.

I have often wondered, for example, why showers, sinks and baths have such imprecise temperature controls. One must fiddle with several knobs for a minute or so — wasting water and energy in the process — to find that "just right" temperature. On the other hand, a computer controlled water heating system could take a person's preferred water temperature, measured to degree Fahrenheit precision, and summon that person's desired water temperature and flow at the push of a button in much the same way some high-end cars store seat position and climate control preferences in drivers' key fobs.

What's more, if the software controlling the building's water heating system employed a Bayesian classifier, it could eventually predict hot water usage patterns to a reasonably high degree of accuracy and precision. Such a system would also reduce the amount of energy expended heating water, improve people's comfort by always having heated water ready and reduce the amount of water wasted before a person actually takes a shower.

Many environmental advocates object to the amount of lamb imported from New Zealand because the idea of transporting food all those thousands of miles offends their carbon conscious morals. These people, however, ignore the host of factors that make up a products carbon footprint, which, in the case of lamb, actually make imported New Zealand lamb more environmentally friendly than domestically produced lamb. Likewise, people living on the East Coast of the United States would actually act in a more environmentally conscious manner if they bought wine imported from Europe, rather than shipped across the country from California.

People need to think before they think green. These reactionary solutions to environmental impact issues, in many cases, create just as many problems — for the environment and for people's overall welfare — as they create. Not to mention they make me wait an intolerably long time to take a shower.

Over the summer I helped to setup a fantastic web portal for students at Bates College. While it's not quite what I had envisioned, mostly due to security-related restrictions that prevented me from deploying a custom coded content management system, it's nice nonetheless.

Thus, if you happen to be a Bates student, I would encourage you to pay a visit to batescentral.org and have a look around.

The Bates economics department is testing my patience. For some inane inexplicable reason, the department refuses to teach economics with true numerical analysis. It frightens me to think the College will grant someone a bachelor's degree in economics without requiring that same person to have taken anything beyond calculus of a single variable.

Trying to do numerical problems in my economics courses without the aid of such useful tools as demand and supply functions, differentiation, and integration drives me crazy. I feel like I have a learning disability because I struggle to understand the bizarre overly vulgarized "economic formulas" provided by my economics professors. People of all ages deserve to know that the price-point elasticity of supply or demand is simply the product of the ratio of the price and the quantity demanded or supplied at that price, and the derivative of the demand or supply function at that point. It's easier, more accurate and it makes so much more sense!

Not that I blame my professors for my misery. Every member of our economics faculty — or at least every member of our economics faculty I've met — is incredibly intelligent, and, for that matter, probably reasonably good at very high-level mathematics.

Rather, I blame our society's general fear or stigmatization of mathematics for my current predicament. For whatever other inane and inexplicable reasons, people generally seem to possess a strong aversion to math. I had to exercise extreme self-restraint the other day when a fellow student expressed her intention to major in economics and never take another math course again. I would call that course of action moronic, to put it mildly.

I only wish our economics department would ditch its soft math requirements and pile on the prerequisites for economics courses. If some students have to become philosophy majors, so be it. Economics and mathematics go together like garlic and butter.

Call me crazy. (Many have.) I have neither the intention nor the desire to become a chemistry major. I do, however, desperately want to learn more about the subject. In the short term, that means I would really like to take organic chemistry.

But I can't. Yet.

The chemistry department, as it was relayed to me, will only exempt students from introductory chemistry classes if they have earned a sufficiently high score on the chemistry Advanced Placement test, regardless of a given student's ability to actually do chemistry. In practice, this means I am forced to take an extraordinarily boring introductory chemistry class.

At first, I thought it would not be that painful. I doubt anyone has ever suffered from earning an A in a chemistry class. Now, however, I have come to realize that introductory chemistry may sound the death knell for my career in science.

As I write this, I have just completed my first lab report for the chemistry course's lab portion. It took me somewhere between seven and ten hours to perform the calculations and typeset the lab in LaTeX. The chemistry department has a strict "absolutely everything must be typed" policy, and the prospect of inserting equation after equation in Word, using its clunky equation editor was not appealing.

In most circumstances, spending somewhere between seven and ten hours composing an assignment would not merit any mention, especially here. But this lab report was, in essence, a seven page paper explaining how to convert one type of units into another. Take this particularly snappy passage from my lab report:

This kind of lab undoubtedly has pedagogical value for someone who has little or no experience with chemistry. For someone with a strong background in chemistry, however, this kind of explanation is nothing short of excruciatingly painful. To draw a comparison for those without a background in chemistry, the above excerpt would be akin to a calculus student explaining how to multiply two numbers.

What really depressed me, though, was a quick flip through some of the other chemistry-related documents on my hard drive. Compare what I wrote for my college-level introductory chemistry class to what I was writing two years ago in high school:

It's really quite disheartening.

And, really, I owe this pain to Bates' lack of placement tests. As standardized tests go, the AP tests are easily the best I've taken. They do a reasonably good job of gauging how well students learned the material the AP includes in its curriculum. But they do not, nor are they designed to, provide an accurate gauge of how much a student knows about a specific subject in the broadest terms.

Thus, I have become a supporter of placement tests. While I can only speculate, I have little doubt I would be a much happier person if I could test out of introductory chemistry.

For a few blissful seconds, I thought I had true network connectivity on my iPhone here at Bates. For a few blissful seconds.

A few minutes ago, I accidentally opened the WiFi configuration panel on my iPhone. As it happened, my phone showed not one, but two different wireless access points: Bates — the campus-wide WiFi I have complained about ad nauseam for the last nine months — and BatesGuest, something new. In a moment of chimerical optimism, I connected to the aforementioned network, just to see what would happen. To my astonishment, just a few minutes later I could open Safari and browse the World Wide Web on my iPhone without any perceivable restrictions.

Then I tried to check my email.

I pushed the Home button, tapped Mail and waited for that wonderful new mail ping. Ten seconds passed. Then thirty. Then sixty. Then I knew I wouldn't have my cake and eat it too. Bates ILS, doubtlessly in the name of network security, has restricted devices using the BatesGuest access point to TCP/IP traffic only. No FTP. No IMAP. No ZeroConf.

While I understand most users have an inexpert understanding of network security, this kind of sandbox is ridiculous. Not only am I unable to check my email on my phone, I'm also prevented from using a host of incredibly useful tools that necessitate my phone and computer be on the same subnet.

Take Air Sharing, a promising application that allows users to copy files from their Macs to their iPhones by way of a Bonjour connection. I can't use it to, say, save paper by storing PDF readings on my phone rather than carrying around a printed copy. Or the Apple iTunes Remote application. Not to mention the fantastic applications just waiting for Apple's okay. (Provided they actually make it.)

The college campus has spawned a host of revolutionary innovations. Bates' lack of a computer science department notwithstanding, the school's ruthless IT security policy means the next Facebook or Napster will likely be developed elsewhere.

As much as I object to some of the experimentation that happens in dark corners of the campus, college is meant to be a place for people to experiment. Unlike experimentation in the physical world, however, software permits perfect control. So, while a student could decide to scream "Fire!" during the drama department's next performance to, say, test the boundaries of free speech — bearing in mind our nation's current laws — perfect control of our network means no experimentation whatsoever. And that's unfortunate.

I've just moved in to my dorm for the 2008-2009 school year here at Bates. By and large, I like the room assigned to me by the housing office. I have a single in the fancy new yet-to-be-named dormitory. Given the building's youth, the walls remain blissfully whole, the baseboard does not crawl with dust, and the furniture does not look dated or overused. For the most part, it's quite nice.

Unfortunately, however, one of the building's greatest virtues is also its greatest vice.

This new dormitory, following Bates' obsession with environmentalism, has a number of features that make it very energy efficient. The lights in the bathrooms dim automatically after motion sensors detect a certain level of inactivity. A fancy ventilation system cools and heats the building with great efficiency. And the windows have a metallic coating to keep heat out in the summer and keep heat in during the winter.

But the windows' metallic coating keeps out more than just heat. It also reflects the microwaves cell phone's use to send and receive phone calls. Thus, no matter where I stand inside, I have absolutely, positively zero reception on my trusty iPhone. Apparently, this has posed a problem to big businesses as well. On the one hand, they want to sell themselves as environmentally responsible by improving the energy efficiency of their offices. On the other, however, cell phones and their derivatives, are essential to business in the new millennium.

The solution, according to what I've read, is to install special repeaters, leased from the cell carriers, inside buildings to ensure phones work.

But it makes more sense, at least in a building like mine with great WiFi reception inside, to simply give cell phones the ability to make calls over the Internet using a WiFi chipset. T-Mobile already offers a service along those lines, however, users must install a special WiFi access point and use a specific phone designed for WiFi-GSM hand-offs. Carriers could still bill customers for minutes talked over WiFi. I would not object to that. I do, however, object to having absolutely no cell reception inside.

While I have something of an affinity for the English language, I do not have an affinity for the "art" that is literary criticism. Nothing, save perhaps the handful of utterly idiotic errors I made on my second mathematics exam, in my one semester of tertiary education has caused me more grief than my French literature class. To be sure, I feel much more intelligent having read such big names as Baudelaire and Appolinaire in their original unfiltered French. Analyzing their poetry, however, has caused me a great deal of mental pain, albeit mental pain for the better.

Mathematics, on the other hand, is perhaps the most pragmatic subject around. It is, for the most part, utterly useless by itself, but, when coupled with a real world problem — particle physics or microeconomics — mathematics manages to solve big problems without messy ambiguity.

As such, when my French literature course turned its attention to Oulipo, I was intrigued. For Oulipo — whose name constitutes a shortened form of "ouvroir de littérature potentielle" or "the workshop of literary potential" — strives to bridge the divide between literature and mathematics.

Of all the avant-garde literary movements producing bizarre, conceptual writing, Oulipo is, without question, the least insane. The writing created using the various Oulipo constraints, while often entirely nonsensical, is at least founded in good mathematics. Moreover, much of the more nonsensical pieces are hilarious, and the more serious pieces are technically breathtaking.

Georges Perec — one of the more well-known "Oulipiens" — penned La Disparition without using a single "e." But, while one might imagine, out of sheer necessity, a 300 page novel without a single "e" would be a meaningless blob of jibber-jabber, French book critics failed to notice the lack of "e" on first glance. Frankly, I found skimming La Disparition a tad frightening. Had I not known Perec omitted the letter "e," I would never have noticed its absence.

One of the more amusing Oulipo works for the mathematically inclined is Cent mille milliards de poèmes or One hundred thousand billion poems. The printed book itself is no larger than a standard hardcover, which, when first I saw it, made me cast doubt on the whole Oulipo movement. I figured the title was nothing more than superfluous literary hyperbole.

Inside, however, the book contains a series of manipulable strips, each printed with a line of poetic verse. I liken it to magnetic poetry. Granted, unlike those absurd magnetic poetry kits, which manage to combine my hatred of refrigerator magnets and completely ambiguous poetry, any permutation of the lines in Cent mille milliards de poèmes actually makes sense. More importantly, it is actually possible to produce about one hundred thousand billion poems, given the number of interchangeable lines in the book.

Whether Oulipo manages to truly bridge the realms of literature and mathematics, I cannot be sure. Nevertheless, Oulipo is easily my favorite way to play with words in a way founded entirely in mathematics.

(For the French-speakers out there, a visit to the Oulipo website at oulipo.net cannot go amiss.)

Of all the horrible staples of college life, one stands out in my mind as the most obnoxious. Some might focus their attention on the dunderheaded folks who disrupt everyone's sleep by holding loud conversations about meaningless jibber-jabber at 4 AM. Others might (quite erroneously, in my opinion) bemoan the insipidity of the muffins. But neither of those two problems have any relevance or weight when compared to the Internet access here at Bates.

I doubt there exists another system even a tenth as convoluted as the system deployed on the Bates campus. It took me no less than three hours to connect my laptop to the Internet for the first time. Three hours! What is more, had it not been for the serendipitous presence and wonderful benevolence of someone a floor down from me, the process might have taken even longer.

For, to correctly authenticate with the network, I needed to install a security certificate on my computer. But, to obtain the certificate, I needed an Internet connection. It took a second computer, with a functioning Internet connection, to put my computer online. Insanity.

Coercing the software to cooperate, however, is only the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. First, there is the software itself. The Cisco Clean Access Agent, companion software product to the infamous Cisco NAC Appliance, is, at least on the Macintosh, poorly-written, dysfunctional and mildly parasitic. When it fails to do a mediocre job connecting me to the Internet, the Clean Access Agent throws caution to the wind, causing kernel panics, forcing restarts, and crashing iTunes. The software also seems to have trouble realizing it has not successfully connected me to the Internet on some occasions. In the five weeks I have been using the software, I have uninstalled and reinstalled it at least four dozen times because it cannot correctly determine the status of my connection.

Then there is the quality of the Internet access itself. On most days it makes me dream of dial-up. My iPhone, connected to the Internet via molasses-like EDGE and operating on a relatively pokey 600 MHz ARM processor, can usually load pages faster than my dual-core laptop connected to the college network. I suspect the problem is twofold. On the one hand, the college needs to realize that, what with YouTube, iTunes and easy videoconferencing, students use far more bandwidth than the college has. Time to upgrade to a zippier connection, as it were. On the other, the software on the network's routers do an awful job of traffic shaping. I have little doubt that some tiny, self-serving group of people suck up 90 percent of the college's bandwidth downloading reruns of Baywatch after classes end at four.

As if the lamentable software, awful connection quality and convoluted installation procedure were not enough, however, I also cannot connect my iPhone to the campus WiFi network. Despite the fact that no third-party software can be installed on the iPhone now, and the fact that Apple would never be sufficiently insane to allow third-parties access to the kind of low-level APIs an iPhone Clean Access Client would need, the college categorically refuses to allow the iPhone onto the NAC Appliance's mythical "white list." Without any authorization, the phone has no Internet access via WiFi. I particularly like the laconic response the IT department sent in response to my email inquiring into the subject of iPhone WiFi access:

I cannot decide whether the "NO" was intended to be in all caps. Regardless, I would have appreciated the "why" behind the senseless policy.

To me, the fact I cannot connect my device to the network is a breach of good morals. It is as if the college were issuing a ban on filling pitchers of a certain shape with the dormitory tap water. I pay a share of the costs associated with the Internet connection, network hardware and its upkeep, thus I should be permitted to use the connection on any device, so long as it does not harm the group. I hardly see my accessing email, browsing maps of Berlin or reading the New York Times on my phone with the help of the campus WiFi network as a violation of that implicit contract.

I joined the Facebook group, Clean Access is the Bane of My Existence, though, with only 13 members as of now, I doubt it will have much of an impact in the near-term. I almost feel as if more direct, outspoken action is necessary to deal with this most troublesome of problems.

There is nothing quite like the smell of alcohol in the morning. But such is life in my dormitory. Or, perhaps, life in any college dormitory. Needless to say, I continue to adjust slowly to life without the luxury of carpet below my feet. (Though that particular problem will be remedied once I manage to pick out a rug.)

Given the less than vibrant restaurant scene in Lewiston, Maine, it is quite fortunate that the dining services folks here at Bates serve food leaps and bounds beyond what I have consumed on other college campuses. In particular, I have nothing but praise for the Bates muffins. They are simply divine. The scones erred a little on the moist side, and the green tea on offer lacks the kind of intense, bitter flavor I like, but the muffins positively cannot be beat.

My second food-related complaint — the lack of luscious crusty bread — may soon be remedied. The fancy new (and mysteriously air conditioning free) commons building, according to one of the officials on hand for questions, has a magnificent oven capable of producing wonderful, hearty bread in the blink of an eye. What I would not give for a just-baked baguette! It has been weeks now, since I have sunk my teeth into something as scrumptious.

More academically speaking, the fine art we call linear algebra, for better or worse, has not posed nearly as much of a challenge as I thought it would. The study of linear algebra, though, has not made me any more fond of matrices. They still torment me like some kind of awful, pestilent disease. Some might argue that, with a calculator, matrices "aren't that bad." But typing matrices into a calculator, or a computer, for that matter, is a process highly prone to errors.

The opposite holds true for my French literature class. Reading Flaubert, Maupassant, Baudelaire and Apollinaire, and writing two six-hundred word literary analyses in French — all in the space of four weeks — takes a certain amount of effort. Having said that, reading French literature makes me feel very smug. Whether I can justify that smugness, however, is another question entirely.

I feel no need to conceal or contort the following statement: At long last, I have been accepted into a college. And, for that matter, a very good college. For, contained in an envelope, which was itself inside a larger envelope, I received a letter of acceptance from the fine folks at Bates College.

But, to my great dismay, my acceptance to Bates has only served to complicate my life.

I need to re-read the letter, but, from what I understand, I only have until 28 November to make up my mind. That, of course, throws something of a wrench into my seemingly well-conceived plan to simultaneously apply to the University of Chicago, which, in a best case scenario, would have given me a choice between two colleges.

Fortunately, the 28 November deadline would give me just enough time to fly out to Lewiston and give the place a thorough examination, so I would not have to accept sight unseen. At the same time, I might be squandering the opportunity to attend the University of Chicago or even another institution. Of course, I might still choose to attend Bates, even if another school accepts me.

On the whole, though, I feel much better knowing that at least one school thinks me worthy of gracing their hallowed halls of learning.

*Just after I clicked the "Publish" button on Moveable Type, I realized that the title of this entry could be misinterpreted as a made-up verb meaning "to rid oneself of anything to do with Bates." That, however, was not my intention. It was meant to be a play on "Debating."

I have long held the College Board at least partially responsible for my current situation. After all, it is the College Board who sold me a misleading test prep book that duped me into taking the Mathematics SAT Subject test completely unprepared. The first time I took the test I managed a rather unimpressive 650, or something to that effect. Naturally, I took the test again, which meant I had, at that point, paid the College Board twice to take the test and once for their misleading preparatory materials: certainly more than if I had bought a third-party test prep book and taken the test once. I find it difficult to believe that the College Board actually cares about any facet of my well-being.

But, more than the test prep book incident, I have never entirely understood how I managed to score a five on the calculus BC Advanced Placement test, yet failed to break 700 on the mathematics section of the SAT despite having thrice taken the test. I doubt anyone would — or could — argue that integral calculus is easier than finding the area of two circles.

At the same time, however, I have wondered whether that one small blemish on my otherwise gleaming CV spelled my downfall in the ultra-competitive college admissions race.

So, at my interview yesterday with a University of Chicago admissions officer, I asked about the University's policy vis-à-vis SAT scores in the admissions process. According to her, the University of Chicago does not give students' SAT scores a great deal of weight, which initially allayed my fears.

But, in the ensuing discussion, she also noted that most selective colleges strive to have, as she described it, "the best class ever," in order to maintain their sterling reputation. For obvious reasons, it would be difficult to categorically state that the class of 2011 wrote better essays than the class of 2010. A college would have no trouble, however, in qualifying one class as better than the one before it by citing an increase in average SAT scores.

In other words, some colleges deny admission to highly qualified students simply to ensure their average SAT score continues to rise. Not exactly the most well-reasoned logic. It seems to me that an institution would better attract qualified applicants and maintain its reputation for excellence by citing its students' actual achievements. As my interviewer pointed out, SAT scores are, by and large, terrible predictors of a student's ability to succeed.

Though, perhaps I am deluding myself. I am very bitter.

Nothing makes me happier than a coincidence with a positive results. Last week, however, I encountered serendipity's opposite. As I wrote on Friday, the fine folks at the University of Chicago ran out of positions for prospective interviewers who planned to visit the campus in Chicago. That was something of a minor tragedy because I do not think that my unique presence or personality can be conveyed as successfully to someone through the words of an alumnus or alumna.

As such, I settled for the next best option: an alumni interview. I clicked the link on the U Chicago application to request an interview and waited. As luck would have it, I was contacted by one of the University's assistant admissions directors, who, as it happens, will be in the Portland area to do interviews with applicants this weekend. Given that I do not suffer from any severe mental handicaps, I leapt at the opportunity, and, fortunately, I will, in fact, do an interview on Saturday.

Hopefully, the fact that I will speak directly to someone in the admissions office — who may make the final discussion regarding my application — will increase my chances of gaining admission. I have long believed that, had the schools I applied to offered interviews with the actual admission committee, I would have been able to stand out much more easily (and perhaps more successfully) from the mass of other highly-qualified people seeking entrance to America's top schools.

Come December, I shall either be vindicated or, not for the first time, thoroughly disappointed. This time around, however, I do have a fail-proof plan. Depending upon the decisions I receive in December, I may or may not re-apply to Princeton, Pomona and Northwestern and apply, for the first time, to the University of Rochester, Carnegie-Mellon University and, as a last, but very certain, resort, the University of Oregon honors college. The Stanford Sticker Paradox, as I call it — the strange phenomenon whereby the Stanford admissions office loses far more application material than other schools despite their overly persnickety rules about envelops, staples and labels — combined with their less-than-stellar reputation for undergraduate education, when compared to their graduate programs, removed that institution from my list. My interest for Dartmouth has waned to the point that I no longer see the point in applying. I may apply to Yale or Columbia in addition to the other schools, but I have yet to make a decision in that regard.

All in all, the stage looks set for at least some measure of fortune in my future. And, if the Chicago interview coincidence is any indicator, everything may turn out rather splendidly.

About one week ago, I came to the decision that I would apply to the University of Chicago. Apart from the many academic and social benefits offered by the university, the fine folks in the windy city offer a non-binding early action program. That would, in theory, give me two choices come December, assuming that both Bates and Chicago accept me.

Initially, the Chicago application, which has somehow managed to earn itself a reputation for being extremely long and rigorous, presented no substantive challenges. Thankfully, their two short-answer essay questions dispensed with excessively flowery language and esoteric literary allusions designed to project an air of prestige, making the questions a cinch to answer. Some of the long-answer essay topics, on the other hand, seemed overly philosophic. Essay option number three, for example, ends with, "Write a page. Who has written it?" I would share my essay here, but given my Google PageRank, there is a high probability that someone looking to cut corners might find it and make my life even more unpleasant.

Unlike the essays, however, managing to schedule an interview was next to impossible. I called the admissions office yesterday, thinking that I would be able to schedule an interview. But, almost as soon as I had finished stating my purpose for calling, the woman on the other end of the line informed me that the interview schedule was, "completely booked," to use her words.

I thought gaining admission to the University itself would be a challenge. But it seems that even obtaining a coveted on-campus interview is rather difficult.

Admittedly, I do deserve some of the blame. Early action candidates must complete their interviews before 2 November and, given that a great many people apply to the school, I probably should have called to book an appointment as soon as I had committed to applying, rather than three weeks before the deadline.

I do have some hope, though. About an hour after I was categorically denied the chance to interview, I called back and asked the lovely woman to whom I spoke whether it would be possible to put me onto some sort of ad hoc waiting list, should someone fall ill, die or find themselves otherwise incapable of interviewing. She did not commit to the idea, but said she would, "Keep me in mind."

Hopefully someone forgot to schedule an appointment for their flu shot. Otherwise I will have to schedule another utterly ineffective alumni interview. On principle, it does seem rather cruel to wish suffering upon another person, but given the amount of suffering that I have been subjected to, I think a moral exception ought be made.

America is a strange place. Black tie means no tie. "That's hilarious!" has been supplanted by "lol." And college applicants now send formal thank you notes to interviewers and admissions officers. According to an article published today in The New York Times, it has now become common practice for students to send formal thank you cards to interviewers and admissions staff in the hope that gratitude will somehow secure them a position at one of America's top schools.

A thank you note, from what I understand, is meant to communicate one's gratitude to someone who has performed an extraordinary service: something above and beyond the norm. For example, I doubt whether most people send a thank you note to their dental hygienist after a routine dental appointment. On the other hand, I can easily see a delighted couple sending a thank you note to their contractor after he or she exceeded their expectations by completing work ahead of schedule and under budget, a small miracle in the world of remodeling.

I see a college admission officer as doing the former more than the latter. Most colleges charge students anywhere from forty to seventy dollars to put their application into the pool because the people reading the applications — the admissions officers — are paid to look at and evaluate applications. The admissions officers are not going out of their way or doing anything particularly extraordinary by doing their jobs.

Alumni who interview students on a volunteer basis, however, might merit a thank you note. Unlike the admissions officers who are paid to review applications, they take the time out of their schedules to do something more exceptional. At the same time, those people do make the active decision to join their school's alumni association, which is a commitment to do work on behalf of their alma mater. And, of course, college staff or student who conduct interviews fall into the same group as the admissions staff who review applications; they are doing their jobs.

But even if the sending of thank you cards can be justified, the notion that it can make a difference in the application process should alert the public to the need for change. Sending a thank you note is far from the most genuine encapsulation of a person's character and ability.

Test scores or grades can be positively attributed to the applicant. Most application forms force students to vouch for the fact that their essays are indeed their own work, which gives those some degree of provenance. A thank you note, on the other hand, could easily be sent to a school or interviewer in the student's name by a counsellor, a parent or any other party. I hardly think it genuinely differentiates one candidate from another. Just as many extremely intelligent people forget to tie their shoelaces or walk into a shower with their clothes on, some lovely and talented people do not send out thank you notes as diligently as perhaps they should.

If this is not a sign that the system needs help, then I don't know what is.

For years I dreamt of making a fortune, buying a tract of land in an idyllic hamlet and retiring early with assets sufficient to continue funding my addictions to gadgets and designer clothing. That dream has now died. In the handful of weeks that I have spent with more or less nothing to do, I have come to the realization that retirement must be the most exhaustingly dull part of a person's life, except, perhaps, for those people who have a penchant for gardening. But given my aversion to dirt, I doubt I shall develop one.

Fortunately for me, I have the assurance that, with a tad more prudence this time around, I will go to college. And, even more fortunately, I was pointed to Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine. Bates, unlike most other schools of its caliber, has a January start date program, which — if I am accepted — would let me escape from boredom in just a few months. I submitted my application yesterday, though I doubt that will expedite the decision of the admissions committee.

By and large, I like the idea of Bates. From what I have read, they have an excellent array of academic programs and Bates graduates are regularly accepted into the nation's top graduate schools. The weather is a tad chilly during the winter, but I see that more as a good excuse to buy a fancy cashmere coat. Students at Bates also have a high propensity to study abroad, with about 80% of students spending some extended length of time in another country. My only reservation concerns the college's remote location. Lewiston, Maine, while the second largest city in the pine tree state, only has a population of 37,000. I have warmed to the idea of life in rural Maine since Bates was first proposed to me. Still, I find the idea of life over a hundred miles from the nearest Design Within Reach store or bona fide symphony a little unsettling.

The rural location would be far more tolerable if the railway system in the Northeast were less disorganized. From what I understand, everything south of Portland, Maine is very well-connected. It would be fairly easy, for instance, to take the train from Portland to New York City. But traveling to Portland from any other city in Maine seems to require a great deal of planning and hassle. More convoluted infrastructure in the United States.

Given that I will not receive my decision before 1 December, I will probably apply to one or two schools on their early-action or early-admission program, just in case Bates does not want to take me. Hopefully life without DWR will not be too unpleasant.

For most of Earth's population, the bad times become a good time to question the existence of God. I, on the other hand, seriously question my belief that no such power exists when everything falls apart. And, of late, no tragedy more horrific has befallen me than my extremely unpleasant and depressing experience with the college admissions process.

As anyone who has even heard my name now knows, I applied, partly out of hubris and out of well-reasoned counsel, to five schools. Initially four of them rejected me outright. But for the last two months I have lived with the faint hope of a spot at Northwestern hanging above my head.

Two days ago, however, that hope became yet more despair thanks to the arrival of one sadly anorexic envelope. It seems that my wit, whimsy and previous penchant for success were not enough even for the purple-tinged folks at Northwestern University to offer me a spot in this fall's freshman class.

Indeed, it is times such as these that I wonder whether or not some omniscient being is exacting his or her revenge upon me. What other force could have conspired to arrange such a terrible set of circumstances?

First I was condemned to apply in a year when every college set a new record for the number of applicants who wished to attend. Then the College Board just happened to incorrectly schedule me for a SAT Reasoning Test, rather than the SAT Subject Test, which prevented me from applying to Princeton early and subsequently diminished my chances of gaining admission there.

After I submitted my applications, every college, save Dartmouth, managed to lose at least one form, with the result that I had to mail them extras, which, for all I know, they never received. I went so far as to pay an exorbitant sum to have my SAT scores sent to schools via express delivery after four of them mysteriously failed to receive them when I had them mailed initially.

Then not one, but four of the schools sent me a flat out rejection. Northwestern, of course, decided to give me a position on their wait list, which also came to nothing.

So, while my piety pale in comparison to the founders of the Creation Museum, I have at least begun to consider reconsidering my belief that no all-powerful being exists. At least my crops were not destroyed by a plague of locusts.

The depravity continues on the college front. I received today, earlier than I had expected, a letter from Pomona informing me that they chose not to admit me. I suppose, at this point, I need to put myself on the "wait list" at Northwestern and see what happens.

On a similar note, I did learn today, in the other physical rejection letters, that most of the schools I applied to had record numbers of applicants this year. What luck! Princeton, just because their statistic was so crazy, had close to 19,000 applicants this year, instead of 16,000 or 17,000 in most previous years.

If Northwestern does not take me, then I really will have a problem.

I thought, when I fell suddenly ill last week, that the worst part of my spring break was over. But, as I so often do, I reckoned incorrectly.

This week also happened to be the week that most of the colleges I applied to delivered admission information. Initially, I was excited. Everyone from the admissions officers from the colleges themselves to friends and family seemed extremely confident that I would be accepted by at least one of the schools that I applied to, if not all of them. But apparently, not even the admissions officers can gauge their insanity.

For I was not only denied admission to my first choice, Princeton, I was also rejected by Dartmouth and Stanford. And Northwestern University decided that I was only worthy of their so-called "wait list."

It would not have surprised me if one or two schools rejected me, however, I did not expect this. Though, frankly, this strange, unexpected and most unpleasant turn of events makes me wonder what on earth the people who did gain admission spent their time in high school doing to gain that admission. Obviously some people had the advantage of being legacy admissions, which, at Princeton and Dartmouth anyway, quadruples one's chance of being admitted. Yet, the entire student body at those schools cannot possibly be composed of legacy admissions. So what did those other students do? How much can one person possibly accomplish in four years? My activities résumé alone is three very detailed pages long!

Perhaps the admissions committee at Pomona has some sense of sanity. For the sake of my own sanity, I desperately hope I got in.

My dear friends at the College Board released the November test scores today. I did not score well - at least by my exacting standards. Frankly, I find it incredibly difficult to believe that, after taking the infernal exam three times, I cannot manage to push my math score up into the 680-and-beyond range. My critical reading and writing scores both fall within my acceptable range of 700 to 800 points, however, I seem to lack the necessary test-taking prowess to conquer the mathematics section. At this point, though, I have concluded that my SAT score probably will not make or break my college applications; the admissions folks should manage to realize that, if I manage to survive second-year calculus, I can do math.

And therein lies the irony of my situation: I can do differential and integral calculus with relative ease, yet I cannot determine how many possible seating arrangements exist when twelve people sit down to eat at the dinner table. Or, at least, the College Board claims I cannot. This third lamentable score almost makes me want to order my detailed score analysis; I may never take the SAT again, but, aside from one absurd problem with circles, I felt that I correctly answered each and every mathematics question.

While composing a short story for my English class the other day, I serendipitously stumbled upon a line, in the dictionary, written by one Bill Shakespeare. He wrote, in Hamlet:

"Brevity is the soul of wit"

Now, I have come to realize just how true that little quip is. I have spent the vast majority of my time this fall weekend composing essays for college admissions. The first essay, for the Common Application, remains incomplete after nearly seven hours of travail. Alternately, it only took me about an hour to write a halfway decent first draft of Princeton's supplemental essay, which brings me back to the brevity.

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that the Common Application essay has proved more difficult to compose because I have such a simple message that I attempt to convey through far too many words. The Common Application essay should comprise some 500 words, as opposed just 300 for the Princeton essay. The essay written with more brevity has more wit. As we might say in math class, QED.

Though, I would also argue that the Princeton essay gives a slightly less vague description of what to write and also provides a tad more in the way of inspiration. The Common Application - a time saver to be sure - has some very open prompts, ranging from, "Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you," to the incredibly open, "Topic of your choice." Some might see that as a boon, however, I feel that it, in many ways, detracts from my creativity.

Princeton, on the other hand, provided a number of very interesting quotes to prompt potential undergraduates. I chose the Einstein quote below, which, in a somewhat enigmatic fashion, shall end this entry.

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day."

- Albert Einstein, Princeton resident 1933 - 1955

The amount of homework I have received from my various teachers this year has been quite sporadic. Some weeks I have almost nothing to occupy my weeknights and others I spend hours hunched over my desk pecking away my keyboard or otherwise killing trees with integrals, derivatives, or organic chemistry.

This weekend unquestionably falls into the latter category. I have two rather important assignments, both of which teachers want by Monday. In addition, this weekend is the last weekend before most colleges - including my top choice, Princeton - have their early application deadlines.

When first I realized how inopportune this timing was, I thought, "This can't be an accident." After all, my entertaining, though simultaneously benevolent-menevolent, chemistry teacher, does seem like the type of person who would choose the most inconvenient time to assign an important assignment.

But, as much as I would like to think that my teachers conspired in some rather grandiose scheme to prevent me from gaining admission to the university of my choice, I must also consider the human element - almost like Dow's new ad campaign. My teachers probably just acted with my best interest in mind, though their eyes, of course.

Earlier today, I took the SAT. I will make my comments brief as I would prefer not to risk having my score canceled, if by some cruel twist of fate the College Board managed to discover that I had posted test details on my website.

In short, the test was very long, very painful, and the writing section completely idiotic. I now believe that the ETS needs to add an option "F" to all of the sentence error questions. In my mind, option "F" should read something like this:

F) The author should completely rewrite the sentence

I have no idea whether these questions come from a consortium of post-doctoarte researchers or a group of inept high schoolers. But regardless of their origins, the sentences need more work than a simple tense change. While I may score well on the writing section, I hope colleges never decide to incorporate it into the admissions process; no college student should write such horrible sentences.

While I object to the principle of standardized testing, as it can never provide a truly accurate gauge of one's aptitude or knowledge, it is no secret that to gain acceptance at virtually any college, one must take several of these tests. So, to prepare myself for the SAT Subject tests, I disbursed twenty-some odd dollars to the College Board for a copy of Real SAT Subject Tests. According to the College Board, this book contains actual, released tests, which the organization administered at one point or another.

The dreaded question nineteen
© Copyright 2006 Joseph Kibe. All rights reserved.

I figured that must have been a serendipitous occurrence. So, after taking the practice World History test (and doing quite well), I bought a copy of Kaplan's SAT Subject Test World History 2006-2007 edition to make absolutely sure that I had a reasonable chance at success when I took the actual test.

After scoring the first twenty questions of the Kaplan book's "Diagnostic Test," I discovered that I had missed about half of them - not exactly stellar. For instance, compare question 19 on Kaplan's diagnostic test with question 19 from Real SAT Subject Tests.

Kaplan:

19) Lingusts would be most apt to trace all of the following EXCEPT:

a) the route of Manila galleons
b) Indo-European migrations
c) the Bantu migrations
d) the path of the Malay sailors
e) Phoenician trade connections

Real SAT Subject Tests:

19) All of the following helped make possible the establishment of European colonies in Africa EXCEPT:

a) the steamship
b) quinine
c) chemical defoliants
d) the telegraph
e) the railroad

(Works cited after the discontinuation)

Whereas I struggled with question 19 from the Kaplan book, eventually answering it incorrectly, I instantly answered question 19 from the Real SAT Subject Tests book correctly.

This has led me to believe that either the Real SAT Subject Test book has absolutely no value whatsoever, or my Math II score was an anomaly and the Kaplan book provides a skewed interpretation of the World History test. I tend to believe the former.