Looking back at this semester- my second semester of college- I spent a lot of time on the performing arts. It was cumulatively my largest time commitment outside classes. Both as a reflection for me and as a glimpse into what I did with my time in four months, this post is a review of the semester as a timeline of (mostly) performance arts events or work. February Maryland Minza As soon as I got back on campus after an IAP, I began practice with my dance team MIT Mirchi for the South Asian fusion dance competition season. Maryland Minza...
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(continued from my previous post) Look and Feel Stepping outside of all those info sessions into the pleasant 5°C/41°F weather, the first thing you notice is that CMU keeps its buildings toasty. It’s T-shirt weather inside the classrooms and halls (although, not shorts weather). Speaking of which, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get the true Pittsburgh weather experience because it was down to -14°C/7°F just the week before with a magnificent snow-storm, but I did get to see… snow! This is, in fact, my first conscious memory of being in snow, because the last and only other...
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Apologies for the long blog hiatus for which ‘college applications’ may or may not be a valid excuse. In line with the wholly unanticipated trend of this blog, here’s yet another post that is written immediately after some form of travel; this time, it’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, home to Carnegie Mellon University where I just spent an exciting weekend Turn[ing] Tartan! (N.B. I haven’t received an admissions decision yet, hehe. The purpose of my visit was rather to scout around a university I didn’t know too much about.) Dietrich College Dietrich College is the college of Humanities at CMU. And Dietrich...
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(Disclaimer: there’s a huge body of research about this topic, which I do not pretend to have read; this post is based purely on my experiences and a little bit of reflective analysis. I’m consequently saying a lot about discovery-based learning applied specifically to mathematics.) What is discovery-based learning? The key principle of this learning process is that students discover the material they’re supposed to learn by themselves instead of it being taught didactically as truth. This is fully and intensely collaborative: students must work together to ask questions, make conjectures, present their ideas and arguments to their peers, and...
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open 2017-09-17T16:50:00Z Mandar: https://youtu.be/M0U73NRSIkw Shardul: in re La Campanella: S: is it true that Liszt wrote a lot of these pieces just to show off how difficult they were? M: Hehe kinda M: He was a show-off M: And a virtuoso pianist M: So yea, a lot of his pieces are flashy and hard and stuff M: [La Campanella] It’s crazy M: Especially after like the first minute/minute and a half S: and if I recall correctly he had to rewrite one because nobody could play it M: Idk about that. That could be a myth M: (for example there’s a myth that Bach could “improvise eight parts at a time”) S: ah...
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