Columbia’s Science Honors Program

The letter from the Columbia’s Science Honors Program finally came in. I was getting a bit worried that I was dropped from the program. I think I was worried last year as well. The letter usually comes after school has started, but I always forget (I always think the letter comes at the end of August).

This year, a few of the courses were renamed and a few of the courses were dropped. I had to think a bit longer about which course I wanted to take this semester because I’ve taken the courses I really wanted to take the past two years. In my first year, I took Neurobiology and Java. In my second year, I took Eukaryotic Genetics and Genomics and Psychology. So this year, I selected these courses in order or preference:

1. Nano - From science to technology
2. Fossil Fuels & Global Change
3. Environ. Health Sciences & Public Health
4. Graph Theory

I’m only going to be taking one course out of those four choices. The last choice was kind of random (but I think I will most likely get one of my top two choices). The only reason I chose that was because the description of the course seemed interesting:

The graphs to be studied in this course are simply collections of vertices (points) with edges (lines) connecting some of the vertices. We will try to answer a variety of questions about different graphs. Can we draw a certain graph on a sheet of paper so that no edges cross? How many colors do we need to color the vertices so that any two vertices connected by an edge have different colors? If we invite 11 people to a party, can everyone dance with exactly 3 other people? Why couldn’t Euler take a walk around the city of Konigsberg and cross each of its even bridges exactly once? Could Harry Potter do better than Euler? Other examples and topics will include: perfect matchings and the college admissions conspiracy, graphs on donuts and other surfaces, edge colorings, Ramsey theory, the four-color theorm, and the big perfect graph theorm.

The course sounds really interesting, especially the part about the college admissions conspiracy. But I’m not a person that’s really big into graphs. Anyway, I think I’ll most likely be taking Nano. I think I signed up for Nano last year as my second preference, but I got placed into the class of my first preference–psychology. Psychology was actually my favorite course out of all the ones I’ve taken before.

Anyway, let’s see! It’s almost time to wake up early on Saturdays again!

And I just remembered, in December, people are going to be getting their letters about their early action or early decision applications. Everyone at the program is extremely smart–I’m a bit nervous about how everyone will be buzzing about getting into Harvard, Yale, etc. and I don’t know if I’m going to get into the college of my preference.