The four of us stumbled out onto pavement at the Sundarijal bus station after nearly eight hours of walking, knees and feet just on the verge of giving out. That was how 13 days of trekking came to a close, and yet Dawa, Henrik, Adèle and I were all grinning as we high-fived and enjoyed a celebratory coke in a grungy food stall.
The same week that I arrived at Arecibo, the observatory staff began noticing another visitor, a small, black, shaggy dog, clearly struggling to survive in the streets. I have always been a dog lover and couldn’t bear to watch the animal suffer while I had more food in front of me than I could eat. So I began leaving food and water for the dog.
The Board of Directors of the Colorado School of Mines Alumni Association has appointed Nancy Blank as the organization’s director of alumni relations and Emily Milian ’08 as deputy director of alumni relations.
There is nothing that makes you feel quite so German as renting a car, driving the Autobahn, admiring castles in the distance and ending the day at a traditional Bavarian restaurant.
It’s a good thing that back wheels come in pairs. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t be giving this update. Somewhere on the winding highway between Mugling and Kathmandu, the outer left rear wheel dislodged itself and spun off into the darkness towards the Trisuli River far below.
I must begin this update with some words of caution: Beware an 8-year-old Nepali kid named Rahul running around the Internet. If I hadn’t already unleashed him, I have surely done so now, because I helped create a Facebook account for him.
The Sacher Torte is a specialty dessert that Austria claims. It is a type of chocolate cake that it rich, and creamy, and delicious. While I have ordered it in a few restaurants here in the states as well, none can compare to one shared in one of Vienna’s beautiful coffee houses.
After four weeks, I can appreciate why no one has ever been able to design a rover to clean the world’s largest telescope reflector without damaging the sensitive panel material, using harmful chemicals or weighing more than 100 pounds.
This past weekend I was able to cross off a major bucket list item—piloting a plane! A local scientist took me out with a flight instructor and I was able to copilot a Cessna 172 around the island. The views of Arecibo from the sky are absolutely incredible.
Another bus ride from hell marked the beginning of my second and last stay in Sisautiya. I was traveling with Prashant, Rashmi, Gayatri and Baibhav because Deepavali was approaching, and, for the same reason, everyone and their brother were also dispersing to their home villages from Kathmandu for the holiday. What resulted was a jam-packed bus, with people variably standing, sitting and lying in the aisle.
Over the months I’ve been here, I’ve seen some amazing sights, met some incredible people, and have tasted some delicious food! Just a few days ago the school put on a Festival of Nations and it combined all three.
I spent my first day here moving in and exploring the campus. Arecibo is situated on very coarse terrain rampant with sinkholes, hills and valleys. To return to the cabin from the offices I have a stair climb roughly equivalent to climbing Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
I should have known that we would meet in Boudhanath. As the epicenter of the displaced Tibetan community in Nepal and generally all things Buddhist, there really is no more appropriate place for any true Sherpa.
As my time in Austria nears its end, my wonderful friends here are trying to make some of my last moments my best. While eating dinner the other night, I was told to meet them at a cross street at 10:30 the next morning for an adventure I would never forget.
When I first announced that I would be going to the Arecibo Observatory this summer, I was told by many people that I should watch the James Bond movie “GoldenEye.” I had never seen the movie. After all, it came out in 1995 when I was just learning to walk.
Earlier in the semester when things weren’t quite as crazy, I asked a few fellow students what Austrian books they would recommend for me to read. To my surprise, not many books were suggested, but one in particular was mentioned a few times: “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka.
So, a Canadian, a German and an American walk into a medieval Nepali city. No joke, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
The pace of the last week picked up considerably from previous weeks. Last Wednesday I wrapped up my first stay in Sisautiya with the promise that I would return, and I devised a way to avoid the 14-hour bus ride back to Kathmandu.
Each year, select members of Mines’ faculty are recognized at the university’s Faculty Forum for their accomplishments in teaching. As part of this recognition, the alumni association honored two individuals in late April with its Alumni Teaching Award, a $2,500 award that recognizes superior teaching at the undergraduate level over an extended period and provides encouragement and incentive for teaching achievement. Here are this year’s awardees.
This morning starkly contrasted with last night’s comfort. The weather was pleasant; you could sit without sweating and I got one of the best rests since being here. I woke up at 5:30 to similarly pleasant weather, but I felt sick.
I am discovering some things that work and others that don’t. I would really rather let the students learn with hands-on experience, but with a poor computer-to-student ratio and unreliable electricity, that is difficult. I have been trying to come up with ways to create exercises for the students to do semi-independently by following instructions I have written, but that failed quite miserably today even when only trying to have them create a new folder on the desktop.
I was lucky enough to spend Easter Break on a trek through Nepal. It all started with a Groupon I received in my email for a 12-day tour, which included a five-day trek.
It all started with a 36-hour travel period from Austin to Kathmandu, which included a three-hour excursion to see the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque during my layover in Istanbul. Besides commenting that the monuments were breathtaking and the weather excellent, all I’ll say here is that I will have to return some day.
Moises Carreon and Gavin Hayes each receive a PECASE, Corinne Packard and Keith Neeves receive CAREER awards, Mines ranks #1 public university for ROI and more.
R. Bruce Allison
Albert H. Brookes ’36
Carl M. Brown ’87
Kenneth W. Carlson ’42
Anthony F. Corbetta ’48
Terry P. Evans ’77
Virgil R. Friebel PhD ’72
Donald N. Haines ’78
John D. Haley ’48
Walter E. Heinrichs Jr. ’40
Ben H. King ’47
David J. Larson ’78
Michael E. McNamara ’71
Joseph M. Peery ’43
Alexander S. Sabitay ’53
Franklin D. Schowengerdt
James F. Simons ’58
Joseph R. Soper ’44
E. Keith Staley ’35
Charles W. Starks ’42, MS ’47
Albert F. Trites Jr. ’46
Jasper N. Warren ’50
Andy Hoover ’69 fought to save his home from the Lower North Fork fire until the very last second. By the time he was forced to flee, the heat had grown so intense that he couldn’t even raise his garage door, so Hoover drove his truck straight through it as flames engulfed the building.
If you made the transition from high school to Mines in the last 25 years, you may have met Ray Priestley ’79, who regularly travels around the U.S.—usually paying his own way—to speak with high school students about Mines.
Not that Miners are competitive, but when senior Jacob Chadwick spotted a Massachusetts Institute of Technology t-shirt that used a series of formulas to spell out “MIT,” he knew he could do something better for Mines.
The Colorado School of Mines Houston Endowed Scholarship Golf Tournament that teed off on April 4, 2014, was the 14th edition of an event that by the end of the year will have created an endowment of nearly $500,000 that has already generated 23 scholarships totaling $76,000. “We just wanted a golf tournament that would give something back, and it has developed into so much more,” says George Puls ’75, the tournament organizer since its inception.
As is the case with many Nobel Prizes, when news broke on the morning of October 9, 2013, that the chemistry award was going to three distinguished scientists for their respective contributions to the field of computational chemistry, most people didn’t have a clue what this meant. Not so for Mines students, where computational chemistry is integrated into the curriculum to an unusual degree.
