I really like Harvey Mudd College. I feel like I fit in there, and I think I can say pretty assuredly that had I known of its existence when I was looking at colleges, I would be going there right now. The students themselves seem to talk down the campus, but I think it’s beautiful.
The research I am doing is on optical networking problems. It’s very theory intensive, which means that there’s a good probablity I will not write a line of code this summer. I’m not sure I’m too happy about that, which is why I’m hoping maybe I could take the research in a different direction. We haven’t actually decided ‘what we will be doing’ for this summer yet; so far, we have been reading papers on different theories that were proven in optical networking. A typical paper proposes a problem, and then shows that the problem is ‘NP Complete’ which means that it takes a computer a long time to solve. Next week, we’ll be scouring the recent literature about networking to try and find problems that are interesting for us to work on. Most likely, we’ll get a paper out of our work this summer, and hopefully we’ll get published.
The people here are cool. I have been doing my best to make friends, and it has proceeded very well. There’s a decent amount of socialization offered by the school, and I’ve been doing my best to try and make friends outside the program so I can widen the range of potential friendships as much as possible.
I am living out of my parents’ house for the first time ever. I feel like I’m finnally getting to experience what ‘campus life’ is all about, and I have to say that I love it. I am buying my own groceries for the first time ever (instead of just buying for the whole family) and I even purchased my own cup and bowl. I thought about getting some silverware, but for now I’ve just been using a single plastic spoon that I took from the cafeteria. Maybe I’ll get a set or something. 
I am happy at Mudd. I think this will be a good summer and I’m enjoying meeting new people. All the same, I will be happy to come home and see my friends in Cincinnati again.