On Thursday, I had the wonderful chance to go visit McMaster for the Science Olympics. Quite a wonderful day. It was fun wandering around campus and it was nice getting to see a university that I normally wouldn’t have visited. Actually, I’ve decided that I will go to Waterloo for UW Day on November 5 just because being at McMaster helped me decide between it and UTSC for the honorable third option. And on with our journey.

Now updated with pictures, kindly provided by

The day started with a bus ride all the way outside of civilization to Hamilton. On the way there, me and AdwinYes, grammar Nazis, I know it’s supposed to be Adwin and I. Suck it up. remembered Gabe was at McMaster. It’d be nice to say hi. There was a problem: we didn’t have his phone number. So we tried, at 8 am, to call someone back in Toronto. Perry, Cat, and Ed all had their phones off. Too bad.

Once we got out of the buses, we noticed that it was much colder than Toronto, even though it’s more to the south. We promptly realized that it was probably the lack of pollution and smog that we’re used to keeping us warm. How will I ever survive the harsh Canadian winter without a film of dirty air surrounding my personal space?

Once we registered, the wonderful McMaster Engineering and Science shirts were distributed. I got myself a red engineering shirt with the trademark fireball. Then, we quickly zipped off to the Engineering building for some warmth and to see if anyone turned their phones on yet. No luck. So we went off to the Health Sci building to watch the first exciting event of the McMaster Science Olympics: building proteins out of pipe cleaners and jujubes.

After the rousing display of artistry and craftsmanship, we decided to scope out the competition for our event: Photonics Puzzles. The first piece of information we got was that there were no prisms. I guess those prisms we borrowed were for nothing. The other thing we learned was that there were beam splitters, that were able to split the lasers into two beams. We also discovered the questions for the quiz. We decided to drop by the library before heading to the campus bookstore.

At the library, we discovered that the Internets is only accessible to Mac students. After we asked a student for access, we found everything we needed. Actually, Planck’s constantE = pc, or the energy of a photon is its momentum multiplied by the speed of light, which is how fast photons always move. wasn’t that hard to grasp.

We realized that the directions a student gave to us were not that accurate, as we started going past some residences. We asked someone else and they pointed us to the student centre. We thought following the signs would help. Nope, they lead us to another student who told us to go all the way back and around. We made it there. I thought of getting a tuque for $5. Then I realized that I had no money.

Following that little adventure was lunch and the teacher competition. We loaded our hot dogs and sat in front of the speakers. Once the teacher competition started, we could hear the chants of “Nguyen! Nguyen!” from the speakers. Meanwhile, the commentator was making snarky remarks. In the end, Nguyen failed. Miserably.

The Egg Drop event was held at Hamilton Hall, which I assume is the Math building. Why? Because there was a Math Cafe and the walls were lined with snazzy looking blackboards with stuff like unordered sets, equations, free body diagrams, and tangent graphs scribbled on them.

At our event, we made a star out of the lasers. Yes, a five pointed, unoriginal star. But boy did our poem pierce everyone’s retinas. It was an epic. Geekery abounded. 3.00 x 10⁸ m/s and Gandalf are a force to be reckoned with.

But we didn’t win. None of us won. But we did get to see some people. In the morning, we ran into SarahGoldberg. Student of the month, FOCS leader, SAC person, announcement person, etc. etc., who was like ‘whoa. What are you guys doing here?’ And eventually, we were able to call Cat and call Gabe, who ran across campus to us.

It was nice spending a day at a university. It was kinda like sitting through the spirit assembly today: it only made me want to graduate and get the hell outta here more.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 at 5:35 pm and is filed under School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.