For those of you who have already visited the website, I apologize for the barrage of silly ads.

My friend Jared Sleeper and I just launched MarketCapChart.org. The website allows you to chart the historical market cap of stocks over time, a functionality that until now has never been available on the internet for free. With these charts, you can also compare market cap with shares outstanding and historical price, a feature that allows you to highlight when a company has been friendly (Exxon Mobil, e.g.) or unfriendly (Bank of America, 2009 - present, e.g.) to its shareholders. 

The website sprung out of our final project for CS50, Harvard’s introductory computer science course that perhaps has been my favorite class at Harvard so far. To give you an idea of how epic it was, the class culminated in a course-sponsored all-nighter “Hackathon” at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center, complete with pizza at 10pm, Chinese takeout at 1am, and a bus ride to iHop at 5am.  

Reminiscent of Pachelbel’s Canon and demonstrates an issue I have with much of pop music these days: lack of musical creativity

PRESENTING the HarvarDNAnos, representing HARVARD UNIVERSITY in BIOMOD 2011, an international bio-molecular design competition.

http://openwetware.org/wiki/Biomod/2011/Harvard/HarvarDNAnos

Check out the stock trading website I just made for my intro CS class: https://cloud.cs50.net/~evanwu/index.php

Presenting the bioengineering research that my team and I worked on over the summer next Saturday at the International Bio-molecular Design Competition. Here’s a little teaser of the top-secret results (not really) that we shall soon reveal!

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~expose/issues/issue_2011/wu.html

[Monday, May 16, 2011, 10pm]

Hello Corvallis Friends!

I write to update you on my last five months of college and my upcoming three months of summer. My last final was on Friday, and after three days of furious packing and moving, I am now settled into my temporary housing for this week, which happens to be just across a courtyard from the dorm I moved out of just yesterday, the wonderful and will-be-sorely-missed Lionel Hall. Why temporary housing? Because today was my first day of Dorm Crew, whereby I make some money and get free housing in exchange for cleaning dorm rooms and bathrooms. Coincidentally, I was assigned to clean Lionel and its sister dorm Mower, and spent half of the morning scrubbing soap scum out of the very shower that I bathed in all year. 

Before I talk about the rest of my summer plans, I should probably elaborate on my second semester of college. A lot has happened since January, although the semester went by really fast compared to the fall semester. I took four classes: a class about Harvard’s museums in relation to United States history, a class on music history that focused on composers from Beethoven to the present, the second half of my linear algebra and real analysis class, and organic chemistry (with lab), ordered from least overwhelming to most overwhelming. The class on museums was very little work and was taught by a raging feminist who also happens to be a Mormon. She did her best to view every topic of the class, no matter how removed, through the lens of women’s history; it got very annoying. Nonetheless, the lectures were interesting, and I got my fair dose of intellectual blah. I loved my music history class, especially the professor, who was young and fashionable and made a lot of awkward, snide jokes. My math class got harder this semester and more conceptually difficult, but at least I now can prove the Ascoli-Arzelà theorem, and I got the chance to fall in love with Stokes’s theorem again. And then there’s orgo. O-chem. Call it what you will, but future college students, Mr. Kanter was not lying when he said it was hard! Probably the hardest class I have taken in my life, definitely what challenged and grabbed me the most this semester. It’s amazing how many reactions and concepts we learned in 5 months. All the hard work paid off in the end; our professor taught us how to synthesize meth, if anyone’s interested. Har har. But in all seriousness, I really have come to like (love?) orgo. I have discovered that it is equal parts science and art; there really is beauty in figuring out how to plan a synthesis, in being able to imagine a molecule in three dimensions. And if nothing else, this class did a great job of showing off Harvard’s resources— what an incredible troupe of ultra-qualified professors and teaching fellows, and I have never been provided so many practice problems, office hours, review sessions, and sections in my life. I am looking forward to getting my ass kicked by Chem 30 (Organic Chemistry II) next semester. 

So the big question these days is: what are you going to major (we call them concentrations) in? I’ve pretty much narrowed it two possibilities: Chemical and Physical Biology, or Biomedical Engineering. Both have their pros and cons, and I suspect I will be having conversations with some of you about this to get your opinion after I return to Corvallis on August 15. I’m also considering a secondary (minor) in Computer Science, or maybe Economics. I have until November to decide. In terms of post-college interests, I could equally see myself going to grad school in a biophysics, going to law school and studying bioethics and technology policy, or working a couple of years first in “the real world.” 

[continued from here on Tuesday, May 17, 2011, 6pm]

Outside of academics, this past term has been punctuated by several trips to see the Boston Symphony Orchestra (I love Mahler’s 9th so much, and poor James Levine), quite a few formals (Freshman Formal, Eliot Formal, sorority formals, Winthrop Formal…), two fantastic Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra concerts (including a performance of Beethoven’s 9th alongside some 300 student choir singers and four professional opera singers), meeting a British lord (who happens to be my roommate’s personal friend), and finding out that I will live for the next three years in Eliot House, the best house obviously (its has its own endowment!). I continued to work in the Whitesides Research Group, helping a postdoc do research on the self-assembly of macroscopic electrets, and beginning to dabble in using magnetism to detect bacteria (think third-world country applications). Perhaps most importantly, I am now dating literally the sweetest, most gorgeous girl in the world. It doesn’t get any better when you get breakfast delivered before your midterms, when you are taken to the Top of the Hub for dinner on your birthday and are then presented a series of gifts lasting ten days (kind of like the Twelve Days of Christmas), when you have an expert on New York City with whom to explore NYC for a long weekend. Even without any of that, she is the best, she really is. 

So back to this summer. I will be working Dorm Crew for the rest of the week. From today (Tuesday) until Friday, I will be making some 300 beds—woohoo. Over the weekend, I will move into my permanent residence for this summer, a fourteenth-floor apartment overlooking the Charles River. For the first half of next week, I will be going to pre-tour orchestra rehearsals, and then I leave with HRO on next Thursday for Havana, CUBA. Here is our tour performance schedule: 

Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, Directed by Federico Cortese

CIENFUEGOS: Teatro Tomás Terry Saturday, May 28, 2011, 9:00PM

Concert Program: -Piano Concerto No. 1, Tchaikovsky -New World Symphony, Dvořák

In collaboration with the Orquesta de Cámara Concierto Sur de Cienfuegos

SANTA CLARA: Teatro La Caridad Sunday May 29, 2011, 9: 00PM

Concert Program: -New World Symphony, Dvořák

This concert will be with a performance of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Santa Clara, Directed by Irina Vázquez

LA HABANA: Sala García Lorca del Gran Teatro de La Habana Tuesday, May 31, 2011, 8: 30PM

Concert Program: -9th Symphony, Beethoven

In collaboration with the Coro Nacional de Cuba, Directed by Digna Guerra and the Coro de Ópera de la Calle, Directed Ulises Aquino

I am really looking forward to performing Beethoven’s 9th again. It is truly a life-changing piece.

After returning from Cuba, I will almost immediately begin my primary summer activity. I am on Harvard’s team for BIOMOD, which is an international “design competition in which undergraduate teams compete to master control of biomolecules on the nanometer scale.” For 10 weeks, I will be working at the Wyss Institute at Harvard Medical School with a graduate student and three fellow undergrads (all very cool) in an attempt to produce some very neat, very very small, perhaps very useful stuff. I can’t give you more details unfortunately; don’t want to tip off our competition. If you want to follow our team’s progress and read up on what we have been brainstorming about, check out our wiki: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Biomod/2011/Harvard/HarvarDNAnos.

After my work at the Wyss is done, I come home on August 15th-ish! I am actually really sad that I am not home in Corvallis right now, and I am really looking forward to going back. I miss Corvallis and all of you a lot, I really do. 

Sorry there are no photos in this post. Just Facebook-stalk me if you want some visual evidence of my life. Also, I will put up my summer address on a Facebook note— please mail me stuff! That would really help me get through this summer without becoming too homesick. 

I hope you have an excellent start to your summer, and I will see you soon! Thanks for reading!

All best wishes,

Evan

Anonymous asked: Do you have more fun in the Orchestra in Harvard or had more fun in Camerata?
-John Shotton

Camerata. I have a ridiculous story to tell y’all about the conductor of the Harvard orchestra.

This will have to suffice until I find the time to write more:

Anonymous asked: Hi Evan,

Lauren here. Was trying to find out the name of your orchestra and happened along this great blog! And I even made a mention iin it. :). Good luck with your finals. Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving with my crazy family.

Thanks! Your “crazy family” treated me wonderfully this weekend. I am really lucky to know such superb people in the Boston area.