Tennis and Football

Tuesday started off in a normal way, I went to my morning lecture, MS&E 220. The professor is pretty entertaining, so getting up for a two hour class at 9am is made less painful. After this I went to Daphne Koller's class. Even though I decided not to take it for credits, I want to get as much out of the lectures as possible. I will also have to glance at the papers through either David or Maureen, or any of the great students in my program that are in that class.

Unfortunately this class runs right into our seminars (12:15pm) which was Brian Naughton's final presentation on the MotifCut paper, which I think I just the greatest thing! It's a new algorithm applied to an old problem (motif finding) that really captures the biological information that the current methods sometimes miss. It's so encouraging to see papers like this produced!

After the seminar was over, we waited for Mark Musen (our 210 professor and a BMI executive committee member) to leave. But we decided to walk ahead anyways. While we're walking, everyone was on their cell phone at one time or another. I snapped a picture of David and Noah on the phone, and Alex in the process of hanging up!!

On Tuesday Marina and Noah and decided we wanted to do team tennis together in the Intramural leagues. We thought it would be best to play tennis and test the waters as to what the best league was for us to join. Marina invited Eugene's (her boyfriend) brother Constantine to play with us as well so that we could meet the minimum size of 4 students. The size required is 4-8 per team. We may or may not have a couple more join.

After lecture I went to coffee with Marc, my fellow Swiss in the Algorithms in Biology course. At first we spoke English, but then made me speak Swiss German, which was actually a good thing since we started off in English. He just pointed out we should be speaking German, and BOOM he started!

I was also in dire need of the latte I had with him, but as it turned out the talk in our course was really interesting! It was given by a Developmental Biology student, Leticia. She's a great speaker, and her slides were great (not just the ones she "stole" from Serafim and George). Hopefully I can consult her for my slides for the class! She definitely set the bar really high.

After class I headed over the MS&E 220 office hours, where the party had already started! I came in and Alex was writing on the board. I swear he's already got like 5 PhDs (which he demonstrated today when he knew all this stuff about previous Nobel Laureates-yay for Andrew Fire and the Kornbergs). After he was done he must have been tired from exerting himself (since he's so convinced he's so old) that he laid his head down on the table. I had to take the picture!

Noah and I just couldn't wait til our 5 pm scheduled time for tennis, so we headed over to the courts earlier. We'll definitely have to play in the stadium at some point! When I first got there, Noah wanted to play mini tennis. He hit 3 easy balls at me, and I missed every one of them. By miss I don't mean they went into the net or out, I actually did not make CONTACT with the ball. It was pretty bad. Once I did, it sounded pretty weird, but I think I was doing better by the end. We played a round-robin tournament, and I sat on the Umpire's chair. Noah tossed me a ball, which I lunged for out of my seat, and I guess I almost toppled down because both Noah and Marina gasped. Noah just said "Umm, Russ"...that would be a great explanation to give our program director! I killed Sarah on the court! Way to go Noah!

He is really good at tennis! He was even giving me pointers on what to do to hit better. Marina is just a little powerhouse. She hits the ball SO hard and it goes in! In high school I was once called the Terminator because every ball that came to me (I was playing doubles) was the end of the point. I would either miss or hit a winner. I need pointers from Marina as well! Constantine is good as well! They are so much more consistent than I am.

After this we headed over to the Ford Center that has a big Gymnastics room. It was pretty cool. We got on the waitlist for Advanced Tennis, but we'll settle for Beginner/Intermediate if we have to. We also signed up for Flag Football! Noah got us on the men's top division. He said "we're really good". He's so funny! We need to put up a sign "now recruiting for Flag Football team Protege" because at the moment, I am Noah's star player, since I'm the only one!

Marina hitting one of her signature winners!

Hitting my serve! I hope my summer coach thinks it's good form, but from the looks of how I'm bent at the waist already, I'm about to hit a ball into the net :(

Noah being an excellent Umpire/Ball Boy during our game! He was even humming circus songs (I think)!!!!