andy reagan only the interesting stuff

Found

I unknowingly lost my hokie passport today on Harding Ave, but luckily Kristen F found it, and dug the interwebs to find and email me! I just wanted to thank her, and share the story because it made me think about how accessible all this information is... Although I am pretty hard to find without sharing my VT account (on VT-stalk as some people call the vt.edu people-search engine) and without having a Facebook, which I deleted this semester as one more distraction, it was possible to find my email, phone number, address...all with just my name!  I'm proud of my number one google ranking for "andy reagan" searches, and it helped save me $20 (paid for the website for two years!).  I think that some people would worry about having that information accessible, and maybe I'm naive, but I'm really not bothered at all that someone who can navigate the web can look me up, I think that in itself is pretty harmless.

Here's the email correspondence:

K: Hey...
I found your Hokie Passport on the side of the road...
Did you cancel it and get a new one? or do you need it?
Just let me know!

Me: Kristen, thanks so much for taking the time to email me!  If you could drop it off in the lost and found in Squires next time you're near there, that would be perfect.  Thanks again!

K: Sure- no problem... It was on the side of the road on Harding Ave, just to let you know...I have class at 9:30 tomorrow, so I will drop it off either before or after it. By the way, it was really hard to find your email address because you aren't on the Student Look-up thing.Haha anyway, no problem! Should be there tomorrow!

Me: Awesome, and it makes sense that it was on Harding, I live up Harding and bike to class.  Sorry that I was hard to find though, how did you find me haha?

K: Haha well I googled you and found your Linkedin and Twitter but there wasn't an email so then I found your website, but your email address wasn't anywhere, and I couldn't find your Facebook. So I had to creep pretty hard and I found your resume and it had your email. Haha Don't judge. It worked

Me: Wow, I'm impressed!  Yeah I have a really hard semester, so deleted my Facebook cause I would spend an hour a day procrastinating on it lol.  And I'm not sure why my VT stuff doesn't show up.  Sounds like it just became a challenge to find me haha but don't worry I don't judge, I'm glad you could find me!!

K: Haha yup... and that makes sense... I'd hope someone would do the same for me!

Etc...

And I finished my numerical methods HW, so I'm not just procrasting right now either. Check out one cool little code I wrote, it saves me work:

And for that matter, check out some of the cooler code I wrote to do work for me in Number Theory Problem Set 1.

That's all for now, goodnight!

Dishes

Coming back to a messy house made me realize why people clean before they leave, after a long a trip the last thing any of us wanted to do was clean.  The biggest problem was the heaping pile of dishes in the sink...and we were trying to think of ways so that this doesn't happen all the time.  I did all the dishes, and vacuumed the floors, and told Dave and James that was the last time I was doin that shit.  We needed something.

As a sort of joke, I told them what my Dad said he and his roommate in college did when they had the same problem with dishes...they put away everything but on dish per person so if you needed it, you had to clean it.  Dave actually took to that idea, and that's what we decided to do.  After two days, it's been working perfect aka no big pile of dishes yet.

I actually like it a lot now, because rather than having cupboards full of dishes and glasses, there's just one and it's easy.  Here's a picture of our cupboard now, and the delicious venison chili, and a berry pie Emily made.

Lying

I have spent all day today writing essays and filling out applications for research positions this summer.  Perhaps the hardest question (besides the open ended essays) was race.  Wait what did he say? I said race.

The C2B2 (Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels) application contains gender and race as optional questions.  Virginia Tech's Modeling and Simulation in Systems Biology program doesn't ask.  They just have a link to survey that is not part of the application, just for data.  For VT's MSSB, when I filled it out this morning, I chose not to answer.  If I chose to put them in, the truth for both would be Male and White.

Take a look at Tech's equal opportunity statement:

It makes sense to me that the only way to enfore such a policy is to not even look at any of those categories.  Now look at the bottom of C2B2's application:

So, they're committed to equality in education.  But then why ask these (optional) questions in the middle of the application:

They're there to serve the second part of the that statement. "Underrepresented students are encouraged to apply." Well to me, that's nothing short of saying that they have a better chance of getting into the program.  How is that promoting eqaulity between the black female and me, the white male.  She's more likely to get in, based on race.  Definitely not equal.

I'm pretty confident that if I submitted the application as a black male, they probably wouldn't find out.  I mean how would they? Until I got to Colorado and we're all white... And it's tempting, but is it ethical?

Certainly it's lying.  I'm not telling the truth. But is that wrong even if the reasons are right? Those reasons being that if they truly were pursuing equality in education, as a "black male" I shouldn't get extra consideration than the white male.

I'm ready to submit, already requested an official transcript be sent there...and am probably going to not answer those questions.  But who will know?