Clark Scholars 2010!

[jsaj79]

<p>I got in!!</p>

[proletariat2]

<p>Hey, I requested to join the group. I hope that’s ok with you all! If you guys need any additional information about Clarks to aid you in your decision-making, please, ask away! It was truly an AMAZING experience - not only research but hanging out with the other Clarkies well into the night. I remember once a bunch of us wandered around campus way after curfew acting shady and attracted the attention of a police officer…Another time, there was a really bad storm and the rain was coming practically horizontally and we decided to take the opportunity to go for a run! nirvanatear and I talked a lot about our favorite mathematicians. He talked about the time he beat Conway himself at Sprouts, which was pretty epic. I also remember how on the first week, he, Torcher, me, and another Clarkie generated (<em>ahem</em>, coauthored) a nonsensical computer science paper, and then proceeded to explain to the girls, who still hadn’t caught on, how it solved the problem of complexity classes P and NP. And how Cido and I made it a goal to memorize all the lyrics of Cake’s Comfort Eagle before the program was over. And presentation day, which was so incredibly bittersweet…ah, good times…</p>

<p>Those of you who got into Clarks and other programs have tough decisions to make, and I encourage you to make the decision you feel is best for yourself. Of course, I think that’s Clarks, but you can decide for yourself. Again, feel free to ask questions!</p>

<p>I’m going to the Weizmann Institute ISSI program in Israel this summer! Whoo!</p>

[Vaeliant]

<p>Still no correspondance. =/.</p>

<p>I think I’ll email them and ask what’s up.</p>

[bks85]

<p>Thanks, proletariat2 for all your help!!
And congrats on ISSI!</p>

[gregariously]

<p>I just got in too! My phone call just came a little less than an hour ago.</p>

<p>Congrats to everybody who made it-- here and other programs.</p>

[proletariat2]

<p>

I don’t really know what you mean by your first question about meeting people outside of the program. I met a few Texas Tech faculty, all my labmates and folks from other labs, the other Clark Scholars, some administrators, and others. There are several group events - actually, one every weekend except the last one! There are trips to a few different places where we went kayaking and hiking and saw an IMAX movie. We also had a weekly seminar during which faculty members presented their research to us. Not all of these were in the sciences; one was in history! We also took care of administrative issues during these meetings, like refilling of meal cards and getting rid of the cockroaches (not really a major problem, since there were only a couple) that inhabited the dorms for the first week. Other group events are all up to you! Much of our time was just spent hanging out, and really we went everywhere together, whether in fragmented groups (more common) or as one huge mass of twelve people (a little rarer). We also spent time with the Welch Scholars, our bitter rivals in the chemistry department. (Ugh.) If one of the Clarkies is from Lubbock and has a car, he/she can drive you around town sometimes if you want to go somewhere. We had two Clarkies from Lubbock last year, and I met both of their families and ate some of their delicious food.</p>

<p>Accommodations are not spectacular but not bad. Two people to a room, community bathrooms but a sink in every room. (I always tried to use the library or Biology department bathrooms when I could. The Biology bathrooms in particular were absolutely pristine! Our bathrooms were sometimes dirty because there was a camp for visually impaired kids down the hall.) The Welch Scholars had amazing rooms which we were very jealous of. The rooms are clean when you enter but you’re responsible for maintaining them. The beds double as couches, and there’s also a desk area with shelves for books. There’s definitely plenty of space in the rooms, and you can alter them however you like as long as you return them to their original state by the end. For example, we had a spare mattress, so we moved it into one of the other rooms so there were three mattresses. Subsequently, that room became our designated party room. (“Party” here does not indicate grinding and getting drunk, but rather doing things like playing epic games of Ten Fingers. However, we used another room as our site for watching things like Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Twilight Zone.) Note that the building you stay in may change, so all this might be wrong. There’s also a piano nearby, if you feel the need to use one, and a TV in a room on the second floor. Oh, and you can use the library whenever you want, and it’s a pretty short walk away.

</p>

<p>From something I PMed to an accepted Clarkie.</p>

[jsaj79]

<p>can anyone compare Clark Scholars to the Garcia MRSEC program at SUNY Stony Brook?</p>

[proletariat2]

<p>More enlightened wisdom from a PM:

[Garcia] produces Siemens/Intel semis at about the same rate as Clark Scholars. (Research at Clark Scholars isn’t necessarily published in a journal, unless you and your mentor decide it should be published in a real journal. That’s the case with me - my mentor is having one of the grad students expand on my research and we’ll be coauthors on the final paper. We also do oral presentations at the end.) The rigor of the program is definitely sufficient for those competitions, as long as you don’t slack off! If you don’t want to work, nobody will make you work. Don’t succumb to temptation. It’s also partially luck based - people in the Carr lab somehow always win awards, just like there are labs at Simons and RSI where people always do well. But I was in a different lab which isn’t known for producing award-winners, and I got Intel semi.</p>

<p>Food. Um. About that. It’s not bad, really. You get unlimited food, since they refill your meal cards whenever you need them filled. But there are a number of locations you can go to get food. One is the Student Union. There’s this AMAZING gelato place there (not authentic, but still good), and then there are a few real restaurants which are pretty good. There’s Sam’s, which has a lot of different options which range from the divine to the atrocious. It also acts as a convenience store, so you can get snack food from there on your meal card and keep it for later. My advice: Stay away from the pizza place and go for either the Mexican or Chinese food. (There are actually multiple locations of Sam’s with slightly different options. One is in the Student Union.) Both are totally inauthentic, but pretty darn good. (Especially the quesadillas!) Then there’s the buffet-style market at Stangel-Murdough. You’ll be eating breakfast here most of the time, and it’s not bad. You can even have ice cream for breakfast if you want. Later meals aren’t particularly good; there isn’t a whole lot of variety and the quality isn’t that good. There are also vending machines in our building if you need a late-night snack and didn’t stock up at Sam’s.</p>

<p>Basically, there is really good food and…not-so-good food. You’ll learn through trial and error, pretty much by the second week. Oh, also, food is NOT covered for Saturday evenings (or was it Sunday?). We usually wandered off campus to eat. Actually, a couple times, we went to restaurants on the Clark Scholars budget. There’s this great sub sandwich place (really a fast-food chain, but only in Texas) called Which Wich? My mentor took me out to eat at a Thai restaurant once - there are plenty of Thai restaurants in the area, actually. And one of the guys in my lab owned a restaurant, so we ate there once.

</p>

[proletariat2]

<p>And yet more wisdom:

Disclaimer: You will sometimes need to put in overtime to do a really good project. Depending on the timing of your tests, you may have to come in during the evening to work. A lot of your paper-writing and lit-searching will be done outside of the lab, in the library. I actually stayed in the lab until 2 a.m. a couple nights. It’s kind of inadvisable to do that generally, but in my case it was necessary. But you will have lots of free time.

</p>

[proletariat2]

<p>Even more wisdom from PMs:

1. The math/science bias isn’t due to the administration or the inherent bias of the program, but rather the students, who are mostly interested in those fields. However, we had plenty of conversations about humanities and social sciences. Actually, we talked a lot about folks like Derrida and Haruki Murakami (Takashi Murakami too, actually…) I also remember having conversations about things from postcolonial thought and imperialism to the aesthetics of music. (Of course, these were all really informal and mostly consisted of mocking the opposite view or whatever view we felt like mocking.) One of the girls was into law; another was in psychology, and she was also a debate girl in her school.</p>

<p>For outside lectures, most of them were in the sciences, but one was in history. Actually, a couple of the science guys took a pretty humanistic view of their research (e.g. disease and society), so there wasn’t a strong bias.</p>

<ol>
<li>Weekday:
Ideally, wake up at 8:00. (Yeah, right.) Get dressed, brush, eat breakfast, shower, etc. Off to work by 8:50!
9:00-5:00 (approximately - it varied a lot!): Research. Varies enormously.
5:00-6:00 As people come back from work, we listen to random music. We play Age of Empires III, I pick up a book on recreational mathematics owned by another Clarkie, we talk about our research progress (what progress? my experiment failed) and where to go to dinner. (Actually, we spent A LOT of time arguing about dinner…)
6:00-6:30 (approximately) Dinner
6:30-anywhere from 11:00 pm to 3:00 am, depending on how much sleep you feel you need: We talk, exercise, watch the Twilight Zone, whatever, rap to Kanye West songs, practice our instruments, play DotA, work on our lit search for our papers, make random excursions around campus or to the library, etc.</li>
</ol>

<p>Weekend:
9:00 Wake up! (Yeah, right.) Get ready.
10:00-6:00 Trip! Many possible locations.
6:00-late at night: Free time</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Ummm…no, actually. Not at all. I LOVED it. We were pretty much like family except that we didn’t argue as much. I’m still in touch with all of them except one who mysteriously disappeared (although I know she got into Stanford). The social part is the best part. We did everything except our research in groups. The last day was so, so bittersweet…</p></li>
<li><p>You can exercise whenever you want, until the rec center closes in the late evening. We usually went a couple times a week. There’s a climbing wall, soccer, basketball, table tennis, tennis courts (bring your own racket, because theirs suck), a track, several rowing machines, treadmills, ellipticals, and stationary cycles, a $8 million indoor/outdoor swimming pool with lanes for real swimming, a slide, a lazy river, fountains, and a hot tub. And I’m forgetting a lot of things. You can check most of the equipment out for free.

</p></li>
</ol>

<p>And about Internet:

You can bring a cable if you have a laptop in your room, or you can go to the library, which always has Internet.

</p>

[azulskies]

<p>go to TASP!</p>

[johnsmith882003]

<p>Hi proletariat2, the program duration is June 21 to August 5, 2010. Do we fly in on June 21 or 20, leave on August 5 or 6? My mom needs to know to arrange our summer vacation. Thank you.</p>

[happysunnyshine]

<p>7 out of 12 finalists are CCers. Wow.</p>

[MissxSilverwing]

<p>@ that lucky person who got into TASP and Clark Scholars (darn you!):</p>

<p>I admittedly don’t know much, but I, personally, would choose TASP. It has such a great reputation and sounds amazing as a program.</p>

<p>Then again, if you feel like your strengths lie in science/math areas, Clark would probably give you a better opportunity to study that. They’re obviously both great programs, so your decision may have to be based on which program best fits your profile - or even which you would rather attend.</p>

[nirvanatear]

<p>@ that lucky person who got into TASP and Clark Scholars:</p>

<p>Go to Clark if you’re science person, TASP if you’re humanities type. If you’re still undecided…go to Clark. You’ll love the intimate environment.</p>

[bestswimmer]

<p>where does the white blond girl from 2009 Clark from? she looks fine…</p>

[proletariat2]

<p>Both the white blond girls are from California, and they are both CC members! I wonder if they would find this awkward…</p>

<p>

Go to Clark if you’re science person, TASP if you’re humanities type. If you’re still undecided…go to Clark. You’ll love the intimate environment.

</p>

<p>Actually, stronghammer93 applied to Clarks for international law.</p>

<p>Clark Scholars is not a science program. The science bias is created by the participants themselves, not the design of the program, and humanities/social science types will do just as well. I would say this: Go to TASP if you thrive on discussions and intense study of existing knowledge. Go to Clark Scholars if you thrive on research and discovery, and discussions are a little more secondary.</p>

<p>

Hi proletariat2, the program duration is June 21 to August 5, 2010. Do we fly in on June 21 or 20, leave on August 5 or 6? My mom needs to know to arrange our summer vacation. Thank you.

</p>

<p>Email them.</p>

[heyycalifornia]

<p>Clark Scholars is not a science program! Proletariat2 is completely right: the science bias is created by the participants themselves. I researched patent law in the summer of 2009, and while I was the only Scholar with a more liberal-artsy approach to the research, and I was 100% supported by the program. My mentor was fantastic, & my research was pretty darn cool.</p>

<p>If anything, the committee behind Clark Scholars would loooove to see a wider range of what the students research. Lots of kids will want to research mathematics, physics, etc. You’ll stand out if you check English, History…PATENT LAW :D</p>

[three3]

<p>I think TASP is almost the same prestige as RSI, and Clark is one level below. But Clark can compete to SSP.</p>

[proletariat2]

<p>I don’t think TASP can be compared experientially to RSI, Clark Scholars, Simons/Garcia, or any other research program. TASP isn’t about research.</p>