Welcome to my blog!

Welcome to my study away blog!

A few meta things first.

Why I'm writing my first blog

 I want my family and friends to know what I'm up to. Otherwise my mom will try to call me everyday :). Also, in 5 years, I want to look back and see all the silly things I did.

My writing style

 I'm going for quantity over length of posts (hopefully the quality will still be there). So my posts will be short. I'm not going to write down everything I did, but rather present one or two interesting cultural/sociological/whatever things I learned that day/week. If you know me (which presumably, you do if you're reading this), you probably know I like writing very informally (with lots side comments). Improper grammar/spelling is a guarantee.

...All right more about France!

More about my study away experience. 

Here's where I'm going: 

École Polytechnique, right outside of Paris, France. Ecole Polytechnique's nickname is "X"

Let's do a quick comparison between X and Olin (my home institution)

	Olin	X
Location	Needham, MA, US	Palaiseau, France
Year founded	1997	1794
Number of students	~350 undergrad	2000 undergrad ~700 grad
Types of majors	Engineering	Engineering, Math, Science
Famous alumni	No one... yet!	Nicolas Carnot (X1812): the heat engine/2nd law of thermo guy Henri Poincaré (X1873):he formulated the Poincaré conjecture Benoit Mandelbrot (X1944): Father of fractal geometry Serge Dassault (X1946):CEO of Dassault Group... you know the guys who make Solidworks and cool fighter jets. Joseph Fourier (Faculty): no explanation needed! André-Marie Ampère (Faculty): see above!

This will definitely be an interesting experience for me!

Your job as the reader

...is to ask me questions (Steven, how well do you speak French? Answer: pas mal) ! Post them in the comments.

That's it for my first blog post!