Posted in 2013

aaaaand there goes another month. The end of the year is near! If it weren’t for the invention of the calendar, I would not believe it.

But before we start talking about the end of the year.. let’s begin with where we left off. Because a couple days after my last blog post, the TU Delft organised the Master Event for the second time this year.
(http://www.tudelft.nl/en/study/master-of-science/come-en-meet-us/master-event/)

At this event, a lot of student from the TU Delft come to the auditorium to get more information about the master they might want to do. It is mainly used to gain more knowledge about the different choices you can make after you finish your Bachelor.

Since I am in the second year of the Applied Mathematic master, it was my job to inform the students about my master. Which is quite fun to do! Especially when people are already really enthousiastic about math and want to hear more about the job opportunities.

– Oh, by the way! I passed the course Bio Environmental Statisics with a nice grade 🙂 Two more courses left! –

Later in the month november a friend from my rowing crew… (Did I already mention that I am a former rower? Which I have done intensively for 2 years at Proteus-Eretes? Well… now you know)… celebrated his 25th aniversiry with a 25-diner. So, the whole crew went to his parents for a delicious diner and some good wine.  It was really nice to see everyone again, because it is hard to keep in touch when you are studying and having all kind of other obligations.

And some days after that.. we entered the month december.. the last one of the year. The month with the celebration of St. Nicholas, Christmas days, snow (?) and lots of family time.

This year there was (again) a lot of commotion around the whole ‘celebration’ of St. Nicholas. Maybe most of you already know it, but just to give a summary of the situation:

– St. Nicholas is one person and is white;

– He has a lot of accomplices, called ‘zwarte pieten’ and they are ‘painted’ brown/black.

And that is where the trouble starts. I do not want to go into this any deeper, you can choose the side you want to be in.. or just don’t bother at all and leave it be.

The night with my family (+the girlfriend of my brother!) on the 5th of december was a lot of fun. Got some really well thought presents, like a book about mathematics… Always a good gift.

I could go on and tell you about all the other stuff I did.. but I rather share a nice video.. It is about running.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F7T1EGSoMQ[/youtube]

With this video I would like to introduce the end of this post. The last post of 2013. Good luck with making your new years resolutions, but never forget that you don’t need a ‘new year’ to change your habits. If you really want to make a change, start today. Start now.

Hello there!

It has already been a month since the last time I posted something, time really goes fast when you’re “studying”… Well lets see what has been going on lately.. Oh yeah, I have survived another exam period! Which was not that hard to do, just sit and study, but this time I also had to do a presentation for the course Bio Environmental Statistics.

This presentation was about the results you had obtain from a project you had to work on (by yourself). We were with only four people (in the whole course) so everyone got a different project, hence a different data-set since this course was all about statistics (as the course name already tells).
My data-set was about two group of mice, one group consisted of ‘regular’ mice while the other were germ free mice. This means that the latter group could not reproduce (if I am correct). However, all mice had a certain chance of getting a (non-lethal) lung tumor. The idea behind the experiment was to check whether one group of mice would have a higher chance of getting this lung tumor.

First, I must say that this was quite interesting and hard to do! For me, this was the first time I would do a statistical project on my own with a real data set. So you cannot expect neat models and nice answers. After some struggling I eventually had some results for both the groups. The conclusion was that one would expect that the germ-free mice ‘obtained’  the tumor earlier than the regular mice.

This conclusion came from the distribution I fitted to both the data-sets. But before I could fit a distribution to the data-set I had to do all sorts of non-parametric approaches to get a good guess of which distribution would fit best. This was all done in the setting of a current status model.
All together I learned a whole lot and in a few days I will have an oral examination for this course, the exams of my other two courses will be done in January.

More fun (study related) news!

I finally managed to get an internship at the company… TNO. I hope those guys don’t read this, but actually they were my second choice. Last summer I first tried to get an internship at Ortec (finance), but this did not work out… So I was glad I’ve already had a backup plan and had some contact with TNO beforehand.
Most of the time it is not that hard to get an internship at a company. But there are some thing that you might want to think about before you contact a company.

First of all, why do you want to get there? What drives you to work for them and why do you like to do that? After that, when you have send your resume and motivation letter and you do get an invitation for an interview, then keep in mind how the company thinks.
They want to know what their gain is, why would they benefit of your presence? Does your education level agrees with theirs? Do you have any future plans involving them, would you like to work with them when you’re done with your study?
Besides the questions, realize that this interview is just a conversation between you and some grown-up people. The main goal (for them) is to know if you are good enough and will fit in the companies ‘culture’. And for you, well, you have to make up your own plans/reasons why you want/need that internship.

KABLAM

Well I better get back to studying because.. eh.. hmm.. I’ll just open my book and stare at it.

Hello dear reader,

a “few” hours have passed and now I finally have/make the time to create my first blog. Before I continue, let me introduce myself by telling my name.
I am Seb Harrevelt.
At this moment I am still 22 years old, or 1182 weeks old, or 8276 days old. What I really really like to do is to workout/sport, at this moment it is some
combination of running/swimming/cycling. I would also like to let you know that my favorite food is risotto…
Since you already know that I study ‘Applied Mathematics’, you now know almost every (important) thing about me!

What you did not know is that I am in the second year of my master. In general, the first year of the master consists of (self chosen) courses and in the
second year you can do an internship and eventually graduate.
There are some other choices you can make, but most people do this.

At this moment I still need to do two courses, do an internship and graduate (of course). Besides these obligations I am also thinking about my future,
as in what to do after my graduation. This is still some vague idea that I have, where there is no certainty whatsoever. Let’s hope that this changes
throughout the year.

In the semester I follow three courses (yeah, that is one more than I need to do.. but I just like this one in particular). The names of the courses are
Stochastic Processes, Bio Environmental Statistics and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). All together I have 7-8 hours of college, it is really not
that much. On Monday and Tuesday I don´t have any lectures at all!
But that doesn´t mean that I have nothing to do, oh no, not even close. In the/my master it is very common to have few lectures but you have to
work a lot on your own/at home.

Later on I will tell you something more about the type of courses they are. For now it is good to know that two of them involve statistics (as you can read..)
and the other (CFD) is about finding/computing numerical  solution to (eliptic/hyperbolic) problems.

Let us look at a picture:

The very last thing that I would like to add to this first post.. is that the second year of the master is fun and scary at the same time. The idea
that you are almost done with your study, almost need to find a job, almost need to leave your home and find one yourself, and so on..
is kinda scary.
But at the other hand, I can start “applying” all the things that I have learned in my study. The knowledge I have gathered is getting really
useful and the things I can do are getting somewhat meaningful. Which is really nice to see.

That’s it for now!

PS: Next Sunday (20th of  October) I will run the half marathon in Amsterdam, last year I almost won the race.. came in second:

Hello this will be my first blog as an ‘Applied Mathematician’!

For now, this is it. Later on, like in a few hours or so, I will add more (useful) text.