So I just arrived back to Atlanta from DC! It was the culmination of a wonderful weekend and the break I needed from the academic environment while being… well, surrounded by academics. So I’ll mainly be writing about that today.

Before that, though: Here’s the week summarized. I ate leftover curry and fried rice for the whole week (and I should switch up my diet) while I attended a lot of talks and thesis defenses, worked on tropical geometry homework (which took longer than I thought it would), and packed up for the DC Sectional. I did neglect a paper that I worked on, but I did make progress on reading the paper on multivariate volume polynomials on polytropes and strengthening my knowledge of the background material. After that (and playing Humans vs Zombies - this year the Humans (including me!) all died), I boarded a plane to Reagan National Airport adjacent to Washington, D.C.

The actual weekend was fantastic! I stayed at a friend’s house, got very familiar with the DC Metro, and attended a lot of interesting talks at the AMS Eastern Sectional, mainly in algebraic combinatorics (so stuff on spanning trees, lattices, shuffles, etc…) with some scattering of number theory and logic. I really liked Jinyoung Park’s invited address on the Kahn-Kalai conjecture also. It was a good break from dealing with papers, emails, and all the rest. I also got to meet a lot of cool professors and some old friends, and the social environment was refreshing.

I also took a free day to explore the DC area and I even got to watch the eclipse while I was there! I did not get any good photos of the eclipse, but I did get some cool photos from the museums and what not! Then I came back to Atlanta (and its very low-quality subway system).

Selfies in front of Howard University (left) and the Lincoln Memorial (right).
Selfies in front of the Cherry Blossoms adjacent to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial (left) and the Washington Monument (right).

This week ahead is a little hectic, but if I play it right, this should be technically be the last week I do any classwork. My main focus for this week is the class project/paper and presentation, and I expect this to take up the rest of the time.