M3
Yesterday, for the first time, I participated in the M3 math modeling challenge. Essentially, it’s a 14-hour challenge where your team of 3-5 people get 3 problems and have to create math models to solve them. Reflecting on the preparation for the competition, we did not do too much. When we did meet in person or virtually, we devoted most of the time to practicing previous problems. Don’t get me wrong, this had some value, but if I was prepping again, I would have spent more time getting to know the software you plan to use for the actual competition, in our case MATLAB, WolframAlpha, and Python. A lot of time on the competition day was wasted due to silly mistakes or actually learning the software (myself included).
As the competition was 14 hours, time choice is a meaningful consideration. You can either wake up early and be done early evening or wake up at a more normal time and work into the night. We ended up choosing a middle, from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., which I think was one thing we did right. Seeing as our local library does not open until 9 a.m., we started the morning on Discord virtually. This first hour and a half was dedicated to reading the problem, creating the solution paper document, and devising a model for the first question.
Around 8:40, we logged off and drove down to the local library, where we would put in a shift from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (including a lunch break of course). For the first hour or so, we just worked on the actual model for the first question, which was by far our best. One thing I did not anticipate was how long it would take to write the write-up for the problems. Having to explain your processes with math terminology in Google Docs is challenging and used a lot of time. Our pacing was also poor for that first question, where we did not finish it entirely until 7 hours had passed. Of course, this was partially because we split up to tackle different problems in subgroups, which I think was also another mistake.
We booked a small, 4-person room in the library for the entire day, just one day before the competition itself, which I guess was some luck to not get boxed out. Anyway, after the library closed at 5 p.m., we went to one of the members of my team’s house to finish the challenge.
It was there that we realized multiple times that our solution to the second one made no sense, and we had to redo it in entirety. That really crunched us on time and forced me to break off and do the entire third solution in an hour and a half. I had to rush the problem because I was also tasked with writing most of the executive summary, which is a summary at the start of the paper. With literally 2 seconds left, we ended up submitting the paper and finishing the challenge using quite literally every second of the 14 hours.
Vacation
With that out of the way, I can finish the stuff about the trip I took now two weeks ago (that’s crazy) to Puerto Rico. The first half of the trip is in “Discoveries P.1”, so make sure to give that a read if you haven’t already.
Day 3:
We woke up early this day to spend a few hours of the early morning in El Yunque, the rainforest in Puerto Rico. We drove the 40 minutes from where we were staying to the elaborate road that winds up the rainforest, and eventually found somewhere to park. It was right next to an observation tower, as shown below, and gave you a beautiful overview of the entire rainforest and for that matter a fraction of Puerto Rico:
We realized there that the trail we had planned on taking was closed and decided to continue driving up the trail to another path of similar length (around 2 miles). By that time, parking had grown scarce, so we had to park around 5 minutes away from the start of the trail. We got out, walked the short distance, and began the hike. I learned El Yunque was completely destroyed in the hurricane a few years ago, and this shocked me. Just in a few years, the rainforest had grown so rapidly that I would not have realized there was a hurricane in the first place. However, learning this made me wonder what the rainforest looked like before. While actually on the hike, my favorite things to photograph were definitely the animals. Below are some of my favorites:
Once we reached the top of the trail and took a short break, conveniently, it started to rain. At first, it was just a light drizzle, but it quickly evolved into a downpour. I had to put away the camera and could not take any more photos, and we also had to hike back 2 miles in the pouring rain. All of our cloths got drenched, but they don’t call it a rainforest for nothing. To make the matter worse, our car seats also got wet, meaning for the rest of the trip we had soggy seats.
We were going to go to Old San Juan that day, but no one was in the mood with soaking socks and cloths. So, we just went back to the resort and relaxed for the rest of the day while it was not raining.
Day 4:
Our last day in Puerto Rico (we left at 7 a.m. the next day), we woke up early and drove down to old San Juan. You would think a Thursday morning would not bring too much traffic, but we could not find a parking spot for over 30 minutes. The streets are crowded and full of pedestrians, which did not help our cause. In the end, since we literally could not get a spot, we ended up using a valet service. From there, we sort of explored the city for an hour or two. Apparently, the city is overrun with wild cats everywhere in the streets and sidewalks. We walked around and ended up going to El Moro, which was this fort built by the Spanish hundreds of years ago to protect the coast. The fort itself is massive, and I’m surprised it only took them 200 years to construct. We walked around the fort for around an hour, and then left and went to have lunch. We went to this unique place that themes their meals around chocolate for lunch. I got a ham and cheese sandwich with an egg on top, which made for a really memorable lunch. Also, on the way out, we got these little homemade chocolates, which were also good.
When we got back, we ended up relaxing in the sun and enjoying the resort for one last time. Having been to nearly every restaurant in the local area, we decided to go back to the place I got the fish tacos on the first day to close our trip.
