Oxford admissions = House roompicks (on crack) + Rotation + high stakes

Well, I think the equation in the title says it all.

Technically, there is stuff I can say, but that's going to have to be restricted to private conversations. The title is just to convey some idea of things in terms of Caltech lingo. The amount of PS12ing I've seen in the last several days definitely puts roompicks to shame (by several orders of magnitude).

Now that we're done, I can finally come up for air --- which, among other things, means looking at some postdoc applications and having some necessary meetings before I leave town and (shortly) finishing up a paper my collaborators and I meant to submit several months ago. (It is, in fact, pretty likely that I'll be submitting two papers while I am visiting Caltech.)

I played my role in bringing novel jargon to Oxford admission discussions; this includes such self-explanatory terms as "epic failure" and "upper blah". On occasion, I also found myself yearning to apply a "champ stamp". I timed my interviews using an iPod, which I am told has been traditionally employed for such purposes in Oxford interviews since at least 1512.