Faces Without Names

It happens to everyone at least once in their life. They are at an event with a friend and then they are suddenly introduced to a large group of new people. You honestly know that there is no way in hell you will remember everyone's names but you pretend to do so. Then after five minutes or so you realize that the only names you remember are those of the last person to be introduced and the member of the group you found most attractive. At the end of the evening when everyone is heading home you think to yourself, "Thank God, there is a chance that I will never see them again , and thus not embarrass myself by not remembering their names."
Well just when you thought the worst was over you run into at least one of the group members in public, and you are not with your friend. Damn they spotted you. Your mind races trying to remember their name, but with no success you resort to saying something along the lines of "Hey how are you?" and skillfully conduct the conversation in a way that lets you avoid using their name.

Well things like this happened to me a few weeks ago. While I was walking from my dorm to flag football practice I ran into someone who knew me. Now since I didn't recognize his face I was almost certain that we had never actually formally met. Well as it turns out we were both members of MAO in high school and he recognized me from there. Needless to say I had no idea who he was because he was not on stage often if at all. After talking to him I got to thinking about just how many people know me because of MAO. I'm fine with it if I am actually friends with the person now and talk to them on a semi-regular basis but it just scares me a little if I don't really know the person.

Classes are going alright so far. French is a lot of work, I am really beginning to wish that I had just taken either Spanish or Portuguese. Learning vocabulary is just taking up way too much time. It is becoming difficult to find time to work on programming or relearning Linear Algebra and Elementary Differential Equations. At least I still have the weekends. Putnam practices start tomorrow [a little late in my opinion but not much I can do about it, so I started my studying a while ago] and it should be interesting to see who will be there. Hopefully it will be more structured that it was last year where the professor really didn't have a plan for what material would be covered at what time. I would really like if my Number Theory teacher ran the practices since he is very enthusiastic and seems to communicate better with students. Sadly however, he is very busy so it is going to be extremely unlikely that he will be running the practices this year. Maybe next year will be different...or so I hope.

As things are now I am still uncertain about what I really want to do over the summer. If I have the choice to choose between attending and REU or and Actuarial Internship (and I hope I have to make this choice later in the year) I am not sure which I would choose. Really I suppose it comes down to which company/companies offer me internships and which REU(s) I get accepted for participation. In terms of internships I only have a list of two companies I would really like to work for, one is a consulting company and the other I like because of its location (yes there are other reasons for liking this company). In terms of REUs I would like to do one in any of the following fields (in order of preference); financial mathematics, stochastic processes and probability, differential equations, and number theory.