Author: Arim Baek, Email: baeka3@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 03/31/2025

I made soap again to take pictures for my soap-making tutorial. This time, I added aroma oil for fragrance and was able to create a nice soap. I gave the soaps as gifts to my lab members. Until now, I had been focused on making the soap prettier and perfectly transparent. But making it with the intention of giving it as a gift made me put even more care into the process. Seeing them smile as they received the soap filled me with excitement and happiness.

I ran into Jacky at the gym, a classmate from my course. He is an exchange student from Taiwan. He told me that he loves challenging his limits by competing in triathlons and that he trains constantly to prepare for the races. His eyes sparkled as he talked about his passion, and it was truly inspiring to see.
Watching Jacky reminded me of my lab members. They are all people who passionately dedicate themselves to what they truly love and enjoy doing it, and I deeply admire and respect them for that. Thanks to Jacky's positive and powerful energy, I was able to enjoy my workout even more.

I once wrote about how Americans often greet and compliment strangers. However, after talking with Hashim, I realized that not everyone in the U.S. does this. it mainly happens among women! He told me that men rarely exchange compliments with strangers and that this is more common among women. Even though he lives here, he mentioned that compliments between unfamiliar men are not that frequent. Come to think of it, most of the compliments I’ve received were from female students! Still, even small compliments can brighten someone's day, so I decided to make an effort to give them more often!

This week, I spent quite a lot of time working on a team project for my machine learning class. Meeting new people, exchanging ideas, and working together toward a common goal was an pretty good experience. However, since I’m very used to studying alone, it was a bit of a challenging week as I had to deal with issues like coordinating opinions, reaching agreements, and communication difficulties which naturally arise in larger teams. Since I’ve always used to working alone, this is a great opportunity for me to learn how to solve problems collaboratively. It’s also a chance to observe and learn from the passionate attitude that my international teammates bring to group projects.

I successfully converted the URDF to the Proto format used in Webots and was able to load it. Despite many attempts, I still haven’t found the right URDF that fits my goal, so I plan to try building it myself next week.