Well, grad school has been both an excessive amount of free time and none at all at the same time. It’s hard to think that over two weeks of official classes, not to mention the entirety of the summer courses, have already passed me by. Of course, it’s not like I haven’t truly enjoyed my time so far!
First bit of news: I passed both of my qualifying exams! Since I passed, I don’t care what score I got, and I won’t need to worry about cramming/studying for that test ever again (as unfortunately some of my new classmates are worrying about right now). In fact, our entire summer class passed the first exam, and all but one passed the second, so our year as a whole is off to a good start.
Second: I’ve moved into an apartment with one of my classmates. It’s about two miles from campus, so I’ve been driving in every day, but I’ll be buying a bike in (hopefully) a few weeks, and that will help to mitigate gas expenditures, past when I need to drive to school due to weather or visiting friends or quidditch tournaments. I really like the place we’re living, I have my own room (and it’s set up essentially identical to my old place in East Lansing), and we have a ton of space! Of course, most of that will get filled when we finally get a dining table and chairs, plus an actual TV stand, but for now it just feels open. We even have a fenced-in backyard!
Third: Classes have been going great! While the homework is very challenging, I’ve been keeping up with it and understanding everything, especially when floods of memories from my undergrad courses come streaming back to me (like how to pick the generalized coordinates in Lagrangian mechanics or Einstein notation). While I’ve had my slip-ups (and started my first problem sets late due to slow shipping of textbooks), everything has been going well in my classes.
Fourth: I’m still deciding on my research field. While a month ago I was dead set on experimental nuclear astrophysics, most likely working under the umbrella of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA) and giving me the possibility of doing research potentially back in East Lansing during my graduate studies and afterward, I am less sure of that now. It may just be nerves, especially since I’ve never really worked with accelerators before, or the fact that I would be programming much less and spending more time in grad school, or that I don’t know what I actually want to do. So, my decision has turned into a binary one: experimental nuclear astrophysics, or computational cosmology (focusing on large-scale formation within the universe and the intergalactic medium). Tough decision, but at least I don’t have to decide for a while, though I want to at least get a little started now even if it’s just reading papers.
Finally: I’m going to a wedding this weekend! My friend Carla, whom I met at MDRS, will be marrying her fiancé Mike (whom I met at the shuttle Atlantis launch in May 2010) down in Albuquerque. I bought my plane tickets and reserved my hotel room back in June, so now all that’s left to do is pack and actual get there!
And that’s the past month or two in a nutshell. Like I said, a lot has happened, but I’ve still had time to watch Doctor Who, help invent a new game, peruse the bars of South Bend, play some disc golf, and sleep. All good things.
Inside a Calculator 