I gave a talk for my group meeting this morning, and got some ideas on what experiments to work on next. It is really nice to finally see publishable work stretching out in front of me. Supposedly I will take my oral exam this fall, where I will show preliminary results and explain my thesis project to a panel of professors. I am also taking my last class this fall, so from there on out it's all thesis work, baby. Incidentally, December would be my hoped-for half-way point, if I can graduate in 5 years (which is on the short side of reasonable). It is weird to think that I have been in graduate school for two years now, half the time I was in college. Ben and I went to renew our rental contract for another year, which makes this house the place I've lived the longest since moving away from my parents.

One of my coworkers is in dire straits. She had surgery to get her wisdom teeth removed last week, which I've had and lots of people I know have had, and in general it is not a big deal kind of thing. But apparently her doctor did not prescribe her antibiotics, so she contracted an infection. She and her husband called the doctor twice to ask about swelling, dropping blood pressure, and he said don't worry about it. She began to feel really awful and have trouble breathing, and had her husband take her to the hospital, where they admitted her with septic shock. I didn't know much about this, but it's much more common in older people and has a pretty scary mortality rate. Her age (she is a grad student, one year ahead of me) worked for her, though, so she is still in the ICU but probably through the worst of it. She'll probably be out of commission for awhile though, and I was so alarmed by this happening because I don't think of wisdom teeth removal as a very serious kind of surgery. But it's scary, and she's a really sweet and fun person so I'm relieved she is probably going to be ok. We can't go visit her yet, though, because she's not really awake (this is what my advisor said, who did go to see her).

I am sort of fumbling through the remainder of wedding planning. I have a bad habit of putting off calls I don't want to make, and a lot of the planning calls have been like that so it's getting to the point where it really wears me down. But there is still some remaining stuff to do, and that's not even counting the things we'll have to do right beforehand. Mika and Devin had really nice wedding favors; they had little packets of seeds with a card on them saying to plant them to remember their special day. And we are dragging 50 people to the middle of nowhere, so it seems important to have something nice to thank them. I can't imagine what though. Ben took care of tuxes while I was in Oregon, and we have all the wedding party gifts now, and the flower girl dress. And chih's bridesmaid dress came in and it looks beautiful; I am really happy about that. I have been terribly remiss about flowers. Mika's bouquets were wildflowers picked the morning before, attached with rubber bands with a ribbon pinned over them, and they were lovely. I can't decide whether doing something like that would be a big stress relief or alarm me when all I could find would be prickly grass. Though I have seen some really nice herbage bouquets.

I think I should not think about wedding stuff when I feel tired or stressed. I feel like I should get most everything done by the one-month mark, which is next Thursday, and then for the month beforehand I would like to feel nothing but elation as it marches closer. In fact, if I buckled down and did the few remaining things that I'm dreading beforehand, that is definitely an achievable goal. Going to other people's weddings does make me more excited about my own. :)

On Saturday Ben and I pushed our way through throngs of graduates and their parents on the Penn campus to go the gym before its closure this week. Then on Sunday, we went to Massachusetts to see his little sister graduate from Smith. It was sort of a lot of driving, and Smith is in the middle of nowhere so we couldn't figure out how to combine it with another trip somewhere without adding a lot of driving and inconvenience. But we got to hang out with a lot of Ben's family, listen to an endless list of names, and hear a very good commencement speech about teaching given by Margaret Edson. It's hard to give a good commencement speech, but hers was very funny, well-written, and touching.

I remember liking my Berkeley commencement speech, which was given by David Gross, because it had a good discussion about what being a scientist means and why we do it. I liked that we had a graduation just for physics, since his advice to us was more specific, rather than 'you are going to do great things!'. It also meant that we only had something like 100 names to sit through, rather than the 900 we sat through at Smith (which is a small college!). A full graduation at Berkeley would have been crazy though.

I have to say though, that academic regalia can be really cool. It is impressive to see professors in various colorful robes, with some sleeves down to the floor and those jaunty octagonal hats. To me a big perk of being a professor would be dressing up in such a ridiculous way as a sign of accomplishment one day a year. I think that at Penn, in physics, I could wear a red and blue gown with a hood and bars in yellow (for science). The whole ceremony of being hooded by your advisor is really cool, too.

PS. LAHS people, do you recall who our commencement speaker was? I was trying to remember but I can't; I just have the guess that it was one of our congressional representatives, Domenici maybe.

I don't know why I have been so terrible at updating recently. Things have been happening, and I think of interesting entries, but I don't manage to write most of them down. I will try to do better at that, mostly for my own sake because I like having a record of things which have happened.

This week was a bit stressful because I had to give two talks, one to my group meeting on my research (which is a lot of preparation but doesn't make me anxious) and one to my nanofabrication class (which was nerve-wracking). The nanofab talk was on a cool subject, using nanowires as radial p-i-n junctions in solar cells and how that's more efficient and cheaper than a planar solar cell of the same material. I was also glad we went early, because some later groups have discussed solar cells or nanowires or VLS fabrication and we got to it first (I say we because it was a joint presentation with another student). I covered the physics in the nanowire talk, and for the first time I felt the power of being able to show complicated derivations and intimidate people into not asking questions. This is a trick professors use all the time, but I generally assume my audience will understand derivations well enough to stump me with questions. Not so with engineers! Being who I am though, I ditched the Bessel functions and spent a lot of time making diagrams so that my content would be as clear as possible.

Oh, and I went to a thesis defense this week, the first I had gone to. It is interesting to see the difference between professors listening to a talk and professors trying to pick at every detail of a talk. By interesting, I mean intimidating and frightening. But it is good to see how it works. Later this year sometime, I will have to give my oral exam, which here consists of a talk about your research so far and what your thesis project will be. No one really fails it but your committee can rip you a new one if they feel you aren't on the right track. I will be trying to get some nice results this summer so that I can wow them into approval.

This is also the worst time of year to be working in my building. Penn is hosting the Penn Relays right now, and the track and field stadium is on the same block as the physics building. The three entrances to the building are partly or completely blocked by booths, lines, toilets, souvenir stands, food vendors, and sometimes loiterers. There are signs all over the building emphasizing that this is not a relays venue and you cannot enter, use the bathroom, or loiter. But it takes forever to get anywhere outside the building, pushing through big crowds. On the other hand, the street outside smells like barbeque.

One of the most exciting things I've done recently was a lab for my nanofab class, where we are learning from someone who does fabrication method research at DuPont how to use ProLith and what it does. It is a simulator for chip fabrication, which allows you to set things like what laser light to use, what kind of resist to use, resist and anti-reflection layer thicknesses, beam exposure, etc. and see whether you would get good line resolution on a chip. Supposedly real people in 'the biz' use this software all the time to optimize processes before bothering to spend zillions of dollars on printing wafers, and if you think about how many layers there are on chip wafers (5-7 is standard I think) it makes sense to optimize it in simulation first. The whole process is very interesting to me, as is the concept of a 'process window'. You want to be able to vary the focus and beam intensity as much as possible and still get nice chips, because this will guarantee a higher yield (since the focus and beam intensity are increasingly expensive to make very consistent). So you not only want to optimize your process to get great results, you also want a big process window because that ensures good yield.

In my nanomechanics class, we recently started talking about scanning probe microscopies (like atomic force microscopy--what I do in research) and cool measurements you can do with them. I am really impressed that someone managed to attach a nanotube to an AFM tip, and attach the other side to another tip, and then pull the tips apart to do a strain measurement. What is really cool is that when you do this on a multi-walled tube, the outer shell breaks first, and then the inner one just slides out because it's only held in by van der waals forces. AND you can measure the friction between tubes using this! They weld the tube to the tip using the hydrocarbon residue that forms from a scanning electron microscope when the beam is focused, which is apparently really hard stuff--on the order of hardness of diamond.

And my research has been boring lately, until today! Another student and I have this chip with electrodes on it, and I did extensive AFM/EFM on it before today, when we dropcasted nanocrystals on it. Now the surface is all crazy-looking, supposedly because it hasn't dried yet, and the images are some of the coolest AFM that I've taken. We'll see how it looks tomorrow!

The amount of work I have in the lab has drastically increased recently. This is mainly because I am the primary atomic force microscope user in our group, and my advisor decided I should be collaborating on more projects. So now I am doing AFM measurements for someone else's project on fluorescing clusters of nanorods, AFM/EFM measurements for a collaborative charge trasnport project, and some miscellaneous fellowship applying and vacuum pump repair. This is on top of the one class I'm enrolled in, in which I recently did x-ray diffraction for the first time ever and chemistry for the first time since high school, and also the one class I'm auditing. Both classes are in the materials science department, that crazy place where no one remembers how to diagonalize a matrix but they all know about principal stress. And I am still working on the cryostat for the AFM... it is slow and disheartening, but if it ever works it will be a font of new experiments that I'll likely base my thesis off of, and once I realized that I had an easier time maintaining motivation for it.

For the last week, all this work has been a big hindrance, because Ben got called for jury duty and was actually selected for a rather nasty case, which he just finished yesterday, so he has been stressed and having to cram in all his homework in off-hours, since his classes didn't stop for jury duty. I was going to say that the upcoming long weekend will be nice for destressing, but then I looked it up and Penn doesn't celebrate Presidents' Day. Fine... maybe we will get all our to-do list done on Saturday of this weekend, and spend Sunday lolling around, drinking tea and reading and cuddling.

This'll be my first semester at grad school not teaching, excluding last summer when I didn't do anything but research. I really enjoy teaching, but it is frustrating to come up against limitations in the curriculum, and frustrating to feel that only by putting in a lot of time can you do a good job. I was at a luncheon about TA issues, and we were in small groups sharing various trials. I mentioned that it bugged me that good teaching requires a lot of time, but I see a lot of other TAs doing just enough to get by, totally uninterested in doing a good job. The other TAs I was talking to were shocked, and asked 'why would you be in graduate school if you aren't preparing to teach?' I had to explain that it's different in the sciences; in the humanities the only real profession for a Ph.D. is professor, but to be a physicist a Ph.D. is just your foot in the door. So it'll be nice to have a little time off. I did get my teaching evaluations from last semester back, which were something like 2 mediocre reviews and 40 of high praise; I feel very happy in my teaching capabilities. Though it would help me further to teach a lecture class. But I'm not preparing for a teaching career anyways.

What I am doing that's a first is taking courses from the materials science department. See, for condensed matter physics my department offers surprisingly few electives, even fewer for me because I took an equivalent course at Berkeley (solid state physics). And I need an extra elective because I skipped out of math methods but still need the same overall number of courses. So this semester I'm taking nanofabrication, and after today I decided to audit nanomechanics/nanotribology. Both seem to have a lot of interesting information that is not taught in physics classes because it is 'trivial consequences', like how temperature affects x-ray diffraction or why resistance is so different at small scales. It is a little silly, though, how much they avoid talking about quantum mechanics directly, and it is weird to me that anyone in a graduate physical science program would not be familiar with the Pauli exclusion principle. Another bonus, though, is that the nanofabrication course actually has a series of labs, which I am really looking forward to.

1. Trying to teach well always results in volunteering a lot of your own time. I and the other physics 50 TA finally got someone to listen about the state of the labs, the undergrad chair, who told us he'd get the department to pay us to rewrite a couple labs, and that if we wrote a statement of problems and suggested solutions, he'd show it around and try to get more faculty-level interest in solving the problem. Well, great, so I'll do a bit more work to try to make an actual difference.

2. There's no avoiding being saddled with someone else's problem project. I had to work with some legacy equipment at LBL, but it had all worked at some point in time so it wasn't so bad. But the legacy project I got here, the cryostat for the AFM, never worked to begin with. It's to the point where I really hate working on it, because so many things consistently go wrong and it's blocking me from getting involved in real science. But I do my best on it and don't give up, and eventually it'll work and my advisor will be happy that I did it. I've managed some fun stuff on the side, like the AFM imaging earlier last month.

3. Taking the initiative is always a good thing. Especially if other people see you do it. Picking up little tasks that everyone benefits from and no one bothered to do makes you look very responsible. This is why I'll be disassembling a vacuum pump later this week to look for an oil leak.

4. Always get back to people promptly, and make decisions as quickly as you can. I am not so great at this, because professors still intimidate me, but I'm trying to do better. In the spring when I was choosing an advisor, I flip-flopped for way to long, and ended up sort of alienating both potential advisors. I've mostly patched over that now with both of them, but I wish I'd handled that better. I will make up for it by not doing that again.

5. Applying for things is not fun but you have to do it anyways. The potential rewards from fellowships or awards are great, and the process of applying is instructive and edifying. On that note, I need to get back to ordering stuff for the NDSEG.

It's nearly the end of the semester. This means that I am finally done with teaching, after having to get a lot of make-up lab students in this week. It also means that I'm done with classes, though the only class I was taking was this seminar. I have a short paper due next week that I'll have to get on this weekend. And then there is research... blah. I learned a lot of cool microscopy techniques this semester, as well as some device fabrication, and had a lot of fun doing mini-projects with that. But my main project, the cryostat for low-temperature AFM, is a big pile of fail. The vacuum is bad and the current theory is that that's causing the cold finger to not get cold. Figuring out why this is happening and how to fix it has taken a lot of time and waiting on materials and machining, and doing it in parallel with everything else has made it really drag on, to the point where I'm just sick of the equipment and hate working on it. But I persevere, mostly so that I can someday finish this project and get one that's actually fun. The low-temperature AFM we would be able to do if this ever succeeds would be very interesting.

And just as I'm writing this, I get an e-mail about needing to specify my classes next semester. I think I'll be taking a course on Nanofabrication, but the course is crosslisted and the two listings sound really different, so I'm trying to find out more about that. And I might take a mathematical physics course... I don't know. I wish I knew whether they were going to teach Advanced Solid State physics next fall (I inquired with the professor and the graduate chair and neither knew). But I shouldn't be teaching, so I should have a lot more time available for research.

I also need to do a couple more fellowship applications, in the 'not very likely but please give me some freaking money' category. The NDSEG is due at the beginning of January, and the GSRP is due at the beginning of February. And of course they have different essay prompts than the NSF. Time for fun!

But I am getting paid to learn about strange and beautiful things, like liquid crystal domains or blinking nanocrystals or quantum dots.

It's fall, which means I'm yet again applying for graduate fellowships. I'm doing three this year: the National Science Foundation one, the National Defense Science and Engineering Grant, and the NASA Graduate Student Research Program. The NSF deadline is Friday, whereas the other two are much later, so I'm working on my application now.

I applied for the NSF and NDSEG fellowships both times that I applied to graduate school, so at first I put off working on them because I had these hyper-negative connotations of endless applications, the horror of writing personal statements, and overall remembering my state of mind when I was writing so many applications. Endless self-scrutiny, endless analysis, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. But in the end, it's $9k extra per year for me if I get one, and it's more money for my group because my advisor no longer pays my stipend out of her grant. And for additional motivation, my friend Jen who was a first-year with me was also applying for one, and made me go order a transcript today, and wanted to get together to exchange essays and work on them. So here I am, doing it again.

I have my application materials from last year, so the first thing I did on my essays was to reread my old essays and see what I can reuse. The research history one, there's obviously a lot I can reuse, since I just have to add on the things I've done in the last two years, like that invited talk at SLAC and all the stuff in my nanoscience group here. But my personal statement... man, reading it was bizarre. When I wrote it two years ago, it wasn't even clear if I'd go to graduate school, since getting rejected twice would really be a sign that I had to do something else. So my personal statement was almost a plea: I've got these amazing credentials, and I didn't give up when a lot of people would have and just kept improving myself, can you please let me do what I want now? I applied the first time from a mentality of strength and competence, the second time from perseverance. But now, that whole arc of hope, shame, vindication... it's over. I'm in graduate school, I'm doing what I wanted, and that's it. The narrative arc of my last personal statement has been completely resolved. So what am I doing now? Where am I going with my career?

I ended up rewriting things, though still explaining what happened with graduate school admissions and how I eventually got in, but this time talking more about where I'm going with my research now, the wide opportunities that are open to me, and also a lot about my teaching experiences and the importance of bringing more people in general, women and minorities in particular, into science. I really underestimated last time how much the NSF wants you to talk about this; as a woman I feel weird playing the gender card, but the NSF wants to know exactly how you'll deal with that. So I talked about it more, and hopefully that'll go over well. I need to edit this essay and the research experience one more, and then I need to write a research proposal. I realize now that I underestimated how technical they want that to be when I previously applied, so I'll have to put some more depth into it. It should be interesting to do, though, and thinking about large-scale future projects is really pretty exciting.

I still hate writing these kinds of essays about myself, though.

I am getting a little burnt out on teaching labs. Maybe it's that I have so many more labs to grade now than I did before (due to individual reports instead of group reports), or maybe it's because I don't really like mechanics labs, or maybe it's that it isn't new any more. Certainly a big contributor is that the labs are really poorly written, which they were last year, but now the students are required to finish in two hours instead of getting two days to do the lab report. The labs haven't been modified at all, so they are now poorly written and way too long. Plus with my lab-only students, they have had physics before and done well in it so they complain that the labs are easy but long and picky. I have to agree with them.

So I'm trying something new, where I cut out some of the less interesting analysis sections of the lab and give them a worksheet of problems from this awesome book, Jearl Walker's Flying Circus of Physics. There are four problems, and they have to at least try two, but for any they get correct they get extra credit (the problems are kind of tricky). This should also help give their grades more spread so that assigning letter grades isn't completely arbitrary. It's more work for me, but today they seemed to enjoy it. Making people discuss interesting physics and get into it is the whole point of teaching, right?

There's a fun essay about the demos that Jearl Walker does/used to do here, and some disturbing photos here. He's pretty awesome.

An oft-reviled figure in any denunciation of our contemporary morals is the rabid consumer. Specifically, a consumer who is constantly buying new things, needing the latest version of everything, without any regard for wasted resources, who makes purchases without thinking about utility, just to have more and better stuff. I don't have a lot of stuff, but I am very much this way when it comes to knowledge.

To put this in context, I had a great day yesterday. The AFM that I am supposed to be a user on, and which I need to install my experiment in, finally came back from repairs. I helped install and test it, and we found that it worked. But someone had the idea of testing the magnetic force microscope capability, just for fun, and what do we have lots of that has an interesting magnetic structure? That's right, hard disks. We opened up a very old and defunct computer, whose hard disk proudly proclaimed Apple 1990, peeled off the stickers that said "Do not unscrew" and covered screw heads, and opened the hard drive case. There was the disk, shiny and perfect... and trapped. In the process of getting to said disk, I learned a lot about how hard disks are constructed, largely from poking around while having the wikipedia page open. For example, I didn't know that the read head is kept elevated by a cushion of spinning air, kept in motion by the disk itself. There is a small opening that draws in air from the outside, through a heavy filter, and this is why normal hard drives do not function above 10,000 feet in altitude. Even more interesting was what we learned when we tried to break off a piece of the liberated hard disk to put in the AFM; instead of snapping, the disk bent while making a crunching, squealing sound. It looks metallic, but our hard disk was made out of glass composite coated with a magnetic material. (Most hard disks are some light, non-magnetic material with a thin magnetic coating.) We actually had to perforate it with a screwdriver and a mallet to get a piece off. And it did look pretty cool in MFM, but not as cool as we'd hoped.

That was a blast, but then right after I went to this amazing talk, given by Ian Shipsley of Purdue, about cochlear implants. It was a physics colloquium, and he is a physics professor who went deaf due to chemotherapy and subsequent antibiotics, then had a cochlear implant. The talk covered ear anatomy, kinds of hearing loss, how the cochlear implant works, and gave data about who it's for and why it's so effective. But what was especially interesting to me was the aspect of how the brain processes sound; Shipsley's implant had 10 frequency channels, and when he played speech through that it was just barely distinguishable (though it was extremely distinguishable once you knew what the sentence was, due to what I'd call neuromagic). He also played music as it's heard through ten channels, which was depressing; he played the opening of the Nutcracker Suite, which I think was only recognizable to me because of its distinctive rhythm. But what's impressive is how much processing your brain does, so that for patients who lose their hearing and then regain it this way, the sounds come to sound much as they did before the experience, because of all the correcting their brains do. He related a story of how he ran into someone he'd known from before the hearing loss, right after the implant was turned on. The friend's voice sounded incredibly high, even though Shipsley knew it was a low voice. This happens commonly with cochlear implants, because of the difficulty of getting a strip of electrodes inserted all the way up the cochlea. But when he saw the same person the next day, his voice sounded normal, because his brain had corrected for the different sound. To me this is amazing and fascinating, and I was just riveted by this talk.

It is so... addictive, learning interesting things like this. And I find that almost everything is interesting, when one looks closely. It isn't that it's all I need to be content; it isn't, unless you allow for learning in all its forms, including cooking, flavors, music, building, relationships. Perhaps that's what makes most things rewarding.

Daria, a friend of mine from high school that also went to Berkeley, came out to Philadelphia over the weekend with her boyfriend Simon, at the end of a weeklong east coast trip to celebrate getting a job. It was very fun seeing them; on Saturday night we went out to the Continental Midtown, which is a very cool bar with tasty food, to celebrate Daria's birthday. We went with some friends of Simon's who also live in Philadelphia, including a professor in the computer science department at Penn who was a postdoc with Simon's group at Berkeley. Then on Sunday, we walked around Philadelphia, following loosely the walking tour I have developed for when people visit me. Simon left Sunday night but Daria came with me to Penn yesterday, and we walked around and ate a late lunch at Bubble House, a restaurant on Sansom which I like more and more.

I was talking to Steph last night, who told me she had to get a rabies vaccine because there was a bat in their apartment. I have to admit that bats were not something I thought that civilized people had in their houses, and before I moved here, I also thought it was very unusual to have mice, rats, or roaches in your house. And yet now we have had all three (though no bats yet). When I was a kid, all we had were spiders and the occasional lizard, but maybe that's because we had cats to scare the larger rodents off.

There's been an interesting development in my teaching situation. I am teaching these two lab-only mechanics courses, for students that got a 5 on the AP Physics exam but need lab for some reason. Although last year my students turned in their labs two days after the lab class, now we are supposed to make them turn in their labs at the end of two hours. The labs are the same, so it's just not nearly enough time. Combine that with the fact that these kids have forgotten a fair amount of the physics they learned, and the result is that I don't think they learn nearly as much as when they can take the lab home and just spend an extra hour on it. I brought this up with the professor in charge of the class, and he responded very nicely, saying he agreed with me completely and felt really guilty, but apparently it's a jurisdictional issue and the engineering school will be all bitchy if we give lab-only students too much work. He did say, though, that I could change the content of the labs however I want. Like, if a lab isn't that educational, I could cut it partially or completely and insert something I think would be more edifying. I am still sorting out what I could do with this, though; it's a lot of freedom. What do you wish you had done in physics lab?

( a long and irritating story )

So, long story short, I am teaching three lab sections instead of one, and have a lot more grading that I have in the past. And am still expected to do research. But at least I'm not doing two sections at once.

Something kind of funny happened at my first lab section last night; after I finished explaining grading policy and everything, and told everyone to get started, one of the guys at the station nearest me turns to me and says, "So you're Ben's girlfriend?" I was very surprised and said yes, and then he told me he's an undergrad in the graphics lab Ben works in, and has seen me around. Ben and I wondered if we'd ever end up teaching the same students, and this is probably as close as we'll get.

And apparently last night, when I had fallen asleep and Ben was reading in bed, I rolled over and opened my eyes and glared at him. Ben claims that he said, "What is it, sweets?" and I said, "Bang! Bang!" and rolled back over. I don't remember that, but his telling me has prompted me to randomly interject "Bang!" into our conversations and e-mails today.

I have spent the last two days learning how to operate a helium-3 cryogenic system that my lab owns. It is a really cool system, with a lot of neat engineering involved, and it even allows you to change your sample without emptying the helium-4 and nitrogen reservoirs. Unfortunately, it's unlikely we'll be able to do much science with it soon because there is a nationwide liquid helium shortage, which is making it impossible for much science below 77K to proceed. My lab can't get any, another lab which does almost nothing but millikelvin measurements can't get any, and in fact the manufacturer for our helium-3 system couldn't get any to demonstrate to us how to use the system. It is certainly not a good thing for low-temperature physics, and probably eventually people will all start operating closed systems where the helium is recovered and reused, because the prices will get prohibitively high (it's just another resource we're diminishing). The helium-3 part, actually, is already a closed recovery system; 10 liters of helium-3 is $1300!

I'm really excited because I just found out there's a Jamba Juice opening on the Penn campus. This is something I really miss about California, because it's overpriced but really delicious, so I was more thrilled than you'd really think appropriate for a smoothie place. But I can't wait to go there!

Another second-year graduate student and I are trying to spearhead both restarting the women's organization in the physics department, and having a free cookies and coffee time à la INPA tea at LBL. The INPA tea was every day, with cookies, cheese, crackers, tea, and coffee, and always had at least 5 people. We're starting this once a week, with just cookies and tea available, but I'm hoping that people will show up and thus it will grow. Everyone in this department is so damn approachable, but we don't have that many events where you get to enjoy that.

EDIT: My advisor is giving me a paper to review for Nanoletters. AWESOME!

That's it! I'm done with my first year of graduate school.

Wednesday I had a not very difficult biophysics final (open-note, so anything I didn't remember immediately I had plenty of time to look up). I helped proctor the pre-med physics final... I brought a book to read during the bulk of the test, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. I did not realize in advance that this book is highly pornographic and mostly about sex and drugs (though it makes lots of political and philosophical statements). It's a little weird to be reading a book like that while proctoring, and I was afraid one of the profs would ask what it was or peek over my shoulder. Hmmm.

Party Wednesday evening, then physical therapy Thursday, and meeting with my advisor today. My taking so long to pick an advisor, and actually investigating two groups (going to group meetings, meeting students, everything) seems to have thrown people off and sent mixed signals. I'm a bit disappointed in myself that I waffled for so long on it, but honestly everyone told me that was fine to do if I decided by the end of the semester. So why are there bad feelings now? My advisor seems really cool, still, assuming I can make sure her students like me.

I had a really nice walk this evening with Ben, while he smoked a cigar. We walked up to Rittenhouse Square, which is amazingly green now (finally!) and sat and talked while the sun went down. Philly is a really nice walking city.

I just had the strangest final of my life. And the way I reacted to it... I really surprised myself. Let me explain.

( Read more... )

Things are hectic and I'm getting bad at updating. But the rest of my Berkeley trip was really great!

After having sushi with the two talk organizers Wednesday night and seeing the great co-op that Jessica was living in, I headed up to Berkeley on Thursday. I took a much-needed nap and then went to LBL to chat with ex-coworkers, eventually having sushi with Joao, Gersende, and Bill. I talked some to Armin, who recently had twins, and it was really nice seeing him because when I was there in January he seemed very stressed and freaked out. But now he was a lot more relaxed, having gotten used to the time demands. Also apparently Armin's dad was a visiting professor at Penn this semester, but just went back! I saw his name somewhere and briefly wondered, but it's not a bizarre last name. I saw Hollis for lunch and pie, and spent some time with Daria wandering around and seeing Carmina Burana for free. And I had a drink with Sherri, had sushi a few more times, and went to a big BFC dinner and loup-garous party on Saturday night, replete with Thai food and Max, a German student I used to work with who I really miss. I had brunch with Natalie, which was really enjoyable and awesome, although I wished Juhi could have been there! I saw Ron, though only briefly and in very unpleasant circumstances... I am hoping things start to go better for him soon. Overall, I really did very little other than hang out with people and eat fantastic food, and happily I got enough from SLAC in per diem to cover all that sushi. Bwahahaha.

I read two excellent, very different books on the plane rides there and back. One is a book I'd been meaning to read for a long time, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and one is a book I'd never heard of, John Hodgman's The Areas of my Expertise. I recommend them both, one for interesting social reading, one for 700 hobo names.

Now I have piles of finals. Quantum mechanics final tomorrow, E&M final Monday, biophysics final Wednesday. That's also in order from hardest to easiest, so presumably after tomorrow I'll feel a lot better.

I did it! It went well!

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Overall, I'm really pleased with how things went. I hope I get to do this kind of thing more when I get involved enough in my research group at Penn.

Things are crazy and hectic. I have been working a lot to finish my remaining homework and get my talk ready, and I leave for the Bay Area in about four hours. I still have two homeworks due after I get back next week, and I'm bringing my lecture notes with me because my finals start late next week. I'm pretty anxious about my talk and everything, though probably it will go fine. But this is the first invited talk I've given, rather than a conference talk or a local seminar. Errrgh. After Wednesday I'll be a lot more relaxed.

Class now. Must relax!

Ben got a really great offer from EA to work in LA for the summer. So that's pretty much decided on, and it sounds like we'll try to sublet our office as a bedroom. We don't have a bed in here, but maybe we'll get a futon to try to get someone to pay a little to live here... it may not work because we're a little far from campus. Who knows. I had been doing okay with this, but the finality of it made me upset again. I love being with Ben so much, and since this hit last Friday when I was very unhappy with E&M, I began to see how people can give up careers to be with loved ones. But now it's Tuesday, I still love physics, and I see that this internship will be one more gold star on Ben's resume which will help him get a great job wherever I end up. I assume my choices will be more restrictive, though I suppose it could go the other way.

That invited seminar which I am so happy to be giving is next week! I practiced by giving my talk to the first-year seminar, which was good practice, gave good comments, and made sure that I had finished and practiced my talk at least a week in advance. I would love to have more opportunity to give scientific talks, because I abhor bad ones so much. I was really nervous about it, but overall I'm happy with how things went.

It is nearly the end of the semester, so my last teaching is this week, and I have one biophysics problem set, one E&M problem set, and two quantum problem sets to go. Then finals, which will be both more numerous and more painful than last semester. Oh god, and homework solutions, and grading... *sigh* but at least now the end is in sight.

Btw, the second cervical cancer vaccine shot really hurts!