"Most engineers forget that matter is made up of atoms" - said jokingly (one hopes) by the professor in my graduate-level materials science class

I am enjoying the nanomechanics class a lot, especially the lightning coverage of elasticity and deformation we just did, which wasn't a review for me since I had never seen the material before. And for some reason it came to me, as I was looking around and realized for the bajillionth time that the other girl in the class had dropped out and I was the only female there--one of the most valuable things I carried with me out of my childhood was the idea that I could do anything if I worked hard. It sounds really cliche, I know, but it was something my parents told me (mostly) and I heard in Girl Scouts a lot. And I think it accounts for a lot about the speed that public education pre-college runs, because there's a lot of wasted space that isn't filled because parents are afraid of overtaxing their kids and the kids are told it would be too much. It also is a big factor in women's scarcity in science/technology/engineering/math (STEM fields, it's called) because from a very early age, women are told that it is unfeminine to enjoy these things, and women are bad at them. And by the way, both women and men are told STEM fields are really hard and only really smart people can do them. A lot more people could pursue these careers if they weren't pushed away like this, and we aren't doing ourselves any favors in terms of public science education by telling everyone that it's too hard for laypeople to understand even basic science. This is where intelligent design comes from.

I wish I remember the reference, but I saw a study awhile back where they took a group of black students and a group of female students, divided each group into two, and gave them all competency exams. Half the black students were told, "Traditionally black students do poorly on language exams, though that is statistical and doesn't necessary apply to each of you," and the other half of these students were told, "Students who work hard and pay attention can improve exam scores," then both groups took a language test. Half the female students were told, "Traditionally female students do poorly on math exams, though that is statistical and doesn't necessary apply to each of you," and the other half of these students were told, "Students who work hard and pay attention can improve exam scores," then both groups took a math test. I hope you are not surprised by the fact that students who were told that were told that hard work pays off outscored the ones who were demotivated at the beginning. Just being told that you can work to achieve whatever you like, and while some subjects are more work than others none are out of your reach, makes a huge difference.

That actually reminds me of another study, in which students who were told that they were gifted did more poorly than students who were told they must have worked hard to get so smart, especially when given the opportunity to retake an intelligence test and improve. Students told they are gifted tend to view poor performance as a sign they are not gifted, and become discouraged, whereas students told they must work hard only view it as a setback.

I'm not sure where I am going with this, except to say that a lot of the trends in our society are directly correlated to messages we send to young people. When I tell someone what I do and they say, "That is so hard, I could never do that," it makes me kind of angry and kind of sad, and they probably don't believe I'm sincere when I say, "You could."

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.

I had a lot of things to finish up at work last week, like submitting my reimbursement papers for the physics cookies and writing a paper for the seminar I took (which I wrote about spray-on-foam insulation for the space shuttle, which was really interesting). I also had a positive development in the teaching frustration front. I was talking with the other TA for the lab-only class that had me so frustrated, and he had the idea of discussing the course with the undergraduate chair, since it's primarily undergraduates who get screwed if the labs are bad. He was sympathetic, and eventually told us that if we put together some documentation of the state of the lab and ideas to fix it, he would show it around and try to drum up faculty support. What we gave him last Friday was firstly, a page discussing the problems that the labs have (poor instructions, lack of time available, boring lab selection) and their potential solutions (rewrite labs, allow students to work at home, throw away the worst labs and replace them with something fascinating). Our main suggestion here was to make a TA position that only has one section to teach (1/3 the normal teaching load) but has the responsibility of rewriting the labs in a brief, clear, standardized fashion and testing them on the students. We also each rewrote a lab the way we think they should be done, to demonstrate. I really hope that this goes somewhere, because it's fixable without needing work from overworked professors or lab staff, with a little intelligence in how the matter is approached. The TA position we suggested would also be an ideal resume piece for anyone wanting to be a professor, so hopefully some graduate student who is not me will volunteer. Though I would trust myself the most not to botch things, just because I have background in writing. One can't do everything oneself, though.

I still have those damn NDSEG essays to write, but I guess I'll be writing them in New Mexico. Fine, whatever. And I tested the cryostat today with high hopes... urgh, more failure. In July, it got down to 90K, which is good performance. I ordered new copper pieces to take better advantage of the geometry, and in October couldn't get below 150K with them. Most people in my group agreed that my vacuum wasn't good enough, so I spent two months replacing gaskets, eliminating tiny leaks, until I improved it by two orders of magnitude. And today when I add liquid nitrogen... 210K. WTF, science, WTF?? When I return in January, there will be some angry experiments involving dipping copper into liquid nitrogen and measuring the temperature, because I'll be damned if I'm going to try it in vacuum again until I have more insight into what's wrong.

And finally, I am trying to pack today and not forget anything, but it seems that I'm getting sick. Right before flying too, so I can infect everyone on my two planes. Sorry, everybody!

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.

My students are starting to turn in lab evaluations. Since they aren't my personal evaluations, I can peek at them now and see comments about how my students love me but hate the lab. One person wrote along the lines of, "I don't want to be an asshole about this, but these labs are really worthless. If it weren't for Jessamyn I wouldn't have learned anything." And I'm glad they all think I'm doing a good job; I feel confident about my teaching skills. But it pisses me off so much that the labs are like this!

The people who are responsible for them are 2/3 incompetent and disorganized, and even if they did an overhaul I really doubt it would help very much. On top of that, edicts come down from the professors that make things worse, like turning in the lab during class instead of being able to take it home and work on it. And the writeups are just so bad, and nobody takes responsibility. On top of that, there isn't even a discussion section for the course, just lecture and labs. Aren't you people here to teach these kids physics? Don't you want them to take a spirit of rational inquiry or at least a basic understanding of the world around them away from this, instead of a sense of confusion and mismanagement? It makes me so mad, because no one whose job it is care, and there's no incentive at all as a graduate student to try to do anything about it. Maybe we have less graduate student manpower than a bigger department would, and maybe we have to operate within the constraints of the resources available to us. But everyone keeps passing the buck, and the results are wronging a lot of students who are paying good money to learn something, and driving people who might otherwise have loved physics. Amazing lab experiences were what kept me in physics; would I have stayed if it had been like this? Not in a million years.

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.

It's nice that finally, finally I have too much to do at work instead of not enough. I have teaching, and loads of grading (which I do not really enjoy, though I do like teaching), and group meetings, and I learned how to use the AFM and have been imaging clusters of nanorods, and I'm applying for some fellowships, and there's still the cryostat for the AFM which has very slow testing because it has to be cooled down with liquid nitrogen and then takes a few days to warm back up. The real research isn't going as fast as I would want, but it's nice to have things to do and feel like I'm making a contribution to my group. I also saw a really interesting and impressive talk yesterday by Lieber, who does amazing things with nanowire sensing for biological applications. That is close to the reason I want to be in nanoscience.

Another grad student and I have been trying to make the department a bit better place, getting funding for free cookies on Thursdays. We're trying to restart the women in physics organization, but an interest meeting we had on Tuesday had pathetically low turnout. A faculty member who wanted to help us suggested we just plan events, and that if the outlet is there people will start coming. It also has a pretty bad acronym, WISP, which sounds all girly and weak to me. The best replacement acronym I've been able to think of is POW, Physics Organization for Women, which sounds better. I like the idea of flyers with POW!!! across the top, along with images of Rosie the Riveter. But maybe that is too aggressively feminist.

The San Diego fires made me really anxious early in the week, with so many people I care about affected and evacuated. I'm really glad that no one I know lost their home, and it's amazing that there's been only one death so far. It's a little weird, seeing how fire evacuations work in such a populated area. Chih was telling me how her house for a while was very close to the evacuation zone, but also very close to an evacuation shelter. During the Cerro Grande fire when I was in high school, once we evacuated people scattered all over the state, pretty far away since not much is close to Los Alamos, and with the conditions so variable it really seems crazy to put thousands of evacuees so close to still-uncontrolled flames. But nothing happened, the worst seems to be over, and that's good. It's terrible to lose one's home, especially a childhood home, but the good thing about wildfires is that generally people are evacuated with enough time to spare that you don't lose any people you care about, which is of course the most important thing. Risks of deaths in other kinds of natural disasters are much higher, I think.

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.

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!

I've spent the last week learning more experimental techniques for nanofabrication, which has been a lot of fun.

See, in order to make devices to be tested out of nanorods and what have you, first my group fabricates small electrode structures. You start with a silicon chip that has a thin window in one area, and you drop some polymer resist onto it and use a wafer spinner to get an even coating. Then you put the chip in a scanning electron microscope. See, an SEM works by bombarding a surface with a focused electron beam and having a detector monitor secondary electrons, so that in an SEM metals, which scatter lots of electrons, are brighter than semiconductors (like silicon). So you find your window in the SEM, and focus the electron beam. Then you can use the focused electron beam to write patterns into the polymer resist, because long exposures to an intense beam will break the polymer backbone. This part is computer automated, once you center and focus the beam. Once you've written an electrode pattern, you remove the chip from the SEM and develop it using a chemical that can wash off the broken polymer, but not the intact polymer. Then you can evaporate gold onto the chip, using the oldest and most ghetto piece of equipment in the lab, but also the largest bell jar I've ever seen, the inside of which has a sheen of gold and other metals. When you evaporate gold onto the chip, in the electrode pattern you wrote it adheres directly to the silicon substrate, but everywhere else it's on top of the polymer. So after you put on the gold, you put the chip into acetone and leave it overnight, to dissolve the remaining polymer so that the extra gold can be easily lifted off. And then, finally, you have electrodes.

The process and equipment have been pretty cool to learn, but what's neat is that at the end you have nanometer-scale features, which you can then wire up and dropcast nanorods on and do all sorts of things to. I still need to learn to use the plasma etcher, which can be used to clean the chip in advance, and the wire bonder, which allows you to attach wires to your electrodes afterwards. And some of this stuff I haven't done myself yet, just watched someone else do while taking notes (like the evaporator). Pretty fun, though.

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... )

For Ben's birthday, my present to him (and me, kind of) was two tickets to the King Tut exhibit that's currently at the Franklin Institute, on travel from the Egyptian Museum. It's sorta pricey, but that's what birthdays are for! I had heard mixed things about it, but boy was it amazing! What makes Tutankhamun's tomb so special is that it had so many incredible artifacts left untouched, so you see some amazingly detailed artifacts in pristine condition. There were a lot of impressive gold chests or seats and chests made of inlaid wood. There was a large collection from Tjuyu's tomb, including a huge gold coffin and a lot of beautiful artifacts, and they had a lot of beautiful stuff from Tutankhamun's tomb as well. I really couldn't get over the quality of the artifacts.

It's so popular that it's also the most micro-managed museum exhibit I've ever seen... our tickets (which were for today because I couldn't get weekend tickets anytime before summer) were for entry between 2:30 and 3:00 pm, and when we arrived we waited in line for a while (they let people in a certain amount at a time) and then were packed with a bunch of other people into a small room to see a short video, after which the curtains on one side opened and we were let into the exhibit (think of "this dismaying observation: this chamber has no windows, and no doors!"). For all that, though, it was really worth it.

Now, in less than an hour, I'll be meeting prospective students and enjoying free dinner and open bar on the department. Hooray for physics!

As previously mentioned, my classes have started up again. I have a good deal of free time this week, partly because teaching starts next week and partly because problem sets are rarely due the first week. But I seem to have a lot of reading to do: background for biophysics, review for electromagnetism, current stuff for quantum. Plus a backlog of New Scientists and New Yorkers which I'd like to read.

Two bits of good news in terms of positive feedback, though. First, I had this paper for liquid crystals last semester, which I wrote on cholesteric liquid crystal displays. I'm a pretty good writer, but I'm not nearly as good as technical writing... I can do it, but it takes more effort and concentration than essay-style writing does for me. But that's obviously something which I'd like to improve, as it's important to my career, so I went to see my liquid crystals professor to ask what he thought of my paper and whether he had any advice for things to improve. He actually told me that it was his favorite of the final papers he received for that class, and that he didn't think anything needed improvement! I was really happy to hear that.

Additionally, I got a summary of student comments on my teaching last term (this constitutes my evaluations), and they were pretty overwhelmingly positive. A lot of comments on how helpful and competent I was, and a few people said they could tell I really wanted them to get the material. It's nice to read a lot of nice things about yourself. There were three less positive remarks (out of 30 or so): one which said that the poor quality of the labs consistently undermined my teaching, even though I was great; one which said that at the beginning of the course my answers were too vague, though the person commented that I got better; one which said that I was afraid to give a 10. The first one, the quality of the lab write-ups, is something I want to talk to people here about and try to change. The second one is probably accurate; I was nervous at the beginning of the semester and got a lot more comfortable as the semester wore on. And the third, about being afraid to give a 10, is definitely a problem with me not communicating my grading effectively enough. A lot of other people remarked that I graded tough but fair (elation! just what I was going for!), but this one person probably got that impression from a conversation I once had with some students about what constituted a 10 and how many had been handed out in the course as a whole. I should make it more clear that I'm perfectly willing to give out a ten for a perfect lab (that's the idea, in fact), and actually I did give out one last semester. It's just that most labs have at least small mistakes.

This semester I'm actually going to teach three lab sections instead of two, which nets me an extra thousand dollars. And apparently I will again be helping to grade the main course, which is tedious but obviously necessary. I'm teaching second semester pre-med physics, on the principles that (a) pre-meds aren't as bad to teach as I was told they'd be, and (b) electromagnetism, even in watered-down form, is way more fun than mechanics. I hope I can help revise the labs so that future semester have it better.

My liquid crystals professor, Randy Kamien, is crazy. But very entertaining, and an excellent speaker. I liked his class a lot, and I tried to write down in the margins of my notes whenever he said something especially funny. Most of these are kind of strange, though.

"It was just like when I invented grunge."

"Now if you have an algebraic relation, then you're finished! You can give it to a computer, or a dog, and tell them x and y and have it spit out z. But if you have a transcendental relation, you have a problem. Because few dogs can solve transcendental equations."

"This took me a long time to figure out how to draw. But that's because Decepticon was doing something to Opticon in the room behind me."

"Now we will study the much-storied XY model. Please write it that way in your notes, the 'much-storied XY model'. I think if we all start calling it that, never just the 'XY model', then it will stick!"

"Have you ever thought about what the course would be like if Eeyore were teaching?"

"Smectics are like ogres. HOW are smectics like ogres?" *long pause* "They have layers!"

"Whenever you hear such a statement in a talk, you should throw up at the very idea!"

"This is nice and happy! It's like a Goldstone mode! But this is horrible and sick! It has a one over q squared!"

"A window slammed. A maid screamed. A young surgeon exited an operating room. A pirate ship appeared in the distance."

By the way, a long-ish talk which my class spent all semester preparing to read is online here.

two suns, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

When I was walking to campus this afternoon, I took the above picture. What's really weird is, when I first saw it, the bright spot on the right was just as bright as the sun on the left; it really looked like two identical suns. In this photo it's already a bit off-center, but you can still see that there is some weird atmospheric refraction or something going on here. Very strange, but cool.

Things I have been called (to my face, anyways) by my students:

*Miss (my last name)
*Dr. (my last name)
*TA (my last name)
*Hey yo
*(my last name)-san

But my favorite was on two lab reports at the end of the semester, which listed "TA: The Jessamyn". Italics NOT MINE.

I don't get evaluations until January, under the theory that if I receive bad evaluations I will change all my students' lab grades to sixes. But I did have to give lab evaluations (which evaluate the structure, write-ups, and experiments of the lab class, mostly independent of the TA). What I learned from sneaking a peek at those is the following:

*our lab writeups really suck
*about 10% of my students think I should explain the lab more at the beginning of class
*for about 25% of my students I am the primary source of information about the lab (not necessarily good since the lab writeup is much more detailed than I tend to be)
*around 20% of my students had an overall bad lab experience

Some people wrote really detailed comments, which is great, and most of them didn't mention me at all. I am gratified that my only mention in the comments on the lab was by a student who was very unhappy with the lab section of the course, and ended a rant on how badly designed they were with 'thank god our TA knew what she was doing'.

Of course, what this reveals is something I already knew, not related to me... our lab writeups suck. The experiments themselves are quite well-designed, some exceedingly so, but the instructions are often vague, conflicting, confusing, or outright ridiculous. I suspect this is because the lab managers are clever and think a lot about how to teach students fundamental physics concepts, but are poor writers. If I were a theory student, no question, I would ask to help rewrite them in a future semester of TAing. As an experimental student, I can wash my hands of the whole thing after this year... but it would be nice if we had clear undergraduate labs. I would feel good about helping to do that.

Hmm.

Apparently the courses I will be taking next semester are Electromagnetism (516), Quantum II (532), and Modern Optical Physics and Spectroscopy (530). I was looking at Intro to Condensed Matter, but it's straight out of Ashcroft and Mermin, and thus identical to the solid state class I took two years ago (the grad chair even told me so!).

So, it's late November, and today's high is 49 degrees F... but there are still some patches of pristine beautiful green grass. Granted, I grew up in a desert with little actual grass, but does grass actually stay alive this long? Or is it more likely that it's UPenn grass which was is replanted frequently to keep the campus looking lovely? (I know that they do this with flowers.) Additionally, I was under the impression that all trees would turn colors and then lose leaves at the same time... simplistic I know, given how many kinds of trees there are, but now there are some trees with no leaves, and some trees with green leaves! And they aren't evergreens! This New England autumn thing isn't very organized.

I should post recipes of some of the soups I've been making... turkey soup, butternut squash soup, creole onion soup... and I made a great dinner Friday night, with crepes and a corn-ginger-red pepper filling and a sweet-potato-rosemary filling. Yum.

I want to write my liquid crystals paper on cholesteric liquid crystal displays. But I need scientific articles about them, and specifically I need a cool liquid crystal picture, and all I can find are various corporate websites that are all, "Cholesteric LCDs! Paper-like display! Never mind how it works!" Accursed unscientificness! There's a good article in the NYTimes right now about how Mythbusters is teaching people scientific method; you guys should check it out.

EDIT: I lied, I'm taking biophysics, not optical physics. Apparently the flavor of optical physics being taught this semester is not useful for me.

My courses have gone well thus far, although they have reinforced two traits in me quite strongly: the need to do lab work rather than theory in physics, and the need to be diverse (i.e., reading novels, making music, having physical activity).

Quantum mechanics is... well, it's not very hard. It covers pretty much the same material as undergraduate quantum, but approached from different angles. The long-ish problem sets each week are never too difficult, and I feel very good about my grade in it. But it's boring.

Stat mech is difficult. It's interesting material, which I like. The professor is good, and engaging, but also difficult to follow, and goes really quickly. The homework is long, difficult, and it's often hard to understand what the problems are asking for, so it's possible to do a problem pretty wrong and not see it at all. This is worrisome when the homework is 70% of the grade. And while the homework being few and far between can feel like a good thing, I think it makes it harder to stay caught up in the class, and it means that the homework is brutal when we have it.

Liquid crystals is really interesting! It's low-workload, and the goals of the course are to learn liquid crystal theory on a basic level, to be able to ask intelligent questions on liquid crystals in seminars, and to know what's interesting right now in the field. Most of the grade is based on a final paper in which we find a cool picture and explain it. This is all the sort of thing I want to be learning in graduate school! The professor is especially good; it's a shame he's a theorist, because he would be a lot of fun to work for.

And the research seminar I'm required to attend every week is awesome, because it has huge free dinners which are invariably tasty.

Weeeird... George Smoot won the Nobel Prize. I remember last year when the prizes were being announced, a bunch of us were at tea trying to guess who at LBL could win one. He was there talking with us (he was pretty much always at tea).

I really wish I was at tea today to hear people talk about this! And I bet there's a free cake or something! Why couldn't he have won last year?