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Never Gonna Give It Up

*blows dust off blog*

Hello there!

So the reason that I haven’t posted is not that I haven’t been studying. It’s just that I haven’t been studying very much. It took me 3 weeks to finish what I had scheduled for a week of studying. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why my productivity has plummeted. There’s a lot of other things going on in my life, to be sure. My family was on vacation nearby, I’ve finally gotten approved to buy my condo, my boyfriend came back from his long trip, etc. But mostly I think I’m just shifting down to enjoy my last couple weeks before the flurry of moving, classes, and all that jazz. I am going to have lots of time to study in the next few years!!

But that doesn’t mean I’m totally giving up on my studies. I still like to be productive (at least a little) and I am enjoying going through this material. I’m just not going to be too hard on myself if I can’t stick to a rigorous schedule.

Since my last post, I have continued on with Bob in the Stars section, reading 3 chapters: The Fate of Massive Stars, The Degenerate Remnants of Stars, and General Relativity and Black Holes. The general relativity stuff is necessary to discuss black holes, but it did feel a bit out of place at first and I had to check back to make sure I was still in the Stars section! These are really fascinating topics, getting into some of the extremes of nature that are on the edge of the field today. My first class this upcoming quarter is going to be on stars and I am really looking forward to it!

I also made some progress through Mathematical Methods and the diff eqs chapters. I finished the chapter on series solutions of ODEs and made it through the chapter on eigenfunction methods for differential equations. To be honest, I am feeling like this is going over my head at this point, but I am trying not to let it upset me. Sitting at home with a pencil and piece of paper and the calculator on my phone trying to work through Bessel’s equation and Legendre’s equation isn’t exactly the best test of my mathematical abilities. I am just focusing on reading through the material now and trying to follow the authors’ arguments as best I can.

I didn’t do much coding over the past couple weeks. I worked through the chapter about errors and accuracy, but that was pretty short and was mostly just about some practical issues and not really new coding. But I am feeling pretty comfortable with Python now, so I hope that I can work with it as needed and continue to learn (and perhaps learn more languages if needed).

In the next couple weeks, I plan to continue to work through Mathematical Methods and An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics. I don’t know if I’ll finish, but just do what I can. I also intend to get more into some of the info that my advisor has sent me about the project I anticipate working on.

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Today I Don’t Feel Like Doing Anything

So, here we are, another week closer to my start date and another week of lackluster productivity. Last week I was visiting my boyfriend and, although I brought all my study materials, I didn’t get a lot done. I planned to get back to it this week but…the best laid plans of mice and men, I suppose. I had 10 study assignments planned and I only got through 4. Of course I am still hoping to hit some more this weekend but getting through all 10 seems unrealistic. But no use in being hard on myself! I’m still enjoying the studying, I just have a lot of other things on my plate and I think I am trying to savor this vacation/free time as I know it will be gone soon! So I am going to appreciate all the things I did get done (a 2000 piece puzzle and some freelance writing and fiction editing and over 10,000 steps a day!) and the free time I’ve had (hello, bingeing on Insecure and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and re-reading Wheel of Time for the fourth time). Plus I did do some studying! So what did I actually get to?

I read two chapters in Bob, both still in “The Nature of Stars” section. These two were Main Sequence and Post-Main-Sequence Stellar Evolution and Stellar Pulsation. Super interesting! I also found out that Stars will be one of the first classes I take in grad school, so it’s nice to be brushing up on it now. The chapter on MS and post-MS was super long but full of so much good information. I also appreciated the timing of the chapter on pulsation because it actually ties into a video that I am planning on recording soon (today, maybe?). Overall, I am about 40% through the textbook, so I need to pick up the pace a little if I want to get through it all.

On the math side, I continued my work on differential equations. This is a big topic (6 chapters of the text), so I’ll probably be on it for a bit! I moved on from first order ODEs to cover higher order ODEs and started on series solutions for ODEs. Not going to lie, there was some tough going in there, mostly in recognizing which method will work to solve an equation. Not always easy, but satisfying to be able to work them out.

Lastly, I did get a bit of a chance to continue working on my physics Python. I completed the chapter on graphics, including a pretty sweet rendition of the Mandelbrot set (which only required the tiniest bit of help from Stack Overflow). I started the next section on accuracy and error, which is a little less exciting than making rotating 3D graphics, but definitely very vital when doing calculations and data processing using Python.

So, that’s where I’m at! Totally not freaking out about next month. Not at all. Just enjoying life! Okay, maybe a leeeeetle of column A, little of column B!