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We’ve Come a Long, Long Way Together

One year ago today, I was sitting at my desk in my dingy cubicle, counting down the hours until I could go home (too many—it was ~9 AM), when I got a very unexpected email. The chair of graduate admissions from UChicago said the committee had met the day before and he would like to call me with some good news.

!!

I didn’t have long to silently freak out at my desk, because he called about 30 minutes later to let me know that I had been accepted (and also nominated for a scholarship). The peculiar combination of elation and disbelief is hard to describe. I had been so unsure if I would get in anywhere. I didn’t know then what the future would bring, whether I would even go through with my mad plan to go back to school for my PhD, but it became a real option in that moment. I ended up getting accepted by 2 more wonderful schools, but here I am at Chicago today. There were a lot of reasons behind my decision, but being first with the news didn’t hurt.

I basically torpedoed my whole entire life over the last year, and while I’ve had my share of doubts and struggles, I can safely say I am very happy with where I am now and that I will never forget silently dancing in the hallway after that phone call.

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Day in the Life of a Grad Student

7:10 AM Woken by gentle buzzing of my Fitbit. Groan. Even though I’m excited about school, Monday mornings are still hard. Groggily stumble out of bed by 7:15 AM.

7:45 AM Complete with normal morning ablutions, feeding bunnies, making bed, standard morning routine. Remember to grab gloves since apparently it’s in the FORTIES, great, where did summer go?

7:50 AM Biking to school. Regretting not grabbing a scarf too.

8:05 AM Get to my office and start settling in, drink some tea, check email, contemplate my to-do list with dread.

8:30 AM Help a student who couldn’t make office hours with some questions on her lab. Feel bad for her being sick and also really hoping that I don’t get sick.

8:40 AM Okay, time to settle in and focus on a tough homework assignment. No one else is ever here this early, so this is my quiet time. Try to write some code, fail. Continue to skip questions until I’m just writing “tbd” and “uhhh” in the spots where rational, scientific answers should go. Curse the gods of python and numerical integration.

9:00 AM Abandon my pressing to-do list and depressing attempt at homework to watch press conference about LIGO. Get really excited and pester my boyfriend about it until he makes his whole office watch it too.

10:25 AM Time to attend lecture for the course I am TAing. I grade some labs during the lecture, which makes it actually quite productive. Mentally freak out over how long the labs are taking to grade and that they need to be done by tomorrow.

11:30 AM Back to my office to pretend I can write code. It fails.

12:00 PM Head to a meeting about fellowships. Free lunch, hurray! As the fellowships lady tells us about various fellowships that we can and should apply for, I start to inwardly freak out about adding that to my hypothetical to do list (in a year). Decide not to think about my future yet.

1:00 PM More useless attempts at writing code. I actually can do one part of one problem, I rejoice at the little plot that I get.

1:30 PM Class. Same class where I can’t do the homework. The class is interesting and makes sense, but I know that when we get homework on it I won’t be able to do it. Try to focus on just paying attention to the now.

3:00 PM Exoplanet journal club. A guest from Harvard is giving a talk and it is super interesting. Also intimidating. He is a grad student (although in his final year) and has many publications and can speak like a total expert. Journal club always makes me feel miles behind. There are many undergrads who attend who seem to grasp the conversation better than me. Always leave feeling inspired and dejected. On the plus side, cookies.

4:00 PM Special colloquium to discuss the announcement from LIGO. By the time I get there, no seats are open so I sit on the floor. It’s an awesome talk and everyone is really excited. I feel a little guilty thinking about my homework and grading and everything, but I’m glad that I opted to go. The finger foods at the reception afterwards are my dinner.

6:00 PM Back to the office. I really knuckle down on my homework and after a lot of frustration I realize I was missing a square in one of my terms. After I correct this, everything works better (still not well, but better). Manage to finish problem number 2 (of 3).

8:35 PM Decide to call it a day. Remember that the light burnt out on my bike the last time I rode, so hope that the street lights are good.

8:50 PM Get home and feed my bunnies. Poor guys act like they haven’t seen food for days. Wash some dishes. While washing dishes, freak out about when I am going to be able to work on my research this week.

9:20 PM Tell myself I should really either go to bed to get some sleep or grade those labs. Instead eat ice cream and write a blog post for my own amusement. Tell myself it is self care and therefore necessary.

9:30 PM Watch a TV show. In an optimistic move, take folder of labs out of my backpack.

??? PM Go to bed. Realize in a panic that I have 10 more labs to grade before 1 PM but it’s way too late for that now.

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Let’s Get It Started

Well, this is it! Okay, not it it. Classes don’t start for another week. But tomorrow, for the first time in a long while, I have a schedule. I have places to be. I’m officially setting foot on campus as a student. I’m nervous, because I’m me and I’m always nervous about meeting new people and navigating social situations, and I’m nervous because I’m half-paralyzed with doubt about this. It’s such a huge, huge change in my life, and I thought I was mentally prepared but now I don’t think I am. But, I don’t know if I ever could be prepared, so all there is to do is jump in and do it!

I have not posted about my studies because they have been nonexistent. I know it sounds crazy to say that moving can completely consume one’s life for weeks on end, but it did in my case! Whether it was cleaning my new condo from top to bottom (an effort of three days and countless buckets of soapy water), making three trips to IKEA sans car(which is 35 miles away—my favorite trip was when I missed the bus and had to take a 3-hour public transit trip by way of Joliet), putting together 24 cartons of IKEA furniture (a drill helps a lot, but my poor fingers are still torn up), or trying to figure out how to fix a trickling toilet (I still can’t believe it was a $7 part and took 2 seconds), I’ve been B-U-S-Y. Oh and I also spent some time turning 30 in there (eek!). The good news is that I am mostly done, just in time! I have about 2 boxes left of random stuff from my old desk that I need to put away—and I may need another piece of furniture, as my new desk has less in the way of storage—and I have got to most of the biggest to-do items. The biggest outstanding one is my dang shower, which basically won’t give more than a limp trickle of hot water. I got a plumber here today to fix it only to discover that my shower for some godawful reason doesn’t have its own shutoff valve, so I have to arrange with the HOA to shut off water to the entire building. Which requires 48 hours notice and has to be between 9 and 4 on a weekday, so gods know when I’ll have a chance to do that. Yay cold showers in the meantime. Guess it’s good for my hair…

Anyway, that’s all the hullabaloo around these parts. Hopefully tomorrow and the rest of this week will make me feel more confident and comfortable in this journey I am embarking on. Or it will just make me even more nervous! Time will tell. In the meantime, I need to check the weather for tomorrow and figure out my biking route!

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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!

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All the Small Things

Today was a bit of strange day, mostly because there was no physics in the mix. Only had a couple of those days but they usually leave me feeling like I’ve forgotten something! But of course I have not, because I have my schedule all written out for the week. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, after all. Or because I’m kind of ridiculous. (Like how my boyfriend teased me about writing up a packing list—complete with expected activities and weather forecast—for a 4 day trip. I swear that’s just conscientious, not crazy!)

Anyway, I started out bright and early (okay, it’s a lie, I didn’t get out of bed until 9, but I did get started right away after I got up!) and got Python running and waiting for some juicy new code. I worked through two more sections in the introductory chapter of the text, covering if/then/else and while loops, lists, arrays, and a few other items. The arrays were new to me, and I still mentally giggle at the “numpy” package, but they seem like they will be very useful indeed. I ran into a problem while trying to write a small program to display the first several Catalan numbers. This should have been straightforward, and I reviewed my logic a hundred times and it was impeccable. After much frustration and some poking around Stack Overflow, I realized I just had to move one of the calculations from outside the loop to inside it. I was ready to rage-quit, but it was so simple in the end! Writing code in a nutshell, I suppose.

After a break for some grocery shopping and a few chapters of the Wheel of Time (I’m re-reading, currently on the fourth book), I dove back into vector calculus. Today I was finishing up the chapter, and I got into the del operator, gradient, divergence, curl, etc. Aside from esoteric theory on curvilinear coordinates, this was pretty straightforward. It can get a bit tedious to work through the longer examples, but it is quite satisfying when it all comes together. And it’s nice to be able to follow what’s going on!

And in non-studying but sort of related news, the condo-buying process has been going pretty great. Inspection was done, no major red flags, attorney review is almost finished, and I may have a place to live for the fall soon! Which just makes me realize that this is all going to actually start happening very, very soon.

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Too Hot (Hot Damn)

This morning I bid farewell to my boyfriend, as he is off on the Navy’s bidding for a few weeks. I also dealt with a malfunctioning air conditioner (a lizard fried himself on a capacitor, poor guy) in 90F+, extremely humid weather, a morass of bug bites on all my limbs, and the cavalcade of documents that go along with a mortgage. I also had to talk on the phone multiple times, which for me is super unfun. All in all, it was A Day, and I could be forgiven for letting my first day back at studying slide.

But! I did not! I guess I’m just stubborn enough. Or scared enough. Or I actually enjoy doing this enough. Well, a little bit of all of it, I suppose. In any case, once the internal temperature settled back down into the 70s, I was able to focus on learning more about matrices. In today’s sections, I got to the key part about determinants. No wonder I was having trouble remembering how to do this—they are, like many matrix-related things, supremely annoying to calculate. I am not sure if it the spatial element of it (if I am not careful I will get my rows and columns mixed up halfway through) or something else, but I have to go slow and frequently use my finger to point at the numbers I am trying to work with within a matrix. However, they are useful little beasties, and doing these sorts of calculations by hand is only for the theory of it and so a little painstaking is fine.

I read through another chapter in Bob today as well, this one on light and the electromagnetic spectrum. After having gone through this at least a little rigorously in my physics text, it was nice to get the astrophysics perspective here. A lot of focus on blackbodies, magnitude, and luminosity, which are key to our observations of the universe. Surface temperatures in the thousands of Kelvin! Distances in parsecs! I also re-learned some interesting info about color indices and getting a little bit into the practical side of things, with at least some attention given to correcting for instruments, atmospheric effects, etc.

One thing popped up that illustrates the downsides of using my old college textbooks for studying. For the most part, it’s quite adequate, as the things I am reviewing have been settled science for many decades, but sometimes the time gap rears its head. In this case, the text referenced an upcoming NASA mission called SIM PlanetQuest. It sounded quite interesting, and I was intrigued about a mission I had never heard of. So I pulled out my phone, googled it…aaaand it was canceled in 2010. Well damn. Better luck next time!

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Back to the Grind!

But in this case, it’s not so bad, since the grind is just studying math and physics at my leisure. ☺ I’ve got it good right now and I know it!

I went up to Chicago this past week to attend my cousin’s wedding and do some house hunting. I was pretty worried about this, as I found out my current lender doesn’t finance co-ops, which wiped out like half my favorites list, and a lot of the units I liked had already gone off the market. But after a lot of visits, I ended up putting in an offer on the very first one we saw! And it was accepted today, so if I’m lucky it’ll go all the way to close and I can spend tons and tons of money having some place to live. Yay! It’s definitely nice to not have to keep stressing about the house hunt—although of course, it ain’t over til it’s over. While we were there, I stopped by the campus and showed my boyfriend around a little, but I felt too shy/nervous to go inside. Yep, introvert!

I gave myself a free day when we got back, but yesterday I put some things down on my study schedule and got back to it! I ran out of time before we left to finish my vector chapter, so I worked through the last sections of that. Then I broke open Bob, aka the Big Orange Book, aka An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, 2nd Edition by Bradley Carroll and Dale Ostlie. I already ready chapter one a couple months back, so I hit up chapter two, which delved into heliocentric theories, Kepler’s laws (which we already know I love!), and the theory of gravity. Very interesting stuff, including a detailed derivation of Kepler’s laws from Newton’s laws and a basic breakdown of conic sections and orbits. This reminded me that I have been dallying in my reading of the Celestial Mechanics book I’ve been working on!

After that, it was back to Mathematical Methods to start on the chapter dealing with matrices. This is important stuff and I am definitely very rusty on it. It’s a long chapter, so I’ve broken it down over 3 different sessions. This first one mostly dealt with laying the groundwork (and making my brain hurt by trying to nail the concept of M-dimensional vector space) and some basic matrix math: addition (easy), subtraction (easy), and multiplication (painstaking).

In all, it felt good to get back to it! September is getting closer every day, and I am trying my best to get all the pieces to fall in place. I still don’t really have any clue what to expect/what I will be doing come fall. That’s making me a bit of a nervous wreck, but at least I am taking some proactive steps to help assuage my anxiety. That being said, it’s a holiday weekend, and my boyfriend is about to leave for some Navy crap for the rest of the summer, so I’ll be taking a few days off to chill with him! But Wednesday it will be ON again!

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I Ain’t Trying to Do What Everybody Else Doing

Another day another dollar! Except not, because I have no dollars coming to me at all right now. Which is fine. This is fine. (Actually, it is fine, because I planned for it, but it is a little…unnerving?)

Today I got some more modern physics refreshed into my brain. I read two chapters, Atoms and Molecules. As advertised, I got to learn about both atoms and molecules! It was a very interesting perspective on things that are familiar from high school science classes. Ionic bonds! Covalent bonds! Except now with added quantum physics! Which I think is pretty damn cool. Suddenly the why of rather arbitrary things, like having 6 electrons in each p-orbital, makes sense. Or at least, makes as much sense as quantum physics ever does. =) Reading about the spectra for molecules made me think about taking spectra of exoplanet atmospheres and I got all excited all over again about what I get to do.

And then I got scared.

Forgive me for waxing a little personal/philosophical here, but reading about all these amazing physicists like Schrödinger and Dirac and Pauli is intimidating. These people were brilliant and able to come up with these new ideas that changed the way we understand the universe. I certainly can’t hope to do that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a pretty smart cookie. And I’m really good at learning physics. But am I good at doing it? I honestly don’t know. And this is part of the reason why it took me so long to pursue this path. Anyway, it’s scary, but I just have to button up and carry on. I’ll do my best and not get ahead of myself.

In other news, I finished up my Python course today! That was pretty exciting. Do I feel like a coding genius? No, not even close. But I have a better understanding of the language now, and I feel more confident about my ability to tackle it and make it work for me. Overall, I think the Codecademy course was very helpful, and I recommend it to anyone trying to get the basics of Python down. Plus free is always a good price! But it’s definitely only a stepping stone and not a full education in a language.

I think I earned myself some ice cream!

Today’s fun “new” fact: The letters used to identify the l quantum number (s, p, d, f for l=0,1,2,3) were not just arbitrarily chosen to frustrate young chemistry students. According to a footnote in my textbook, they are “remnants of spectroscopists descriptions of various spectral lines as sharp, principal, diffuse, and fundamental.”

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A Whole New World

Today I got to start on the part of the physics textbook that deals with the somewhat-misleadingly-named modern physics (dating back about a hundred years now!). Excitingly enough this is also the last section of the textbook. The end is drawing near for Tipler and Mosca! So today I read two chapters, Wave-Particle Duality and Quantum Physics and Applications of the Schrödinger Equation, and these were an introduction to quantum physics. They’re actually a pretty well-written introduction, explaining Schrödinger’s equation and wave-particle duality and probability densities in a matter-of-fact way that makes it sound like, okay that makes sense, and not like that is Totally Fucking Weird, which probably should be the default reaction to quantum physics. It covered some of the stuff that had previously been mentioned in the light chapters, and it was a good recap plus adding Schrödinger and some of the quantum things that arise that are classically forbidden like tunneling and partial reflection.

Math-wise, I worked on integrals today. It was actually a pretty easy chapter—I did the whole thing in one go—on multiple integrals. Basically integrating over areas and volumes. The trickiest part here is defining the limits of your integrals, and there was a fun section on change of variables which didn’t make a whole lot of sense because it was said to just use the determinant of the matrix, and if you don’t know what that is we’ll cover that in two chapters. I don’t really remember anything about matrices so that was not quite so helpful for me, but other than that I do feel like I have a good handle on the material in this chapter. I was pretty comfortable working through the problems, although I got a little bogged down in some of the actual calculations. But that’s just me being out of practice and doing stupid things like dropping random x’s when I was doing multi-line integrals.

Really, it was a good day. I feel happy with where I’m at, and I am looking forward to the rest of this week. It’s a little bit of a short week because I’m going to Chicago on Friday, both to go to my cousin’s wedding and to look at houses for when I move to Chicago in just a couple months now! I’m looking forward to that, and I’m a little nervous and hoping that all the places I see don’t suck and that I can find something I can afford. I’m also excited to show my boyfriend Hyde Park so he can get a feel for where I’m going to be living—and for me to get a better feel it because I’ve only been there once!

Today’s fun “new” fact: While I remembered the Pauli exclusion principle, I forgot that it can be seen in the construction of anti-symmetric wave functions, where if both quantum numbers are the same, the wave function will go to zero and so therefore, while it is still a valid solution mathematically, it is rejected as a wave function because it cannot be normalized. It’s a simple way of thinking about a complicated assertion.

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I’m Outta Here!

No posts for a while, as I’m off exploring Peru! Hopefully I don’t fall off a mountain or die of altitude sickness. If you’re missing me, you can check out my previous physics videos. Until next time!!

xoxo