*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.