More placement...

The week is comes to an end with an emotional bang.

Today I took the SPEAK test. It is about English language proficiency and it is oral. As always, silly questions aimed at inducing a hemorrhage of verbal expressions to test one's ability of pronunciation, fluency, etc. My score placed along the borderline of taking advanced classes (I guess in English...) or just passing. I was really sad to hear that I could be adding another class to my already busy schedule. I am planing on taking three core courses (Classical Mechanics, Classical Electrodynamics and Quantum Mechanics), one seminar, one colloquium and the teaching assignment (two lab sections). The examiner concluded with the English class recommendation, but suggested a second opinion. I could take the English classes, but...

... I want to catch up with Strings and Fields! If I am going to become a particle theory student, I have to work on my fluency in string- and quantum field-stuff. The way the graduate program works is that I should start research by the beginning of my third year. I just cannot sit back and expect to take the respective classes on Strings and Quantum Field Theory (not to mention Relativity...). I should take the classes, but if I already have basic knowledge in the field (pun intended!) then I could start choosing a research topic by my second year.

I have been laying back (and blogging and reading other blogs) to much. This cannot continue. I need a major update to my routine. Knowing this does not make things any better (but it will make me feel more sorry...), I need actions. So I am going to start reading my books. I am going to put together the ideas from A First Course in String Theory and Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. Work out problems. Etc. I was planning on attending the Field and String courses, but it will all depend on my schedule. I need to do well in the courses I'll be taking.

In other news, today was also the second part of the placement exams. This time: Quantum Mechanics and Statistical Mechanics. Just like last time, I was only able to tackle a part of a problem from the QM test. It was about neutrino mixing. Given the Hamiltonian operator I was able to find the eigenvalues and I started to find the eigenvectors. But that problem was not going to be enough. I needed more to pass the test, so I decided to flee the scene. I will keep both exam sets and I will try them again at the end of the semester.