Is it fake?

It is about time I bring some graduate school experiences to this blog, so let's all get worried about my future!

I have been thinking about it. It might not be the best thing to do now, since there are other things more pertinent at the current moment (like passing my classes with better grades than last semester), but I believe that I should think about it for a little while. The first thing in my head is

summer work.

This is related to the problem of

housing.

If I do not have a summer job, how am I going to pay for my housing? I cannot just walk to the YITP and tell everyone "Hey, give me a project for the summer and I will work on it". First of all, I do not anything about string theory yet, and my quantum field theory is very rudimentary. My special relativity is better, and my math skills are so and so, but still. I do not have a good reason why I want to do research in string theory. Is is fake? Of course it is, after I read (and watched) The Elegant Universe and Hyperspace I just wanted to learn about all this theories and work with them. But just a popular approach is not even close to what it actually is.

Have this semesters being a waste of time? I do not think so. Like professor Likharev said once, "This is the basic core knowledge of physics" (or maybe he said something along this lines...). I needed to take these classes, I really lacked that knowledge. So maybe I am rushing to much. The plan for next fall is to take course on field theory and relativity, and maybe the breadth courses and graduate lab. Which brings me to my second thing,

what to research?

Either I read on my own, or take courses on strings (which I will take at some point), but I need to learn about this topic before I even think of what particular aspect I would like to study. The thing is, time may not be enough. Money is a crucial part of my survival, which is a sad thing. Gotta go to class now...

During one year...

...my girlfriend went and came back from New Zealand, I graduated from college, went to California for the summer, spent some weekends in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, moved to New York, started graduate school in Stony Brook, got a lot of experience commuting to Boston from New York, went to San Antonio for Christmas and met little Vonn, went home for new year's eve, saw the first falling snow in Wellesley and started my second semester at Stony Brook.

Phew!

Happy Birthday QC!

This blog just turned one year old. Happy Birthday Quantum Crops! It was a long and arduous labor, but it is growing healthy.

Well that is annoying...

Life is a beach.

Today classes were canceled at 2:00 PM due to the current weather conditions. This morning while walking to my office I almost got blown off the sidewalk by the wind, the chilling wind. It was not that cold. It was even raining, with about two inches of snow in the ground. But the wind... the wind was blowing from all directions! Oh boy, my poor umbrella was torn to pieces.

Today at 2:20 PM I was presenting my seminar talk on the search for supersymmetry. I must confess I was not 100% prepared for it. During this past weeks I have been paying the price of my procrastination during the first week of classes. It has been one homework right after the other, with almost no rest between. I am very sleepy now. The first EM homework was handed in with almost all problems partially solved. For the second I choose not to solve one of them. Statistical mechanics was done the night before. This class is scaring the shit out of me, since I feel I am not following the professor during lectures. And QM. For the first "set" I had to work on it just the night before, and literally solved only one of the problems the morning it was due. I have been out of it. And my dedication to the seminar presentation was very little, in the sense that I have not read that meaning papers related to experiment concerning "the search for supersymmetry".

I put some slides together in the course of these past two weeks and really wanted to get it over with today. Oh well. I guess now I have more time to work on it. Make a better presentation.

I also need to start working on the QM problem set due tomorrow.

No rest for the wicked.