Destroyed

Phew! Just finished grading this week batch of lab reports. Last week saw my ego completely destroyed by the first midterm on statistical mechanics.

It was an easy exam. The first problem was a collection of two-level systems; we were asked to find thermodynamic quantities and analyze them. I started doing things the wrong way, until I finally realized I had to find the partition function and calculate everything from there. It was to late when I figure things out. The second problem was a rotating cylinder with a pressure in its axis, we were asked to find the pressure in the boundary. Again, I started walking the wrong path and by the time I realized what I had to do it was to late. Literally, time was up. So I handed in two less-than-half-way done problems.

I was angry at myself. So angry that during lunch I bit my own tongue. I hated myself for not thinking things right. Then I felt in this thinking storm of how I sucked as a physics student, how I was alright back in Puerto Rico and how I am never going to make it to work with quantum gravity. It made me feel really low. I went to Boston during that weekend and worked on homeworks.

I had worked on EM previously during the week, but on Sunday night I realized that what I did was very wrong. It turned out I only had solved correctly one problem, out of 4. Again, it made me feel so hopeless. I ended up arriving at Stony Brook around 8:30 PM to grade my part of the midterm grading for the class I am TAing. It turned out that the professor wanted the grades early, so he had started grading my part with another instructor. I felt so bad when I saw somebody doing my job. I graded a bit of what was left and helped entered all the grades to the spreadsheet in the computer. This lasted until 3:00 AM.

While walking back to my apartment I saw the snow falling down on the campus. That night and Monday we had like 3 inches of snow. I think most of it is melted now, since it had been relatively warm lately. On Tuesday I got my grade from the midterm and it was not that bad, 85/150. The average was around 100, so I am well below average. I do not feel that bad, because I know that (at the end) I had an idea on how to solved the problems.

I also email some professors in the mathematics department asking for summer research. Three out of four already replied with a negative answer, mostly the same; they are busy, they are going to be gone during the summer, they do not have anything to offer, and I can always take courses to learn. I get a bit annoyed by the fact that they tell me I can take the courses. While it is true, I can take the courses at some point, I also have to take a lot of other courses. I am tired of taking courses and solving textbook problems. I want to work with somebody, and to learn things in a non-linear way. Oh well, there is still one professor who has not replied, but I do not have my hopes high...

Still, I am a happy person.

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.