Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Dumpster Fire

This week is the coolest week ever.

1. Our DFT midterm was given to us on Sunday. It's due next Monday. It looks like fun.
2. NSF is due Friday.
3. My research project is currently just trying to integrate a stupid two dimensional function. And I can't do it. Oh and I've been doing this for almost a month.
4. I destroyed my leg during a long run on Sunday so I can't relieve stress.

Ohheygradschool.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Writing, writing, and more writing!

First off, I should apologize to my faithful audience for my absence. I know I said I'd write up a little thing about Spain and whatnot, but research, NSFing, and DFT class have been all-consuming and it's felt wrong to take time away from those things for blogging. But! Blogging is important so here I am. Writing a blog post.

Which is fitting in some respects because recently, all I've been doing is writing. The NSF GRFP stuff is due in 11 days (hoooooooly moly) and I've been frantically polishing and rewriting and polishing and fixing and editing and pruning nonstop it seems. It's a lot of fun though. I've always enjoyed writing and I really have to put a different hat on when I'm writing sciency stuff. This stream of consciousness style I write in for this blog is really how I prefer to write, but that doesn't jive when you only have two pages and (presumably) an exhausted reader who probably wants to go home. Conciseness is key and I'm way too flowery in my writing.

Luckily, Kieron is really good at taking long sentences and turning them into a handful of words. Justin has been invaluable as well in fixing my word choice. It's nice having people to help you out! Then again that's been my experience in this group since I first got here.

Research has been progressing more slowly recently, though that's thanks to Apple's new operating system which un-taught my computer how to compile fortran and TeX, and my general lack of knowledge concerning physics-y stuff. DFT class has been a blast though, particularly since a lot of what we're learning is more about how to think about quantum mechanics. Which is weird. Quantum stuff is weird.