The first semester of my graduate school career is over — woohoo!!! I just finished my last exam on Friday. I don’t know what kind of grades I earned yet, but I am pretty happy with how classes went — I now have a pretty solid understanding of the basics of Quantum Mechanics and Statistical Mechanics. Mostly I am excited because I have the next few weeks free to get some work done; i.e. no problem sets to distract me from learning about lasers, solid state physics, non-linear spectroscopy and the like. And that reminds me that I have neglected to say what group I joined…
I joined the C.B. Harris Group! The principle investigator (PI) is pretty awesome, and the group itself has thus far seemed like a very good fit. I keep hearing horror stories from other first-years about how they are having trouble with their lab-mates/PI and I am just glad that I have had zero conflicts. Specifically I joined what is known as the ’surface-side’ of the Harris Group which studies how electrons behave on surfaces; more details can be found on the group website. I haven’t started real research yet since the learning curve on the apparatus is pretty steep (not to mention my lack of theoretical knowledge about surface science), but next semester I will be gearing up — picking a project and hopefully starting to really work on collecting data.
What is kinda crazy is that Harris is my great-grand-advisor in a manner of speaking. My undergraduate PI, C. Stromberg, studied under M. Fayer @ Stanford, and Fayer was one of Harris’ first graduate students! Small world eh?
I will be in Berkeley for another few days before I head home to MD to spend Christmas with the family. I am really looking forward to taking some time off so I can come back refreshed and ready to do some science!