I passed my qualifying exam. I actually took it two weeks ago but I just found out today that I passed it. I have a much longer explanation of the qual over at The Eternal Universe, but I just wanted to say something here that I did not mention there.
When I was preparing for the qual I was wondering what I should do to focus my studying. It was something that I was praying about and thinking about a lot. There are so many things I could study and look at that it would not be possible to look at them all, so I had the be selective in the things that I studied. As I was praying about this I got the impression that I should focus on the statistical mechanics portion of a book containing old qualifier problems from the University of Chicago. So I went to that portion of the Chicago book and looked it over and selected the problems that I thought could turn up on the test (I selected 17 of the 22 problems) and worked them out. As it turned out two of those questions turned up on the qualifying exam, and I was able to answer them easily.
The test was also spread over two days. Initially it was scheduled to be on Sunday and Monday the 9th and 10th of May, but the department secretary pointed out that Commencement was that Sunday and there would be several people in the building making noise and it would be hard to reserve a room. This prompted the chair of the qualifying committee to propose moving the first day of testing to Friday the 7th. I sent an email to him saying I would much prefer moving it to the Friday, so it was moved from Sunday to Friday.
Also, I was preparing for the test by studying with two other people, who were also taking the astronomy test like me. We had looked at many different things and we were finalizing our last minute studying. We had two tests on the Friday and four on Monday. So we planned to spend Saturday studying for the first two tests (stat mech and quantum) and then they wanted to spend Sunday studying for stars and high energy. I decided that even though it would help to study for stars and high energy some more as those were the two that I had not studied as much, it would be better for me to keep the sabbath and not to study. So I studied with them on Saturday and then on Sunday I went to church, had our home teachers come by and spent the day "resting" (i.e. worrying about my tests the next day). But when it came time for the tests, it turned out that everything that I was able to answer on the tests was stuff that I had already studied, or already knew, and thus it turned out that if I had studied on Sunday then that would not have helped me any on the two tests. It was such a good feeling to see a blessing of keeping the sabbath.
Showing posts with label Grad School. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grad School. Show all posts
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
My Office
As a graduate student at UNC I am given an office with a desk. Because my class was rather large (25 of us, they normally have less than 15) they had to find a place to put us. So they cleared out an unused lab and put 11 of us in one office. It has actually been convenient because generally there is always someone there working on the same homework assignment as me and that makes my homework easier.
The downside is as a first year, and as a member of the large class of students, there aren't the same amount of basic resources, such as desks and bookshelves t
hat grad students normally have. Thus we have to make due with whatever we have. I was lucky (or fast) to get a larger desk, but for a place to put my books I had to improvise, as can be seen from the photo to the right. Yes, that is a sink next to my desk, remember this used to be a lab. (OK, funny side story. As an old lab we used to have a warning sign up on our door detailing the hazards in the lab, level 3 reactivity, level 2 flammability, level 2 radioactivity, and it would scare the undergraduate students that had to come find one of us during our office hours. We would always have people knocking on our door and asking rather timidly, "Can I come in...Is it safe for me to come in? There's a sign out here saying there's radiation." But they eventually took down the sign, so now the only problem we have is that our office doesn't have a number.)
I found the particle board shelves and put them on top of my desk so that I had someplace to put my books. I know it's cheap but we didn't have a lot of stuff. I also had to go through several chairs before I found one that was the right height and wasn't broken. In the photo you can't really see my chair because it has my coat on it. We also have two couches in our office and a padded chair, as can be seen in the photos below (taken from my desk).
That's Dave on the couch. His desk in the other corner (the corner in the photo on the left), he's also an astro student, so we have all the same classes. We also have some very similar research interests. The couches are questionable, as we got them from the undergraduates. Some people will not even touch them, while others in the office sleep on them on a regular basis. We are considered lucky to have this office because we have so many windows. I must say it is nice to have a view of the outside, even when it is freezing cold, it's nice to see out and look at the snow (that's why the windows are so bright in the photos, it's the glare off of the snow).
It's not the most "designer" building on campus, but the building was built for practicality, not looks. It's hard to make the building look nice when we constantly have to add pipes and electrical cables to allow us to do our work. That is something that is entirely missed in Hollywood movies and TV shows, the wires, the cables, the pipes and random things (sinks, next to their desk), and no one really cares. We just work around them.
The downside is as a first year, and as a member of the large class of students, there aren't the same amount of basic resources, such as desks and bookshelves t
hat grad students normally have. Thus we have to make due with whatever we have. I was lucky (or fast) to get a larger desk, but for a place to put my books I had to improvise, as can be seen from the photo to the right. Yes, that is a sink next to my desk, remember this used to be a lab. (OK, funny side story. As an old lab we used to have a warning sign up on our door detailing the hazards in the lab, level 3 reactivity, level 2 flammability, level 2 radioactivity, and it would scare the undergraduate students that had to come find one of us during our office hours. We would always have people knocking on our door and asking rather timidly, "Can I come in...Is it safe for me to come in? There's a sign out here saying there's radiation." But they eventually took down the sign, so now the only problem we have is that our office doesn't have a number.)I found the particle board shelves and put them on top of my desk so that I had someplace to put my books. I know it's cheap but we didn't have a lot of stuff. I also had to go through several chairs before I found one that was the right height and wasn't broken. In the photo you can't really see my chair because it has my coat on it. We also have two couches in our office and a padded chair, as can be seen in the photos below (taken from my desk).
That's Dave on the couch. His desk in the other corner (the corner in the photo on the left), he's also an astro student, so we have all the same classes. We also have some very similar research interests. The couches are questionable, as we got them from the undergraduates. Some people will not even touch them, while others in the office sleep on them on a regular basis. We are considered lucky to have this office because we have so many windows. I must say it is nice to have a view of the outside, even when it is freezing cold, it's nice to see out and look at the snow (that's why the windows are so bright in the photos, it's the glare off of the snow).
It's not the most "designer" building on campus, but the building was built for practicality, not looks. It's hard to make the building look nice when we constantly have to add pipes and electrical cables to allow us to do our work. That is something that is entirely missed in Hollywood movies and TV shows, the wires, the cables, the pipes and random things (sinks, next to their desk), and no one really cares. We just work around them.
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