grad school - decision time!

my grad school options!

( huge post! with poll! vote! )

my day so far

08:25 - 09:00 Math 140 with Bjorn Poonen. I was too groggy to really follow what was going on, but I did see on the board "Math 140 Lunch, 1:10 at the Faculty Club (not free!)".

09:07 - 10:10 MCB 218P with Bob Glaeser. When I arrived they were talking about lattice groups (the symmetry groups of regular systems of points in the plane, generated by two linearly independent vectors). Now, there are generalyl considered to be five such lattice, but one of them is "body centered rectangular," and I think it's incredibly bogus (choose new basis vectors and suddenly you have a rhomboidal system!). I wasn't convinced that it isn't bogus, although I do think I caught a glimmer of why this lattice is thought to be so handy by crystallographers. Then nobody had a question to ask so I asked about how magnetic lenses work (like in an electron microscope) - how is the field arranged so that it will focus parallel rays? Bob had a really nice explanation for this, which I'll reproduce in nibot_lab one of these days. How do I calculate where the field lines go? I think that's somewhat nontrivial.

10:15 - 13:00 a blissful almost-three-hours nap in the chemistry library — a bunch of nights of 5 hrs sleep has gotten me quite tired. They have these nice vinyl chairs facing the windows that you can curl up in, or you can lounge in and put your feet against a sort of shelf. the view is pretty nice, too.

13:10 - 14:00 lunch at the faculty club! well, lo and behold, the faculty club is open to any anyone. they have a salad bar and a grill and also make sandwiches.. I think the food is more exciting off-campus actually, but I had a decent roast beef sandwich for $5.14. I ran into John Clarke and he nodded at me. We always exchange nods — I wonder if he knows that I took a full four courses from him? anyway, four others from M140 came and we had a nice little lunch with Prof. Poonen, although it did seem a little awkward in that it's sort of ridiculous that the semester is almost over and we're only now meeting each other. Nonetheless, I think these lunches are a splendid idea. (I asked Prof. Poonen about his first name — he says he's one-eighth Norwegian!)

13:10 - 14:00 Tour the Zettl group's lab in Birge and Leconte halls. This is the local nano-scale physics lab, where kennyjensen works. He introduced me as a prospective grad student for Superfine's group... one of their big competitors, at UNC. Zettl's group seems to have a lot more labspace. I still get the feeling these groups are just "messing about with nanotubes." (-:

There's a lot of interesting stuff coming up next week.. some stuff to look forward to:

Tomorrow: Charter Day! Everyone's favorite holiday.. Berdahl will give you a cupcake!

Saturday: Cal Day! everyone's second-favorite holiday!

Monday, April 19: finite universe?, a review of cosmology and the topology of spacetime, hosted by our beloved MSRI.

April 20 to 23: Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2004 — held in Berkeley this year!

April 21 to 28: Matlab Programming Contest

April 22 to 24: J. Robert Oppenheimer Centennial at Berkeley

May 1: Berkeley Nanotechnology Forum

May 5: MUSA-sponsored dinner with faculty?

last (pre-) grad school post

I found another graduate school ranker. It's based on a survey distributed to current grad students.

It says I should go to Rochester. Just ranking over "overall satisfaction," Rochester comes in second, after UC Santa Cruz and tied with Cornell. UNC is lumped in the third quartile. CMU did not respond.

I suspect this survey has a huge amount of self-selective bias in it, though. We should all sign up to take part in next year's incarnation. (There were 32 responses for Rochester and 28 for UNC — far more than for most departments, so the results should be statistically significant. Rochester has 135 physics PhD students, and UNC has 64.)

But I liked UNC so much!