Books

A little more than two years ago there was a challenge floating around my neighborhood of the internet. It was very straightforward: read 100 books in 2010. I decided to try it, so I tracked the books I read in 2010, and got to 67 books. Admittedly, that's on average more than a book a week, so that's not bad. This year, I tried again. And today I finished the 100th book I've read this year!
Next year my goal is to read 50 books in English, 5 livres en francais, and 50 scholarly articles. The French books will probably be the kicker, but I've only read about a dozen articles this year, so that could be too. We'll see- it depends on where I'm looking for background for my thesis in the spring and what I'm doing after graduation.
Anyway, back to working on my grad school apps, now that I've finished my book. I've submitted 5 apps, but that means I have 6 to go.

Published! Update on Janus particle research.

One of the articles I collaborated on this summer (at my REU at Lehigh) is now published as a letter in Langmuir, a physical chemistry journal.

Self Assembly of Janus Ellipsoids

Applying to Graduate School; Warnings

So, I have my final list of graduate programs all put together, my recommenders all have their information, I've put together my resume, started work on my personal statement...the one problem is transcripts. There's a strike of the union workers at l'Universite de Sherbrooke (in Quebec province) where I did my study abroad. So those transcripts are taking up to a month to arrive, which I did not count on. Plus, they cannot currently fax them, so they're taking that long to get mailed to the translation service too. So much for everything being on time, let's hope a note of explanation will help the admissions committee. Anyway, my advice for today is to be prepared early with transcripts and translations if you study at any non-English speaking institution.

In other news, I am not going to grad school in physics because I realized how important it is to me to precisely understand the math involved. I get very frustrated with handwaving explanations and using math I don't fully understand. So I am mostly applying to applied math programs. I want to still look at modeling the physical world, but from a mathematically rigorous position. In fact, I am generally as interested in the math as the physics, and find the math to come more naturally. I am still applying to the MIT-WHOI program in physical oceanography, but I have an internship there for January and will decide then whether that is what I would rather pursue.
ttfn

Grad School Apps

Hi all,
If anyone reading this would like to comment on the graduate programs I am examining, please do so in the comments. I am interested in statistical/continuum mechanics, particularly fluid dynamics, colloids, and granular media. I am willing to come at research from the fields of math, physics, or oceanography. Here are the programs I am considering at the moment:
Physics: Duke, Brandeis, UMass Amherst, UChicago, NYU, Clark, Emory, Georgetown U
Applied Physics: Harvard
Mathematics: RPI, NCSU, NYU
Applied Mathematics: Columbia, Brown, NJIT (mathematical sciences, joint program with Rutgers)
Oceanography: MIT-WHOI, looking for another

I want to get this down to 5 math programs, 5 physics, and up to 2 oceanography to actually apply to.

Lehigh REU 2011 Results (Janus Ellipsoids)

Hi all,
Once again I don't really have time to write much (unpacking, repacking, GREs, family visits, you know). So, I will direct you firstly to the paper that the Lehigh research group is working on publishing. It's up at the ArXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.2571 (not my own project, but it's what inspired all the work I did [and yes, I helped write it, woo having my name on there]).

From what was 90% my own sweat tears and blood, here's the poster on my project:

Hopefully it'll be a paper some day, but the grad student who's theoretically been working on writing it hasn't responded to my emails this week, so I don't know what's happening there. Oh well. I'm planning to take the poster to the March APS meeting, so if you have questions that aren't easy to ask in writing, you could ask me then.
ttfn

Lehigh REU research: a Brief summary

Below you'll find the 'abstract' we'll be sending to the NSF summarizing my summer work. I did some other stuff besides what's mentioned, and later I'll give more details, but for now I just want to put something up before I leave tomorrow.

Monte Carlo Simulations

A Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is a method commonly used in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.  While in general MC is just a sampling scheme, it is normally used for importance sampling.  The MC method starts from a given 'position' and takes a random walk, returning information from wherever it travels.  With importance sampling, MC does not take a purely random walk, but instead will take a random step and then check the final position against some requirement. If the final position meets the requirements, the information for that position is recorded as data and a new step is tried. Otherwise, the simulation goes back and takes a new random step.