Grad School: Week One

First off, where are you Tim, Toto, and Alfredo? Updates! Pronto! Stat! Schnell! (Do the French have a word for quickly? I'm thinking probably not. If they do its probably not a catchy one or two syllable one.)

Now it's time to update you on my first week at graduate school.

I'm taking three classes and being a lab T.A. My three classes are Quantum Mechanics, Electromagnetic Theory, and Mathematical Methods of Optics and Physics. So far it seems like my first semester will be covering material that I've already seen before, but trying to really get it down this time. I'll be T.A.ing for intro mechanics and E&M labs, which should be fun, but right now means that I have to do all of their ten labs in the next week, which is not so fun.

I'm in an office with two other first years (though there are supposed to be three others but apparently they have found somewhere else to do all their work). The other two students in my office are Shane, who graduated from Knox College in Iowa last year, and Jim who graduated from Hamilton (and also swam as an undergrad) but has been teaching high school near Boston for the last few years.

I found out that the motto here at U of R is Meliora which is Latin for "Always Better" or some other similar phrase with the word better in it. This is slightly less verbose than Carleton's motto (Declaratio Sermonum Tuorum Illuminat--"The Revelation of Your Words Illuminates"), but it's still a good one. The colors seem to be pretty much exactly the same as Carleton's, but the mascot is a yellowjacket (bee).