Yo. I've been working in this lab now for about 9 months. I still feel like I know nothing and I still feel completely new. But I'm learning a lot...for reals. And I'm experiencing a different kind of learning than I did in classes. I'm sure all of you have taken classes where you cram your head full of information during 10 weeks and then dump it all out after the final. One of the nice things about Carleton is that this effect is minimized. Of the 6 courses I have taken so far in graduate school, I only retained a good amount of material from 2, maybe 3 of them. I say 3 because the 3rd is a class I just finished in December...we'll see if it sticks. Isn't that a horrible thing? We have 15 weeks here at Maryland to take a class. With all that time they can't get the material out effectively? It's strange.
I remember a whole lot more from my classes at Carleton than I do here at Maryland. I can think of 2 main reasons, but feel free to propose others.
1) At Carleton, the pace moves so fast, that you have to pay close attention in class or else you'll miss everything. When I came to Maryland, I was astonished when we started reviewing material from the previous class. I was even more astonished when this started happening every class period. Although I find this helpful sometimes, I think it encourages people (me) to zone out in the beginning of class and ultimately become disengaged throughout the rest of the class period. I suppose this also related to the fact that the courses at Maryland are straight up easier than those at Carleton. For one of my electives, I took a course about how radiation affects materials. You'd be surprised how much stuff you touch daily has been irradiated. For example, plastic grocery bags, tires, and food packaging have all been irradiated with an electron beam. Everyone has heard of polyethylene. It is what makes up your plastic water bottles. Exposing the monomer, ethylene, to radiation under various conditions can drastically change its physical properties. Ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene can actually be used as a hip replacement. Anyway, despite how interesting the course was (this is the one I finished in Dec), I hated it. I think I felt this way because it was not challenging enough (possibly because it was combined with undergrads). I got through almost every assignment and test by using unit analysis. There wasn't any difficult math, and all the cool physics is typically covered in math! By the way, unit analysis is, by example, when you know that the answer to your problem is going to be in units of time, and they give you a distance and a speed, than you just divide the distance by the speed to get the time because distance is in meters and speed is in meters/second.
Crap. As I've been writing I realize that a) this was a course of which I did not do a mental dump and b) I didn't learn enough to actually have my brain full, which is the whole point of what I started with. In fact, I think it turned into stream of consciousness a little.
Anyway, this class in particular moved very slowly, so I would just bring my computer and go on gchat all period.
Wow. Now I can't even remember what my second reason for mental dumps was. Oh well. What I meant to say at some point was that I have been learning way more from being part of this research group than I have in my classes. It makes sense too because obviously a PhD is more than just classes (otherwise it would be a masters).
I think the key way to learning something effectively is to get involved in it. Obvious, right? As obvious as it seems I feel like a lot of professors do not embrace it. I've had too many professors that just go through the motions of teaching introductory material. It is clearly "elementary" and boring to them, but they have to teach it. One professor I had uses the same power point presentations every year except for the occasional new slide to discuss a modern application for a couple minutes.
I think the classes I enjoyed or learned from the most were those that either had labs or had an intense project (no non-science classes discussed here btw). Although I spent a lot of time on lab reports in contemporary experimental physics at Carleton, I loved that class. I think part of why I liked it so much was because I was putting my time into an experiment. So why would I want to write a shitty report after all my hard work to get good data?
What I'm trying to say the long way is that I really care about the research I'm doing and want to get good results. And through this "investment" of mine I am learning all sorts of new shit. Back at Carleton I had the hardest time reading academic papers. Now I have a much easier time with them because I've read so many. I also get really hands on with the equipment in the lab. If something breaks (which happens frequently), the other graduate students and I have to fix it ourselves rather than send it to a specialist or something. This hands-on approach forces us to get into the nitty gritty details of how the equipment works, even if its as simple as a pressure gauge (which is not always simple btw).
Ok, so this really isn't a research update. It is definitely more of a ramble. Adios
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