Julia's Blog

the good and bad of grad school yearmark 2.2

2009-10-26T03:09:00.000-07:00

I have to give a talk on Thursday at LBL on a project that I've been ignoring for a while, so this is naturally a really stressful prospect that fills me with great fear of utter public humiliation. In addition to the fear of public humiliation (which is real, because the people there are truly intelligent and awesome and I admire them enormously and I want their respect) there's also the fear that even if my talk is well-recieved, I'll still be a half-assed dilletante claiming things that I can't produce (or don't actually intend to produce, or something). I'd rather be honest, even if my honesty is underwhelming.

Anyway, but as a result of preparing for this talk, I've had to revisit some things and pull out some papers that I printed out three or four years ago as an undergrad. And the nice thing is that I guess I have grown as a scientist in grad school. I've learned more fundamental concepts, equations look more familiar to me, my vocabulary has expanded (which means an increase in the probability that I will have some idea of what a paper is about by looking at its title) and I'm able to be critical, sometimes, of what people are doing. This last thing is probably the most important, and in practice often boils down to just trusting myself. This also often backfires and makes me overconfident more likely to think that things are stupid when I don't understand them, but that's (mostly) okay.

So where am I at 2.2 years into grad school? I've learned a lot, but I haven't (yet) produced a lot. This is an okay thing to say so long as it changes, hopefully soon, but is stressful because there's no guarantee that things will work out for themselves.

2008-10-27T01:42:00.000-07:00

More wine

2008-08-15T21:20:00.001-07:00

At the banquet today I tried to wines. I tried a cabernet sauvignon, and a chardonnay from some place callled charing hills or something. Both were okay; tasty, drinkable, but not amaazing.

Energy efficiency workshop: day 1, part 2

2008-08-14T23:44:00.000-07:00

The fourth speaker of session 1 was Garry Rumbles, a cool guy with a British accent who defended the bulk heterojunction cell. The main message I got from his talk was that the Band diagram is wrong (and therefore that physicists are dumb!). The reason why the Band diagram is wrong is because it hides a lot of the details that are present in molecules, such as the locations of the triplet states, and of various trap states. Also, it doesn't show the fact that holes and excitons annihilate each other. Maybe this is because of the coulombic attraction, although I'm not sure.

He pointed out that the big breakthrough, credited to Alan Heeger, was that you could make solar cells with C60 as an electron acceptor, and with this solar cell architecture you get very slow recombination rates. In P3HT the exciton diffusion time is 300 to 500 ps, which I guess is pretty short, and so the distance excitons diffuse is less than 10 nm. I knew this already. Then he went on to discuss some stuff that was probably important but which I didn't write down and don't recall. Finally, he showed a plot of how a solar cell degrades--it can last for ~50 days, although it seems to have degraded quite a bit by the end of it. He also commented that the most efficient organic cells that have been recently made were made in companies, not in government-funded research labs or universities. And he talked about intrinsic and extrinsic sources of degradation. Extrinsic ones that he listed were oxygen, water, and UV-presumably, they react with the active material, but the material could be protected. Also, there are effects like Delamination, PSS (not sure what this means now but it's in my notes) and Reducing the metal. Intrinsic effects were oxidizing effects, due to polarons (or related to polarons), reducing species, and intermal conversion (which presumably heats up the system and causes thermal damage).

I guess that last point is interesting because internal conversion is the way in which plants dissipate heat, and is deemed "safe" compared to the alternative of a long-lived excited state chlorophyll. I guess heat damage is an issue in things like computers and optical devices, where we need to have chillers and heat sinks. At the same time, plants are probably a lot more exposed to air than computers or laminated (i.e. plastic-enclosed) solar cells, and so they heat from them probably gets conducted away a lot faster. Or maybe there's just less heat to be released. In any case, I wonder where the boundary is between internal conversion=good and internal conversion=bad. Maybe it's not such a good thing in solar cells.

Then he talked about Time Resolved Microwave Conductivity (TRMC) which is this technique that measures charge transfer rates and recombinations lifetimes, I think. I'm not really clear on this but the technique seems cool, and he harped on the importance of considering the triplet state in these calculations, something that I guess solid state physicists don't do. He also mentioned that P3HT has pretty good Intersystem crossing. There was a question at the end about tirplets, and how the are too low in energy to really charge separate.

Which brings us to lunch. I ended up chatting with this guy who works on singlet fission (into triplets). He emphasized the importance of fission rather than intersystem crossing as the desirable mechanism. I guess I had never differentiated these two mechanisms in my mind, so I suppose I should look into that. And at lunch I met some grad students from the Kapteyn Group, who were all cool.

The next talk was about the hydrogen economy. The main point the guy tried to make is that we should only focus our research funding on things that will scale, in time. He doesn't think Carbon sequestration will every become commercially relevant. and apparently crystalling PV cells pay for themselves in 30 years, thin films in 1-2 years, and wind in a few months. And he thinks wind could surpass nuclear energy by 2020. And apparently hydrogen requires 30% of the stored energy in order to generate the fule. But I was a little bored and started doing other things in my notepad.

Then there was a guy who talked about the redox chemistry of water oxidation. I was not really awake, although surely all that is important. THe take home message there was that doing a thorough kinetic analysis of your system is an important thing to do.

And then there was another guy who talked about making photoelectrochemical cells. His main point was that metal oxides are the class of materials taht are most promising. They are stable ("most rocks are oxides") and can be semiconductors. He's doing combinatorial analysis to look for candidate metal oxides, and he's developed modules that can be given to high school students who can help out with this. I thought that was cool, and something I probably wouldn't have liked, at least in theory, as a high school student.

The final talk was by this wonderful lady--she talked about CO2 reduction, but I was tired and learned nothing. But I do remember, either from her talk or the preceding one, that there are catalysts available for making methanol or hydrocarbons out of CO2( without having super-high energy intermediates) but not ethanol--so , that's is a problem for GM potentially.

The poster session was excellent. I learned about triplet fission, and talked to someone who worked on doing 2D spectroscopy with pulse shaping.

Wine Tasting

2008-08-14T22:01:00.000-07:00

At the poster session, about which I'll write soon but not now, people were drinking wine. I like wine and the greasy eggplant I had consumed for dinner left me wanting wine, but it cost $6.50 at the bar for a glass, and I didn't want to pay. It looked like maybe some people had these red tickets that got them wine and beer for free, but I especially didn't want to ask.

So after the poster session I walked to safeway, intending to buy some apples and wine. In addition to apples, I ended up getting tea bags, a cucumber, some cherry tomatoes, and some celery. But to my dismay, the Safeway had no wine. So I purchased my produce (And a Colorado mug) and left. Fortunately, a young and probably underage boy who worked at safeway told me that there was a liquor store down the street. So I walked down the street, and shortly I came upon this wine haven called "spirits and wine." The people inside were kind and friendly. I wanted to buy a single bottle and get out, but I also wanted to try something new, but then again I also wanted to get a wine I knew I would like in case the new one was bad. So in the end I got a

Oxford Landing Shiraz, 2006 (South Austrialia) which cost about $7.

and a

Mosel River Riesling, 2007.

The only criteria I had going in was that the wine had to have screw caps, because I don't have any stoppers at the hostel. This turned out not to be too limiting, although it kept me from buying the Yellow Tail Resiling I was going to buy initially, or anything from Sutter Home.

I like the Shiraz, although I wouldn't have a few months ago. I only started liking red wine very very recently--maybe a month ago. It kind of reminds me of the Pinot Noir I had with my grandparents. It's kind of fruity, I think (I guess I don't exactly know what fruity means when it comes to wines, but I use it anyway), not sweet, and has this taste of "I could get really nasty and start tasting like acetone, but right now I'm just pleasantly intriguing and very wine-like."

I would buy it again, and drink it, but I wouldn't tell people that they absolutely must drink this wine if they want their life to be complete.

As for the Riesling:

It is delicious, sweet (but not too sweet, not like the sweet Reisling I had at Suppenkuche on June 29th). It's fruity, and tastes bubbly even though it doesn't actually have bubbles in it.

I would definitely buy it again, although I dont' know for sure that it's the best Riesling I've ever had or anything. I like Riesling a lot.

Other wines that I have had:

Carlo Rossi Sangria: This was my first (maybe second) love, only I learned that if you keep a huge jug for a month it will, eventually, get nasty. Maybe some vintage years are better than others; the last time I had it I couldn't help but admit its less-than-perfectness, even though I still love it because Sangria is Delicious. It is sweet and delicious and like bubbly fruit juice.

Sutter Home Muscato: If Sangria wasn't my first love, this was. It is sweet and fruity and tastes of delicious muscato grapes and is delicous. And cheap. And Delicious.

Yellow Tail Pinot Grigio: I tried it at my parents' house and liked it.

Sutter Home Gewurztraminer: tasty

Some other kind of fancy-pants Gewurztraminer that I had at an italian Restraurant in LA: not tasty, although I didn't admit it to Robert at the time

Some fancy-pats Muscato

Pinot Noir for $16 (one of the Cheaper ones, don't recall the brand): didn't like it at first, but this was the first dry red wine I enjoyed when I had it with my grandparents.

Alazani, a Georgian wine that Borya brought over once: Delicious. And Red. and somewhat sweet.

Cheapo Zinfandel (don't recall the winery--this is why I'm writing these things down!)--pretty good, but not when it's been standing for a month. But good to cook with.

The Brain, it is Full: CU workshop, day 1 part 1

2008-08-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

Today was the first full day of this energy efficiency workshop that I'm attending. There were 8 full talks (~45 minutes each) plus a brief introduction to energy policy in the beginning by a guy who works for the Department of Energy, which I didn't really follow too well other than that it seems like the DOE is funding a lot of weapons research and a lot of fuel.

The first talk was by John Benner, who talked about the economics of solar cells. He said that photovoltaics are in a pretty typical "growing curve" in terms of how markets develop, but there will need to be a lot of breakthroughs in order for solar-generated electricity to become cheap enough to be competitive with fossil fuels. Showed some calculations of projected growth rates. He also mentioned that because people have underestimated growth of the solar cell market in their predictions, there hasn't been enough supply of solar cells to meet the demand. Also, that we might be in a "bubble" wrt solar cells, where the cost of the modules is going down, abut the price is not because people will pay. Later, though, there was a discussion about how much energy it takes to make a solar cell; it turns out that you don't get any net energy out of your installation until you stop building new solar cells.

The next talk was by Arthur Frank, from NREL, who talked about dye sensitized solar cells, and about the properties of titania and sensitizers that were desirable for these cells. It turns out that organic molecules are catching up with the more expensive ruthenium based dyes in terms of efficiency. Also, the surface roughness of the titania determines things like charge transport. There was also a comment at the end about trap states in titania, and he said that no one really knows much about traps. Presumably traps are defects in semiconductor structure--at least that's how I always thought about them--but they may not be bad. The person had asked whether there are different kinds of traps (i.e. deep vs. shallow), and whether it's possibly that one kind slows down diffusion and the other kind encourages exciton recombination. And at the end there was a comment about how some Japanese engineers had tested a solar cell for 3 years and it dropped in efficiency by 5%, but this wasn't due to the dye leaking (some dye-sensitized solar cells are made of liquid electrolytes).

Then we had a break. I ate a bagel and some fruit. Then Brian Gregg, also from NREL, talked about small molecules solar cells, and about doping organic semiconductors to improve their performance. The highest efficiency organic solar cell is 5%--not good enough! He talked a little bit about why the conventional band diagram that people use to describe p-n junction solar cells in silicon is the wrong picture to have; how a state diagram is more accurate. Also, unlike Silicon, you can have an open circuit voltage in excitonic solar cells even if your electrodes have the same work function, because you only have hole transport through the material, and not electron transfer. This has to do with the energies of only one of the HOMO or LUMO lining up with the work function of the electrode. There was also something about how you can use chemical potential gradients to help you with your solar cell in addition to electric field gradients, even though you can't do this in silicon. I didn't quite understand that
.
Then he talked a lot about interfaces and the problems with recombination; however, I wasn't sure if he was omitting recombination in bulk because it wasn't important, or because that wasn't what he studied.
He also talked about how In small molecules, the binding energy of the exciton is about 0.25 eV, which is more than the thermal energy available at room temperature (kT). So excitons have to diffuse to an interface and then be split at an interface, in order for them to be useful. But even at the interface the coulombic attraction doesn't go away. There are ways to overcome this, but they end up wasting 0.9 eV, which is a lot. It think this involves some sort of thermal energy, but I didn't understand how it works. He also had a way of overcoming the coulombing attraction energy, but hasn't demonstrated it yet. It involved doping, and he proceeded to talk about the effects of "doping" for the rest of the talk. (Actually, a professor from Maryland who I talked to later and who works on SPM told me that she doesn't think doping is the right term; that really, you're polarizing the molecule differently). But yes, apparently some recent work out of Peter Peumans' group at stanford showed that super-purifying P3HT doesn't actually make a better device--but people don't know exactly what these dopants are.

So Brian Gregg's group has apparently done some "chemical" doping, which increases the dielectric constant of these molecules (the ones he used was PPEEB) and through that maybe increases the mobility (if I understood correctly). And through the Poole-Frenkel equation, which is a super-oversimlification that works, this increases the conductivity.

The next guy was Garry Rumbles, and talked about bulk heterojunction cells, and his talk was cool, so I'll write about that later.

Distopia

2008-08-13T21:28:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day of our energy efficiency conference, and Nathan Lewis, a chemistry professor at Caltech, gave the keynote. He is an extremely charismatic speaker and an obviously intelligent man. His talk was very depressing. It was much like watching An Inconvenient Truth, except more scientific. He had a few main points that I've remembered in the hour and a half since the talk ended:
1. There is enough non-renewable fuel to provide 3,000 years' worth of energy
2. But that fuel will dump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere if we use it

3. CO2 is a stable molecule--it doesn't react with oxygen on its own--so it doesn't really break down on its own, ever. It needs a catalyst, like something they use in photosynthesis.
4. There's a lot of energy coming to the earth from the sun
5. But the only way to store it in a way that will scale to the entire world economy is in chemical bonds, i.e. in fuels. Not batteries.

6. If we don't start building solar cells soon, then we (by we he means the world) will build coal and gas plants, because that is "business as usual," and those have a lifetime of 40 years

7. By 2050 we will have dumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere that scientists predict bad shit might go down (or something--I'm not too clear on this part, and I don't think anyone really is) unless we stop emitting now

8. So we better stop emitting CO2 now, guys.

Then Walter Kohn (nobel laureate and creator of the much-despised DFT) suggested that maybe we should try to reduce the world's population. Nathan Lewis replied that that's not very practical; plus, if we were to do that, we'd have to get rid of mostly Americans. Then he answer a question about methane and the meeting was dimissed.

Bouldering

2008-08-12T23:26:00.000-07:00

I've arrived safely and soundly in Boulder, Colorado, where I will attend an energy efficiency workshop from tomorrow until Friday. I'm staying at the International Hostel, which is a frat house turned Hostel. I've managed to piss off the front desk guy by being totally clueless about checking in procedures, and by somehow not knowing the code for getting in here after hours--either that, or else he's just not friendly and grouchy. But staying here is inexpensive, my room is clean enough, and the showers, which are basically metal boxes, are going to be a character-building and water conserving experience that will, I'm sure, make me happy to have packed my shower sandals with me on this trip.

I really really liked this town when I first stepped off the bus from Denver. It smells of pine trees. I walked the 0.8 miles to the hostel and was pleased to see people out and about; this seems like a real college town--maybe Berkeley is like this at night, but I don't live in Berkeley. But after I went through the checking in awkwardness here and went for a walk in search of food, I felt a little less in love with the town because I began to feel self-conscious. I wanted food, you see, real food, but most places that were open at this hour seemed to be intended to serve people alcohol. Which is good and fine, except that I don't have anyone to go drinking with right now. I ended up buying a middle eastern chicken wrap from a convenience store where I also bought dental floss and deodorant, and it tasted pretty okay, except that it had all the standard subway sandwich vegetables that add this uniform taste to everything, masking the potential distinctiveness of incredients like chicken and feta cheese. In any case, I got my food, and now I am fed with something more than chocolate-covered esperesso beans. And it is late, and I must go tend to my assigned reading if I am to get what I want out of this workshop.

For the reading of it

2008-07-29T06:24:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth", which had been offhandedly given a tenuous thumbs up by Anna many many years ago when she went off to college and I looted the books in her room that were not deemed important enough to accompany her. It was, indeed, very good, especially for the kind of drawn out victorian novel that I expected it to be. It was basically about this attractive 29-year old named Miss Lily Bart going about living her elaborate social life in New York in 1900, attending parties and looking for a husband to take her out of her poverty. There are numerous important plot turns and it all ends quite tragically (as the inside cover put it), but the thing that struck me was this line, somewhere, about how to Lily it was important to live wealthily, or at least giving the appearance of being wealthy, because a live of poverty is practically not worth living.

I guess I remembered this phrase above others because it made me realize that I've somehow acquired an analogous value, if you replace wealth with something like being social and having lots of friends and exciting moments of passionate feeling. I can't put one word to my values the way Edith Wharton can to a character in a book, but maybe someone seeking to find the most laughable about me could. Anyway, one of my biggest fears is having my life reduced to a monotony of *getting up, going to work, coming home, eating dinner, occupying myself in some retarded and uninspired fashion with some menial task like washing dishes or laundry or cleaning the bathroom or watching tv, and then going to sleep, and repeating from (*) ad infinitum. This lifestyle wouldn't necessarily be objectionable if I had no other options, but the objectionable part is having other options, having access to life's more titillating pleasures (or pastimes) and not partaking of them because of inertia. And by tittilating pleasures, I mean things like inviting friends over for fun, whacky, and/or noisy parties, going out dancing or hiking or wandering the city streets at 3 am, taking up a hobby and getting sufficiently non-sucky at it to be able to impress ignorant onlookers...the kind reader gets the idea.

I'm not going to go into whether or not this is a reasonable thing to fear, and what kind of spoiled brat this might make me. I've thought about whether this fear is justified or not (it's probably not), about whether there's anything wrong with a simple lifestyle (when you put it this way, there probably isn't). The point is that I have this fear and that it's a pretty big part of how I perceive my life. I maybe be a snooty stuck up brat (much like the fictional Lily Bart) but the point here is not that I should try to become less of one.

Back to the point--I'm afraid of falling into this kind of lifestyle. And compared to what college was like, this last year has been, socially, a narrowing of my world. I don't hang out with friends as often as before. In part, I haven't wanted to. I haven't had any big parties like the housewarming tea party or pirate party of years past. I've frequently thought that it would be cool and fun to do, but ultimately I haven't done it. And that's okay, because I haven't really wanted to badly enough, but whenever I contemplate the matter I'm plagued by a fear that if I don't kick my social life back into the gear it used to be in, my world will slowly shrink into dull nothingness and I will end up an old stiff-nosed crotchety woman who wears starched vests and walks about town with her nose high in the air and a thin condescending smile towards all the fun things of life. That would be kind of sucky, because I want to partake of the fun things in life.

I guess my fear of not having an exciting social life starts from my earliest memories, where fun things were equivalent to parties and lots of other people being around. And having parties requires some amount of social capital (and funds too, enough to feed people or at least enclose them and give them a place to sit, but I'm ignoring that for now because that cost need not be high). But, as I learned, having parties is a good way for me to feel that people like me, but it's not always very fun or very fulfilling for me. And so sometimes it feels like I put all this energy into something that I don't actually enjoy, but just do because somewhere, somehow, I've gotten the impression that that's the only way to live life.

In reading "The house of mirth" I felt like, on one hand, I could understand all these people's needs to outdress and out-entertain their co peers, but on the other hand, the struggles of victorian high society seem so petty. For the first time, though, in reading about the petty lives of rich people, I didn't feel like I was above their petty struggles because I work for a living, dammit (or could potentially, at any rate, but that's another story). Now I understand that a lot of these rich conceits stem from that same desire to make live be about something more than making a living and getting by each day. And so I empathize with those fictionalized stories instead of scorning them, because this same desire is the source of many of my insecurities about how I'm living my life.

I am what I am

2008-04-29T20:29:00.000-07:00

I've started going to the Israeli Dance class at Berkeley's Hillel this semester. It's a much more active class than the one we had a stanford; there are a lot of Jews (mostly from LA) who come and a lot of them know a lot of dances. So it's been a really awesome experience to learn all these dances.

Socially, though, it does feel a little awkward. Everything feels a little socially awkward actually. As I was walking home today I realized that yes, making friends has always been hard for me. That doesn't mean I can't or don't do it; I have a lot of friends, and I enjoy meeting people and making friends (this is one example of how just because something is hard doesn't mean that I can't or won't or shouldn't do it). Nonetheless, being in new environments with people who have very different interests and goals from me is hard. It's a new feeling now because I'm not as used to it as I was before.

When I started going to the Israeli Dance class at Stanford, I felt a lot more awkward. I felt ugly and young and immature. People didn't really talk to me (because, as it turns out, making friends and starting conversations is hard for other people, not just for me), and so I felt like there must be something wrong with me. Then, after dancing with these people for nearly a year, that feeling went away. Well now it's back, because I'm in a new crowd. I feel uncomfortable again, although I really don't feel like there's anything wrong with me. It's just unusual, after spending all my days in lab where I feel, on the whole, pretty comfortable. It's good for me to feel uncomfortable like this, though; it reminds me that there's more to social interaction than discussing interesting topics (i.e. science) and it keeps me from getting too full of myself, which I am wont to do at times. For you see, there's still a large part of me, that will probably never go away, that assumes that all those undergrads (or at least the ones that don't smile at me, which is about half of them) hate me and thing I'm disgusting and want me to disappear from their holy Hillel forever.

I'm particularly reflective about this today because I saw my piano teacher's daughter, Paula, who goes to the Israeli Dance class after mine. After chatting with her and some other people I ended up borrowing a book called "Dancing with Cancer" by Loui Tucker, a dance teacher from San Jose who had breast cancer. The book is a compilation of the emails she sent out to her family and friends during the course of her therapy. It's written very well and very honestly; a part of me was bothered by her confidence in herself and in her network of friends and in the love her friends and everyone around her has for her. I think I was bothered because I'd like to have that kind of confidence in myself and my life, and I don't, at least not now.

I'm so lucky to have the family and friends that I do--and I know that--but knowing and feeling are two different things.

Humbled Revision

2008-02-24T12:12:00.000-08:00

So, I have a midterm on thursday that I have a very good chance of failing--like seriously failing, due to sheer ignorance-- and over the past week I'm trying to get off my self-righteous soapbox and actually learn quantum chemistry. It's a very difficult subject. I dislike my professors pedagogy because it doesnt' really help me learn, but the truth is that there are a lot of approximation methods with their plusses and minuses, and as graduate students in physical chemistry we should know about them. I have an enormous amount of respect for my TA, not least because he gives me no credit for my half-assed homework assignments and also because he's actually quite good at answering questions.

So what's the point of this entry? That I'm looking for that balance between my self-righteous approach to my own educations (i.e. what are these fucktards doing not explaining anything to me?!? They can't teach worth shit!) and acknowledging that sometimes new things are hard and sometimes I just need to work a little harder than I maybe want to. I don't really know where that balance lies.

How Chemistry textbooks work (apparently)

2008-02-20T11:34:00.001-08:00

Okay, I think I get it. In Chemistry textbooks, when an author is going to explain something to me, he will first tell me the results, tell me (in just enough detail to get me confused) what the essence of the thing he is going to cover is, and then dive into a chapter that covers the material for real.

I guess I understand the value of this approach. This way, I know why I should care about the method before I get into it. THe problem is that these introductions have just enough confusing terminology that when I read them before having read the actual chapter I get horribly nervous and feel like I don't understand anything at all.

But even in the course of the chapter, there is still this issue that the results are presented before their justification.

Take, for example, Configuration Interaction. It is, to my current (2-days' worth of exposure) understanding, a method of approximating the ground state wavefunction of an n-electron molecule by taking linear combinations of known n-electron wavefuctions and varying the linear combination coefficients such that the energy is minimized (i.e. use the variational principle).

Szabo and Ostlund covers this well. I'm not just saying this because Szabo's first name is Attilla, my TA recommended this book. But I guess the sad truth is that I actually have to read the whole 40 page chapter. I don't have that kind of attention span.

More on Chemistry vs Physics

2008-02-04T05:27:00.000-08:00

As I was drifting away to sleep five hours ago after writing my previous post, I realized that the reason why I don't feel the same hatred towards physics departments as towards chemistry departments is due to specific people. There were plenty of people in my physics classroom that made me feel like there was hostility; however, I interacted with enough people in the department at Stanford who were friendly and who encouraged me to learn rather than resenting my taking up their time. These were people who liked learning and cared about teaching. And while there was a lot of them, they are still individuals that stand out. The thing is, in physics, probably half of the people with whom I interacted wanted me to half a positive learning experience; the rest didn't care. In chemistry, the vast majority didn't care. I can name 2 people who positively influenced my learning as a chemistry major, and both of them I met through research. I can name 10, maybe 15 or even 20 people who positively impacted my physics education. Maybe the people who go into physics are more my kind of people?

Why I hate Chemistry Departments

2008-02-03T22:22:00.000-08:00

I decided last week that I hate Chemistry departments. I don't hate Chemistry--I almost majored in it in college--nor do I hate Chemists. Nonetheless, there is still something about chemistry departments that makes me deeply miserable, and I think that the greatest challenge I will have to overcome in grad school will be to figure out how to learn chemistry from the wonderful chemists that surround me in our department without falling into a pit of despair.

I first realized that I hate Stanford's chemistry department about three years ago, when I was a sophomore in college and was taking Quantum Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry, and had declared myself a chemistry major. By then, I had been working in a biophysical chemistry research lab for a year. I enjoyed research a lot--I met smart, fun, interesting people who shared many of my interests. I liked working on my own project, and even though it had not been going so well for the last six months of that year, I still valued working on it. Since I had all that going for me, I figured I could declare chemistry as my major, study it, and go on to a happy grad school in the sky.

But I was wrong. Mostly, I hated my classes. My biggest hate was Analytical Chemistry Lab. I think it was because I perceived that the TAs hated me. One of my TA's would go on and on about how lazy we Stanford students were compared to her undergraduate university (which, in case anyone is wondering, was not MIT). Ok fine. We are lazy. So I came to lab feeling not only bad about how I didn't understand the lab, but also feeling horrible about myself because clearly, this is even an easy class compared to the *real* chemistry classes out in real universities. Now, as a grad student, I look back and think "well it was just a lab class, it doesn't really matter." But it did really matter to me at the time, and being surrounded by TAs who resented having to teach me did not really encourage my love for the subject at all. Now I realize that many TAs resent having to teach because they have a lot of work to do themselves. My TA probably did not personally hate me, because I doubt she cared enough about me to really feel hate. I was just one of the many frustrations in her life, and a graduate students' life is filled with frustration. And the way one of my current labmates put it is this: Grad school is set up such that grad students always feel stupid. So they take out their feelings of inferiority on undergrads. If he's right, and I'm not sure if he is yet, this is probably what was happening in that lab.

Quantum Chemistry was the class I had been waiting to take for all of college. I tried to enjoy it at the time, but looking back, it was a major disappointment. I came out of that class with an appreciation for quantum mechanics, but with absolutely no intuition for it. I was sad. I wanted intuition. I wanted to understand what that spin-spin splitting that we had learned about in the context of NMR really was. And I wanted to understand what resonance structures really were. And what orbitals really were. And what the Stark effect was. I thought it was reasonable to expect to get this kind of understanding from a class that called itself quantum chemistry, but I was wrong. And it wasn't entirely for lack of trying. I read the textbook, I did the homeworks, I went to office hours, and I stayed after class asking the TA's lots of questions that, most of the time, they couldn't answer. What stands out in my mind the most was the introduction of spin. Spin is crucial to everything in science, and I am not even exaggerating--I am plagiarizing. The great David Chandler told me (and the rest of my Statistical Mechanics class) last semester that the difference between bosons and fermions is the most important distinction in all of science, because without it, you wouldn't have electrons, or the Pauli exclusion principle, or atoms or molecules...or proteins, or anything else that is Good in life and Fruitful for science. And so, given the importance of spin, and the distinction between fermions and bosons, you would expect--or at least hope--that a Quantum Chemistry class, the only quantum mechanics class required for chemistry majors, would teach people this loud and clear: Fermions are particles with half-integer spin, and bosons are particles with integer spin. And you would also think that in order to teach people this, you would tell them what spin is in a way that they can understand, or at least use.

I didn't get any of that from my quantum chemistry class. I also did not do too well in it (I got a B+). I was sad. Were it not for the experiences that were to follow, I would probably just assume that quantum mechanics is beyond me. Fortunately, I had a wonderful boyfriend who suggested that maybe if chemistry wasn't making me happy that I should major in something else. And when I replied that I was too incompetent to major in anything else, he dismissed these insecurities as being stupid. So stuck between stupid and stupid, I picked the less painful of the stupids. I had decided that if I was going to be bad at whatever it is I would major in anyway, I may as well major in something interesting, like physics. And hey, by the time I graduated with my physics degree, my GPA had gone up and not down, as I had expected.

And I say that not to brag, but to get to the point that mystifies me now. There is this idea in the scientific community that physics is harder than chemistry. I had this idea myself too in undergrad, which is why I felt so much hesitation about majoring in physics. But actually, this idea is kind of odd because the problems chemists try to solve are much more complex than those that physicists try to solve. But the problems in chemistry are so complex that chemists don't have time to go through the basics, and so there is a certain level of basic knowledge (e.g. What is a Hamiltonian? What is Angular Momentum? What is reduced mass?) that is assumed but rarely learned. And that stuff is really important if you ever want to build intuition.

And that brings me to the biggest source of evil in chemistry departments : my peers. And specifically, the hostility that I sense from my peers when I ask questions in class. You could say that this hostility is all in my head, and maybe I am exaggerating it because, yes, I am Jewish, but from talking to people I know that I am not the only one who feels this way. And that is what I completely don't understand. Presumably, we all want to learn chemistry, which is why we're in these classes, and so we should welcome each others' desire to learn. But for some weird reason it doesn't work that way. In the 2 chemistry departments I've inhabited, classes are percieved as a necessary evil, at best. Now, yes, chemistry is difficult. And yes, professors aren't always great, although the ones I've had at Berkeley all have been so far. But I think that as students, we're responsible for our own education and ultimately we have to make sure that we learn. And that is why I ask questions--to make sure that I learn the material. I'm about 90% sure that (most of) my questions aren't completely retarded. And yet, somehow, I do not feel asking questions is something that students feel comfortable doing, even when they are confused, perhaps because they are intimidated. I think this is bad, and more specifically, counterproductive. And maybe because everyone thinks that they should understand everything, or have seen it somewhere.

I think it comes back to the fact that a lot of basic knowledge is assumed in chemistry, but never really taught, so many people use terms that they haven't precisely defined (such as "coupling") and use shorthand notation (because writing out wavefunctions in full is too cumbersome) where a slight "typo" on the blackboard could completely change the meaning of the equation. This all makes me nervous and uncomfortable; in a safer environment, I can generally ask questions. But a chemistry department is not safe. Questions are not welcomed, since they are seen more as an annoyance for everyone than an opportunity for everyone to learn.

A postdoc in my lab said that it seems like physicists embrace each others' quirkiness more, whereas chemists are in general more socially conscious. I agree that this is true, although my evidence is not statistically significant. Still, I doubt my experience is unique--Stanford's chemistry department lost quite a few undergrad majors, and of the ones that stuck to it, a good number hated it. I don't know why. And even though I'd like to change things, I don't think it's in my power, at least not now. Now, I think, my objective is just to survive this hostility, and to extract all the wonderful knowledge that chemistry professors have to offer without becoming horribly depressed, like I did three years ago.

only a month?

2007-12-23T01:25:00.001-08:00

Dear me, has it only been a month since I last updated this journal? It feels like much longer. I've spent the last 2 days baking gingerbread and gingerbread cookies. I just mixed up a batch of a new recipe Robert found, and used my cuisinart for the first time ever. It was quite convenient; the butter actually looked sandy. Tomrrow is my birthday and I have to wake up in 7 hours to go hiking with my grandfather. Should be exciting.

Has my enthusiasm for life temporarily left me?

2007-11-21T00:45:00.001-08:00

In the very distant past, in the age of Napster and before the advent of facebook, Thanksgiving used to be a big rocking party. We had two days off--two!!--and I remember always gearing up for thanksgiving and feeling quite festive when it came. Now, not so much. I don't have to go into lab tomorrow, because my main activities for now are reading papers and doing homework, and I'm not even all that enthused about the prospect of not going to lab.

Maybe it's because all my friends are much further away, geographically, and inviting them over tomorrow night just isn't going to work. Maybe it's because I'm older and have been disappointed more often. Maybe it's because I like my work, and don't feel particularly overworked, and so I don't feel like I need or deserve this break. I'm excited to see family on Thursday and Saturday, but I'm not necessarily excited to not go into lab. But on the other hand I don't feel that excited about going into lab either. Hmmm.

I discover food blogs, obsess a little, and wonder if perhaps this is nothing to be ashamed of

2007-11-04T13:06:00.000-08:00

I called my grandmother this morning. She was really really sick over the past few weeks and it's a huge relief to hear her sounding happy and cheerful, and to know that she can go out for walks again. I told her that I made waffles for breakfast. Her reply? Oh that's wonderful. But you know, those things are too tasty, you have to watch yourself. I laughed it off, but that's the typical response I get from my grandma and my mom about various new endeavors I've attempted. Like when, about a month ago, I told my mom that I got worms for composting and she told me that I have a very patient husband, and that I should keep him away from other women so that he doesn't try to compare me to anyone else.

Anyway, so I think that these kinds of comments from my family have kept from truly getting into something. And to an extent, they still do.

But this last summer things were a little different. First of all, I'm older and wiser now, and have a husband who doesn't believe in the idea of moderation. Second, I lost weight in China (I'm not sure why, but I think that swimming a lot spring quarter had a lot to do with it. I never lose weight when I start swimming, but I do tend to lose weight when I stop swimming. This has happened to me only twice now, so this isn't too scientific a conclusion). I think I only lost about 5 pounds, but it was enough to make me feel better about my body. Furthermore, the fact that I could lost weight while eating tasty food made me thing about quality vs quantity of food. We always had a large amount of food in our house--I think this had to do with the excitement of having access to massive quantities of food that ex-soviets necessarily experience--and no one in my family has particularly good eating habits. So while we're all pretty healthy and not obese, we don't exactly have slim bodies at all. And this made me very very self-conscious all through high school, and through some of college. Anyway, having visited China made me think about how we view food; maybe it's better to spend more money on a small quantity of a really tasty thing, eat it, enjoy it, and then stop eating it. It helped that I came back to a summer with no research to do, and no real plans other than moving to San Francisco. So I read about food (and also investigated composting). Then we went to San Diego, and oh boy was that a lifechanging trip for me. First, I was on my own for a large part of the time. Second, I wasn't really counting dollars. So in terms of what we ate and what we did, the point was to maximize enjoyment, not necessarily get the most for our dollar. I tasted a mojito, I had spanish food, I truly enjoyed a shakespeare play for the first time in ages. This was all very sensual and very epicurean andd very nice, and a very welcome change from college.

In particular, at this lovely Indian Restaurant called Monsoon, in the Gaslamp district, I tried saag. Which is something I've tried before many times. It's basically Indian creamed spinach. But this time, I returned to my shiny new apartment in San Francisco and thought, hmm, I should find a recipe and learn how to make saag. And so after a google search, I found a recipe on a lovely food blog and then I learned what a food blog was. Oh my! People obsessively writing about food. My mother would never approve, or rather, my mother would never judge this to be a valuable use of time. And yet, how appealing. I read a read some more. I learned that mojitos require a lot of love from bartenders. I still haven't made one, but when I decide to try I know that I'll have lots of help from the internets.

I think the point of all this is that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about and reading about things that my mother would never think to do. My mom says that she is not very domashnaya--she doesn't stay at home and tend to her household, because she has bigger and better and more exciting things to do like ski and climb rocks and hang out with uber-cool 20-something year olds (who are now 30-something year olds) from poxod.com. And while my mom actually does cook very tasty food very well, and has a deceptively impressive garden and beautiful (and reasonably clean) house, all this stuff that she does around this house was always done as somewhat of an afterthought, at least in my view. And so I never learned how to do certain things because I felt like it would be shameful to think about them. But I don't feel so bad about my interests in cooking and composting and gardening now. Cause I'm a grad student now, I have no children, and so no matter what I do I won't be my mom. So I guess I can just be happy being me.

Grad school frustrations

2007-11-04T07:02:00.000-08:00

There is a fine line between a friendly, social atmosphere where I feel free and comfortable asking questions, and a distracting, unproductive atmosphere. Yesterday, I felt like that line was crossed. I felt like I got very little work done, due to unstoppable complaining and lab drama that I won't describe in detail, but that has to do with not all the grad students in the lab getting along.

To be fair, I like drama to an extent. It entertains me, it makes my life more fun, and it keeps me from having to invent drama. I think if there were no drama I would make some up just to amuse myself. But I don't like it when drama becomes destructive or distracting. Sometimes I think I'm being insensitive, because I am just new and I will maybe complain just as much in the future; other times I just think other people need to be more easy going, at least professionally.

How I do physics today

2007-10-31T14:25:00.000-07:00

1.) Bang head against table.

2.) Find typo in revered professors lecture notes

3.) wait 3 hours for said professor to confirm that typo is typo

4.) eat lots of oatmeal and chocolate chips

5.) write down 2 lines of problem set answers

Repeat steps 4 and 5 until thoroughly disgusted with myself.

It may not be efficient, but I'm slowly understanding angular momentum. Hooray!

Lectures and classes and learning

2007-10-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I returned to lab traumatized by Statistical Mechanics class. I came in making a face that apparently amused my labmate enough that she asked me what was wrong.

"Class was BORING" I tell her. She laughs. "No, I mean it, it was REALLY BORING." She laughs some more.

"You know, class isn't always supposed to be exciting."

Yes it is folks, especially when you're a graduate student. See, learning is fun. If it wasn't fun we shouldn't do it, or more precisely, shouldn't try to make that our profession (which, in my idealized little world, is how a graduate student ought to be defined).

We were covering electrons in metals. I've learned about electrons in metals three times now. It's incredibly important. And, in my experience, incredibly painful and incredibly boring. Why is it so boring? Was it boring to the various dudes who developed it? I hope not. Is it boring to our professor who teaches it? Maybe, but I'd like to think not, because if it were boring to him he shouldn't teach it. So then why is it boring to me? I'm interested in semiconductors, or at least I appreciate them. Someone should make fermi statistics and density of states fun to learn about. Please? Any takers?

2007-10-31T10:50:00.000-07:00

I stayed home today for the first time since starting grad school because I felt intense nausea all last night and this morning. Were I not on birth control pills I would be certain that I'm pregnant; when I talked to my mom last night and told her I've been feeling down and immobile for the last few days she asked me if I'm pregnant. So, although I've never been pregnant, I imagine that what I experienced this morning was a mild version of morning sickness. I'm better now, thanks to time, lots of fiber-rich foods like carrots and apples, and the close proximity of the toilet.

I've been sort of working on my quantum mechanics problem set since I woke up, but I've also turned to the internet for solace. First I asked the internet why I'm nauseous. I learned that some people do experience nausea as a side effect of birth control pills. In fact I knew that already, but I'm skeptical that the pills alone are responsible for this because I've been taking them for more than three years without problems.

Then I asked the internet if its okay for me to gorge myself on food today. You see, in this current nauseous state, eating makes me feel better. I think that the food gives the nausea-causing things in my stomach something to distract themselves with. But I'm scared of gaining massive amounts of weight. Or even small amounts of weight. Because I feel like I'm on the border between where I'm happy with my body and if I cross that border I will enter the unhappy with my body regime. It doesn't ruin my life, or even really keep me from doing things that I'd like to do, but it does make a pretty significant difference to me when I feel good both about how I look, and when I just physically feel good and comfortable.

The reason why I turned to the internet for solace is because I discovered food blogs this summer. This summer had lots of culinary discoveries for me. And the relationship between food and weight is an obvious one, yet learning to appreciate food made me reexamine how I connect my eating and my weight. I haven't come to any new conclusions--and I still eat lots of chocolate, although I do it unapologetically--but it's an interesting dillema where people write about tasty food and still have to face the reality that they don't want to fall into an abyss of obesity, or even mild chubbiness.

And it turns out that many of these food blogs that I like so much, and would link to if I didn't feel like figuring out hyperlinks in blogger was way way way crossing the line into stealing precious time from quantum mechanics. Yes, they think about not turning into complete and total fatties. That's all I really want to say about it, because going into more details is embarassing, since all my friends are thin and beautiful.

I learned that my nausea was probably caused by some meat that I ate for lunch yesterday. It is in the lab right now, and I now feel compelled to throw it out tomorrow. I feel bad, because I put a lot of effort into preparing it, but it's better to throw it out than to get sick again.

I miss my lab. I want some warmth, and fuzziness. And until Robert comes home this evening suppose I will seek it out in steamed cauliflower and angular momentum representation matrices. And maybe some chocolate chips.

Prudent life decisions?

2007-10-11T20:44:00.000-07:00

Over the last week or two I've had several conversations with fellow grad students who seem to think that the world is a force they must fight with. They seem to think that the world is basically out to screw them over, and they have to fight it in order to not be screwed over. I think I understand where they're coming from. Resources are scarce; they always have been. A couple of thousand years ago people had to fight various forces of nature in order to find some grub and not become the grub of a bear in the process; now, they must fight the force of society to not be unemployed and starving and homeless. Or something.

I wonder, then, why do I not feel this way? Is it because I'm female? Because I'm married to a smart, kind, sane, and gainfully employed man? Because my parents made sure I was never hungry, weren't abusive, and put my safety and education and health quite high on their list of priorities? Why do I not feel like the world is out to screw me over? I feel like I'm limited by my own motivationl; opportunities abound, and I think I'm more limited by not taking advantage of opportunities that are presented than by the lack of opportunities.

Stress time

2007-10-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

Last friday, i decided to drop my useless Electromagnetism class and take this useful and well-taught statistical mechanics class. Because it is five weeks into the quarter, I have a fair amount of catching up to do. I am currently working on a problem set for this class, and the last 12 hours have been fruitless. I need to get my ass over to campus and ask someone for help.

I've consumed two fairly large pieces of chocolate in the last hour. This does not bode well.

Voting with your feet

2007-09-22T00:22:00.000-07:00

I'm about 100 pages into Howard Zinn's "People's history of the United States." It's interesting, but not very new or shocking, and irritating when it gets sentimental. One of the things he mentions in his chapter on the Colonies is how white people would often end up living with Indians and choose not to return to white civilization when given the chance, whereas no Indian chose to join white civilization.

This idea caught my attention because I believe that people's choices reflect their values. We hear so much about our American values being destructive, and yet many many people choose to come to America, and not just people who are suffering or are refugees. My family came as refugees, yes, but many people came for work or grad school and tried to get green cards and stay. So I wonder a little bit sometimes why people criticize our country so much and yet choose to live here.

Furthermore, there are things like better healthcare and sanitation that people accross the board seem to want. I learned this from the book "Three cups of tea," written about a philanthropist who builds schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It seems that women dying in childbirth is pretty sucky, and if someone could prevent this then it seems like everyone in that woman's community would be happier. But perhaps that isn't true. Maybe the cost of better healthcare and nutrition isn't worth it.

Eggplants and Salmon

2007-09-20T22:09:00.000-07:00

Ever since our vacation to San Diego, where I stumbled upon Julie Powell's book "Julie and Julia," acquired one of Julia Child's cookbooks at a used bookstore in La Jolla, and experienced 2 weeks worth of fine dining, I've been getting in touch with my culinary tastes. I used to think of baking as the ultimate thing to do if I want to cook, but the trouble with that is that we don't actually eat that many baked goods, so my baked bread would often sit there and grow old. Since I don't like to waste food, it becomes difficult to refine a baking process when the end result won't be consumed.

Now that we've moved, and grocery shopping is much easier, and my attitude has changed a little bit, I've come to realize that two foods that I really like, and also can cook fairly frequently because they are normal meal foods, and not desserts, are salmon and eggplant. So learning how to cook these two foods well will be my tentative culinary goal for the time being. Right now I have some mashed up chinese eggplant baking in the toaster oven under parmesan and manchego cheese. We'll see.

Gluttony and quantum mechanics

2007-09-20T00:25:00.000-07:00

My dearest husband is out of town as of this morning, and I am already revering to my undergraduate habits of stuffing myself full of starchy sugars late at night and plugging away at quantum mechanics. Part of me hates me for this gluttony; another part of me appreciates the freedom (to stuff myself) and the freer thinking that being home alone seems to afford me from time to time. Of course I can't let this continue indefinitely if I want to fit in my pants in a month, but fortunately Robert's absence is only for 4 days.

I tried cooking the eggplants I purchased on Saturday. They were bitter and not so tasty. My quest to cook eggplants well will soon have to become a real quest, since I love eggplant but seem to be less than successful at preparing them well.

I had two minor epiphanies over the last two days. The first one happened yesterday; it's the more significant of the two. We had a substitute lecturer in quantum, one of our Professor's grad students. I stayed after class and asked him about the dot product of position and momentum space, which was necessary in order to do one of the homework problems. After he helped me over the hurdle I was stuck at, I asked him how to go about thinking about this problem. I basically said "I understand what you did but I would never have come up with it myself. What am I not understanding?" He proceeded to explain basic rotations to me, but I was still confused. So I asked him if there was a good reference to read up on this. His response:

"There are lots of references, but it's far more valuable to try to figure it out for yourself."

Oh my. What a thought. There are several thoughts here, actually. One, that I can figure out for myself what the dot product of position and momentum should be. Not too much to ask I guess, given that someone somewhere had to figure it out for the first time. Second, that I should figure it out. That's reading books and being studious is the intellectually lazy way to go. I suspected that all along, that turning to books when something puzzled me wasn't making me a better scientist, but here it was spelled out for me. Duh! Just because books exist doesn't meet I have to read them. Sometimes I should try to figure out what's in them for myself.

The second epiphany was realizing that I love talking to people, but don't like working with them. I like working independently. Unfortunately, I don't like being alone or lonely; that makes me feel isolated. There is a fine line through the desert of interpersonal communications that must be tiptoed if I am to be a happy and successful graduate student.

Science and Writing and Writing Science

2007-09-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

I like science a lot. And I like writing, a lot, although not everyone knows that because my fine undergraduate institution completely turned me off of the humanities (with the excellent exception of history). But I'm not interested in writing about science. Why not? Maybe I should be? Why am I prejudiced against science writing and is this prejudice well-founded?

I think my awareness of science writing began with a negative impression. When I was fifteen, I stupidly decided to go to some Nobel Laureate Symposium at the Palace of Fine Arts. It was a stupendous waste of time, and the worst part is that I missed school for it (I suppose it doesn't matter too much now, but it is embarassing to remember). One of the speakers involved there was science writer K.C. Cole, who told a pretty bad story about a friend of hers, was generally socially awkward, and really annoyed me. She was introduced as a science writer. At the time I didn't even know what a science writer was, but from that point on science writers and embarassing emotions have been inextricably associated in my mind.

Subsequent experiences that involved actually writing science, mostly in the form of psuedo-grant proposals to get the Undergraduate Research programs to give me money were reasonably pleasant and successful. Hey, I was proposing the research I was going to do! And of course on paper it would all work! However, when it came time at the end of summers to write reports of my research, there was always a tension between being honest about what I did and making my research look good. And that's where I saw that for many people honesty didn't quite fly out the window, but did get negelected, a bit, for the sake of artistry.

But see, artistry is what writing is all about. The great thing about fiction is that it doesn't have to be real. In fact, it's not supposed to be real because then it wouldn't be fiction. Fiction-at least good fiction--just has to entertain. That's it. Voila. Nothing real, no honesty required, at least not in the literal sense. Some peevish folks--and I am among them-- might request that fiction be "believable" or "true to life" but those are mere luxuries and preference, not hard rules.

I realize that not all writing is fiction. In fact, the writing that we learned in high school, writing essays and research reports and whatnot, was most definitely not fiction. Incidentally, that's the writing that my teachers in high school liked me for, the writing that let me to beleive that I'm not a sucky writer. But the writing that I've always loved was fiction, in the form of big long books that go on and on telling their beautiful made up tales. And even the columns I used to write for the school newspaper didn't have hard rules about truthfullneess. I expressed my opinion, tried to be honest, and never lied, but it was impossible to be completely dishonest about something because I was just expressing my opinion.

In science, there should be hard rules. Such as, first of all, No Lying. No Fiction. No making up pretty stuff that sounds good. And more importantly, no covering up your lack of progress with the tale of exciting applications. [I guess I should note that when I talk about writing science, I am speaking more generally about presenting science--it can include oral presentation as well. This is how my undergraduate Writing and Rhetoric classes have skewed me.] I undertand that people who present science to a more general audince, one that isn't going to go work on your same research question, want to tell a neat story. But I also know, from being in the middle of things, that neat stories are hard to come by. That's why research exists and why research groups are still doing their work. But I can't help but feel that people who present their research at colloquia are not giving me the fully honest story, but rather a dressed up and prettified version of the truth.

And so, because the writing I most love is antithetical to the way I think science should be written, I've developed an aversion to science writing. But maybe I should, instead, try to find ways to write about science that I don't find to be repulsive. I could then convince myself that I am doing a great public service. Robert suggested something about working on educational science for elementary school kids. Science education is important, and is also pretty crappy because it's not very deep. It needs work.

All Female Research group

2007-09-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

I've been in my new grad school lab for 4 weeks now, and the biggest difference from my previous lab is how many girls there are! I sit in an office with 2 other girls, both second years, and there are 2 other grad school girls and one postdoc girl (woman, really, as we all are, but no matter) who sit in the other office. In fact the lab is probably split male-female about 50/50 but the girls are more social and we interact with each other more. Furthermore a lot of the male postdocs don't socialize so much with the rest of the group because they are a lot older than us, so this leaves me surrounded by an unprecedented level of estrogen.

It's fun. I've learned more about some people in 4 weeks than I learned about some of the guys in my old lab in 16 months, and it's not because I was antisocial or reclusive in the old lab. I'm not trying to suggest here that i've met my grad school soulmates. I haven't. I don't think I'm going to have grad school soulmates. I try to be friendly and nice and listen and be open, and I like everyone and people seem to like me just fine, but I'm very much making my own path as far as the science goes, with taking physics classes and working in a chemistry lab and not really finding a mentor for myself inside the group just yet. (That's something I need to get on, incidentally, but that's a subject for a different post). But the point is that working with girls, or at least with these girls, means that there's more conversation and interaction. I feel a lot more comfortable asking silly science questions, and also sharing personal stories. In my old lab, no one knew I was married for about 4 months, and the professor didn't know until he had to write my grad school application letters. Here everyone knows, because I've felt comfortable enough sharing things that begin with "my husband..."

On the other hand, I feel like all this socialness wears me out a little bit. I'm always worried about saying something awful that will offend my labmates and alienate them for weeks. I know that people have their differences and I'm not worried that sasying something offensive will ruin my career prospects or anything like that, but I do want to be on good terms with people and it takes energy to watch what I'm saying all the time.

Religious Wedding

2007-08-19T08:57:00.000-07:00

Two of our friends from high school got married yesterday. Their wedding was a very Christian wedding, in a church, with lots of hymns and prayers. During one of the Bible readings, from Ephesians, it occured to me that while there's a lot of wisdom in the bible that everyone could benefit from hearing, it can be very diffucult for non-christians to extract this wisdom because it's sandwiched between lines and lines of Jesus Speak.

Letting go of Undergrad

2007-08-16T18:48:00.000-07:00

I've returned from San Diego and I learned that there are several social dance events happening in the next week. I could go to all of them, if it was my top priority. I could go and have fun, and I am used to always going to the social dance events that I can go to, if homework or lab work or dinner with friends is not in the way. But now that I've moved up to San Francisco it's a more significant committment to go to Jammix or Friday night waltz, and therefore I have to think harder about how it's going to affect Robert too, and not just me. That makes it a little bit harder--part of me really wants to go to these dances, part of me thinks I should stay home and spend time with Robert, and part of me wonders if I really want to spend an evening dancing with random people I don't know. And these parts of me aren't mutually exclusive.

I realized just today, although this is obvious, that there are plenty of places to go dancing in San Francisco, and I just need to find them. It's just that finding them, and then convincing Robert that we should go check them out (or maybe I'm projecting--maybe the effort to go check them out is hard for me)--isn't trivial. But it should be fun.

Travel Guide Books

2007-08-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

Ever since I saw them in use, I've been vaguely averse to guidebooks. They basically tell you the "insider scoop" on what's worth seeing in a place, what restaurants are worth eating at, and what to expect and how to enjoy a place best. The compelling argument for them is that they keep you from wasting your time on flashy but bad tourist attrations. My parents just went to Spain a few months ago and complained that the food there is bad. Had they had one of these guide books from Fodor's or Frommer's, then they might have been able to find high quality restaurants.

I believe at this point I'm "arguing with myself," in the words of my latest history TA.

Ok, so having presented the arguments against my poit, I will now argue my point. The thing I don't like about guide books is that one of the things that appeals to me about traveling, in theory mostly but in practice too, is that I can discover things for myself--things like how yucky the water is in Mission Bay park and how long it takes to walk to Balboa Park from downtown. With a guidebook, it almost seems like part of the fun is gone, because then all theres left for me to do is arrive at point A, "enjoy it", leave, arrive at point B, etc etc. But maybe not having a guide book means that you're not using all the information available to you, and maybe that is also undesireable.

Here commences my Blog

2007-08-09T10:25:00.000-07:00

Here I am, under the granite staircase of the San Diego convention center, starting a new blog on a black MacBook with TI calculator keys. Why am I doing this? And Why do I need to ask myself Why I'm doing this?

For one, livejournal has gotten kind of annoying. I've historically used to it to vent about things that have pissed me off. It has been the forum of much angst and much drama. While I have undoubtedly fond memories associated with that drama, I no longer want to write about things that foster that kind of drama. Also, livejournal makes it very difficult to navigate past entries, and thus makes it hard to go back and find a specific entry that I wrote years ago. It seems that blogspot offers better navigation of past entries. And it's also prettier.

And then, why do I really want a blog? Is it because I'm so vain that I think the world is interested in what I have to say? Maybe. I'm still insecure about putting my thoughts out there in the world, about presuming that someone would care about them. I don't think I'm any less insecure about this than I was when I started my livejournal. But the world doesn't have to care. That's what's beautiful about the internet. And I like to write. At my college graduation, the speaker said that the point of including arts curricula in schools wasn't to make more artists, it was to make complete human beings. The world doesn't need more artists, but the world does need complete human beings. The internet doesn't need more bloggers, and the world doesn't need more writers, but I need to write, and memory on blogger's server is apparently free to me.

I think lots of people are willing to exhibit their lives. Justin TV comes to mind (http://www.justin.tv/ --it's the "lifecast of a dudes life"). Art mirrors life, and in books and TV shows and movies we often identify things with our lives, but this lifecast isn't an art--it's just life, practically unfiltered. I'm not interested in getting into a debate about the meaning of art. The point is that there's nothing artificial about a lifecast. And in the same way a blog is just the unfolding of a life. Lots of famous peoples' diaries have been published after they become famous. With blogs, we don't know who will become famous and who won't, but we get to read the unfoldings of these lives anyway.