Classes started today
Well, my spring semester started today at 8:40 when I stepped into my first class of the new year. Maybe I'm a big geek, but through all these years of school, I've always had the same feelings at the beginning of new classes. It's a strange mix of anticipation and anxiety. Will my prof be nice? Will the course be useful? Make sense? Be labor intensive? Will I make new friends? My mom must have taught me well because even today I worry about looking nice for the first day back. I was wearing a nice red sweater.
The first class of the day was "kinetics, diffusion, and phase transformations." The professor seems hard but friendly, but, over all, the class scared me. We'll be having weekly quizzes and homework assignments. This is good for tracking progress but can cause problems when research is supposed to be the main emphasis. The scariest part is that some of the classes will last from 8:00am - 10:00am because our professor will be missing several lectures. Why can't professors find substitute teachers? When all your lecture notes are already available, why can't the TA read them to the class?
Later I headed off to "solid mechanics II". This seems like it'll be my "easy" class and my "fun" class, to the extent that graduate level classes can be either "easy" or "fun." Solid Mechanics is handled by the theoretical and applied mechanics department. Most of the profs in that department look like they're runners. We learned about how human bones are tricky materials to analyze in the context of solid mechanics and spent some time with good old Saint Venant.
I was supposed to have "computational materials science" later in the day, but, after waiting around for 25 minutes, we figured out the prof wasn't going to show. We tried him in his office. He wasn't there. Then it turned out that the MSE website said the course isn't offered this semester. I emailed the prof anyhow. The class is available. He was in Binghamton for a meeting and had apparently left a note.
I may try out computational physics, too, but taking four classes is suicidal.
Anyhow, so far, so good. At least I don't have the same sense of doom I had last semester. :-)
The first class of the day was "kinetics, diffusion, and phase transformations." The professor seems hard but friendly, but, over all, the class scared me. We'll be having weekly quizzes and homework assignments. This is good for tracking progress but can cause problems when research is supposed to be the main emphasis. The scariest part is that some of the classes will last from 8:00am - 10:00am because our professor will be missing several lectures. Why can't professors find substitute teachers? When all your lecture notes are already available, why can't the TA read them to the class?
Later I headed off to "solid mechanics II". This seems like it'll be my "easy" class and my "fun" class, to the extent that graduate level classes can be either "easy" or "fun." Solid Mechanics is handled by the theoretical and applied mechanics department. Most of the profs in that department look like they're runners. We learned about how human bones are tricky materials to analyze in the context of solid mechanics and spent some time with good old Saint Venant.
I was supposed to have "computational materials science" later in the day, but, after waiting around for 25 minutes, we figured out the prof wasn't going to show. We tried him in his office. He wasn't there. Then it turned out that the MSE website said the course isn't offered this semester. I emailed the prof anyhow. The class is available. He was in Binghamton for a meeting and had apparently left a note.
I may try out computational physics, too, but taking four classes is suicidal.
Anyhow, so far, so good. At least I don't have the same sense of doom I had last semester. :-)
posted by megan at
9:57 PM
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