Graduate School

I almost forgot that graduate school decisions had to be made soon (eg. yesterday).

I'm off to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall. That's only so I can drink excimer's perylene and other experiments.

Bitch took my drink

I'm on the last leg of my graduate school visitations here in Boulder, CO, so-named "P.Chem Mecca". It's very nice here. Beautiful landscape, beautiful lasers, beautiful city, beautiful lasers, beautiful people, beautiful lasers. Did I mention lasers enough times?

I can see why ultrafast laser spectroscopy would be big in Boulder. The high is dry. That's key. Nothing is more annoying than to get moisture in your vacuum chamber and gunk up your signal.

There are good theorists here, too, and the ample number of spectroscopists keep the theorists dealing with quantum problems more so than statistical thermodynamics. I now have the tough decision between CU-Boulder, UIUC, and Johns Hopkins since each have their own unique strengths and weaknesses.

So, what's the weakness of Boulder and why the title of my post? Everyone knows the main reason to go on graduate school visits is booze yourself up with strangers and talk solid science while inebriated. That's no secret. And when the night is still young and the professors are all nestled in their beds with visions of psi-squareds and lasers dancing in their head, the graduate students take the visitors out to town on the department dime. That's no secret either.

What pissed me off last night was finding out that either Colorado or Boulder itself has a rule about licenses and age verification. Apparently, bars cannot accept licenses that are expired on the front but have a sticker on the back. It probably deals with the ease of creating fake IDs in this manner, but I call bullshit.

So i was at the bar last night, and the first server came by checking IDs and gave me a frosted glass. So I poured myself a beer from the pitcher and chatted about science with those near me. Maybe 15 minutes later, another server comes by to check IDs and give stamps out. She saw the expiration date, told me about the (idiotic) law, and bitch took my drink. She then proceeded to hover around the area the rest of the night to make sure I didn't sneak a drink.

So, needless to say, this was the first night of a visit that I was sober. YARG! Being sober sucks. Hopefully, maybe, I'll be able to make up with Bacchus today and enjoy the sweet lager that was denied to me last night by a less obnoxious server? We will see.

Grad School Tango

March Madness is creeping around the corner, and I am not referring to the college basketball tournament series.

I have accumulated an interesting list of graduate schools that have accepted me into their physical chemistry programs. They are University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign, University of Colorado at Boulder, John Hopkins University, and Ohio State University.

I visit UIUC this weekend. I will be at LA Tech the next weekend (March 7th and 8th) for the annual Society of Physics Students Zone 10 Meeting. The following weekend (March 14th-16th) I will be in Baltimore to visit JHU, and after JHU that next weekend (March 20th-23rd) I will be in Boulder, CO visiting the CU campus there. Then, for the last weekend of March (29th-30th), I will be visiting OSU.

Of course, the fun doesn't end when March wanes. The first weekend of April is the 235th ACS National Meeting & Exposition in New Orleans, LA. I guess there is consolation in the fact that I will not be adding more airline miles for that trip compared to the previously mentioned destinations. However, I have to prepare the two posters I will be presenting: one on a topic tangent to my undergraduate thesis and the other being my undergraduate thesis topic! Oi!

And when all is said and done, I must make a descision by mid April. I wonder where I will be next year.

Studying for the GRE General Test

I am taking the GRE General Test tomorrow, and I wish I had prepared more for the verbal section. If I could redo everything all over again, these are the changes I would have done.

I would have started early on vocabulary. How early? I am thinking starting a vocabulary building excercise when I was in high school. yes, that would not only have helped me for the SAT, but also build my vocabulary for writing assignments and the GRE General. Now, I am reduced to recognizing key roots in words to guess a general meaning. Though not a bad technique, knowing the actual definition would make the analogies and antonym sections a little less difficult.

I would have started early on building my analytical writing skills. ETS gives out the entire pool of topics for both the issue and the argument sections of the analytical writing section. had I known this before a week ago, I would have started giving preliminary answers to each question to develop an idea of what I would address on test day. Also, this would keep building the necessary skillset to answering each anlytical writing section to satisfaction.

I let the GRE General slip by some. Though rumor has it that the GRE General is not as important as the subject tests are, I seriously doubt any school would admit a graduate student who scored below a 400 on the GRE verbal.

Wish me luck. After the GRE nonsense is all done, I'll post some chemistry topics of interest.