In a rush, I passed a guy and his dog in the hallway. I looked down and stopped. It wasn't a dog — it was a skunk. The guy cut in with a “Don't worry, his scent glands have been removed,” and went on his way like that was the end of the explanation.
The other day I asked my boyfriend if his long term goals (i.e., “What do you want out of life?”) have changed over the last few years. I'd venture to say that we're both on the ambitious and competitive side of the spectrum and in the past we've talked about the value of education, FIRE, and mentoring.
In more words, he explained to me that the past few months in his Ph.D. program have been draining. He's often anxious and stressed and it never ends. So his primary goal, on the green grassy other-side of a dissertation, has become work-life balance. It was exactly how I would have responded if given the question.
Stayed up until 2 A.M. guiding my boyfriend through fundamental electromagnetics, just like he used to do with me for calculus II. It's the first date we've had in over a month. We were always busy during our undergraduate years, but not once did I think about quitting. Since starting the Ph.D. program, I think about quitting most days. I think everyone does.
I am twenty two years old and I am experiencing the giddy awe that accompanies observing magic. Usually I would not be so keen as to share whether or not I believe in tangible magic (it's all intention, anyways) but that changes today! I have met a powerful witch who cured my migraine in less than two minutes, using magic. All that was necessary for this spell was holding an ice cube to the roof of my mouth for a minute. So, that will be the first one in the grimoire!
Cat Pictures
Some days are hard. Recently, most days have been tough.
Fortunately, I am still able to work from home.
So I just have to look over for a reminder to keep going.
Oh boy. One of my classes started with a completely unfamiliar topic (fracture mechanics) and the accompanying lab was outside anything I had ever learned, including the lectures we had to cover the material. Unfortunately, my lab partner and I have similar backgrounds and neither of us knew how to approach the subject. In this course, the labs consist of numerical programming and each group has one week to turn in their submission.
I took the lead writing MATLAB code, as my lab partner is not comfortable programming. I asked if he could make a glossary or begin writing the report while we deciphered what the instructions meant and trudged through each line of code, which was available to him via Git.
About a week later, most of the code was working but I had also written the only words on the report. We had one day to finish and every other group had supposedly already turned in their lab. It's 5 P.M. on a Friday and I get this email from my lab partner:
“I tried writing a code of my own but was not able to get it to work. I hope yours worked, because that's the only hope we have to get the lab submitted😃.
Thanks for taking the lead on this, I hope in the future there will be something I can take the lead on😊 so you don't have to do all the work alone.“
Wow. Great. It was a long night but I couldn't get the second half of the lab working, and about midnight I emailed my professor to ask for mercy. There was just one bug in the code but I couldn't find it. The problem was asking us to model crack propagation (i.e., growth of a crack given some initial conditions) under cyclical bending. My code was showing me that the crack didn't grow — it immediately went into catastrophic failure. I couldn't find a dimensional error.
The next morning, my professor asked to take a look at my code. An hour later came the reply:
“... Looks like you are right about the initial crack length... Thanks for catching this! (See email to the entire class)“
Well, at least that felt good!
About me A.K.A. Lil' Grump
Second year Ph.D. student in electrical engineering thanks to discovering the realms of possibility through science fiction.
Book reader, cat's humble servant, home brewer, plant owner, video gamer. Part time witch.
It's been too long since I've shared Madame's charm with the world
I think over the past few months the ratio of “I take a shower” to “I open the front door” is about 2:1. Weird.