Today has been one of those rainy days where I just want to be at home, reading, with the cat on my lap. (Or trying to eat my hair. He's still very kittenish.)
I've at least got the reading part down...
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Learning Linguistics
I've always been interested in languages and how the way your language is constructed affects how you think. One of my favorite things about grad school is having linguistics conversations with non-native speakers, especially about idioms and grammatical constructions. Explaining how passive voice works in English is a particularly fun challenge. Why and where do you use proper nouns? And how do you respond to "What's up?"
My first language is English, and I sort of know Spanish (when I can remember enough vocabulary). Once upon a time, I started learning German, and then my school dropped the program. Structurally, there are some major differences between the languages. The use of gendered nouns is one big difference between English and other European languages. Spanish also conveys the degree of formality in both the pronoun and verb conjugation. English also deals with tenses more simply. [Disclaimer: going from memory here]. There's past, present, and future. Spanish is more specific, with immediate past, general past, present, specific future, general future, and past future (would have been, basically). 100 Years of Solitude makes much more sense in Spanish, where non-linear time is much more easily accommodated linguistically.
I realized recently that the amount of time I spend in conversation with non-native speakers has changed some of my habits. I'm more precise in my word choice than I used to be, and my diction is no longer quite as Midwestern-neutral as it was in high school. I occasionally get asked if I ever lived in England (which I haven't, I just watch too much BBC).
English is a complex, messy language with few consistent rules. It steals from everyone. It's incredibly colorful and nuanced, and very subject to cultural interpretation. There's a huge volume of assumed connotation with word choice, and this is part of what makes it so incredibly difficult to learn. I have to remind myself of this occasionally, and remember that scientific papers should be read for content.
The failure to use proper nouns correctly does not affect the quality of the science, but it is certainly distracting.
My first language is English, and I sort of know Spanish (when I can remember enough vocabulary). Once upon a time, I started learning German, and then my school dropped the program. Structurally, there are some major differences between the languages. The use of gendered nouns is one big difference between English and other European languages. Spanish also conveys the degree of formality in both the pronoun and verb conjugation. English also deals with tenses more simply. [Disclaimer: going from memory here]. There's past, present, and future. Spanish is more specific, with immediate past, general past, present, specific future, general future, and past future (would have been, basically). 100 Years of Solitude makes much more sense in Spanish, where non-linear time is much more easily accommodated linguistically.
I realized recently that the amount of time I spend in conversation with non-native speakers has changed some of my habits. I'm more precise in my word choice than I used to be, and my diction is no longer quite as Midwestern-neutral as it was in high school. I occasionally get asked if I ever lived in England (which I haven't, I just watch too much BBC).
English is a complex, messy language with few consistent rules. It steals from everyone. It's incredibly colorful and nuanced, and very subject to cultural interpretation. There's a huge volume of assumed connotation with word choice, and this is part of what makes it so incredibly difficult to learn. I have to remind myself of this occasionally, and remember that scientific papers should be read for content.
The failure to use proper nouns correctly does not affect the quality of the science, but it is certainly distracting.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Being honest, but not too honest...
My department has graduate student recruit visits for the next two weekends. While I'm not involved in planning this year, I like being involved. Given my current advisorial issues, this raises a dilemma. How do I sell the department when I'm a bit bitter about how things have turned out for me?
Harder still is how honest to be in answering questions about my advisor. He's a nice guy, we do interesting work (I really love my project), and when he eventually manages to give feedback, it's generally constructive. On the other hand, funding for the experimentalists has been flaky of late, and his snail-like response times aren't likely to vanish overnight.
We also have a large fraction of the group defending within the next year (1/2 of the non-postdocs). It wouldn't be a bad thing for the group to get a bit smaller, but we will need another experimentalist soon (we'd be down to one lonely student). The only new student we got this year switched groups to join us, rather than being a new enrollee.
I think at this point, I plan to answer questions honestly, but I'm not going to volunteer negative information. The important part is convincing them that GiantU is a good place to be. Advising decisions don't have to be set until well into the fall semester. We've just gotten two new postdocs, and they may have some positive effects on group dynamics by then.
Harder still is how honest to be in answering questions about my advisor. He's a nice guy, we do interesting work (I really love my project), and when he eventually manages to give feedback, it's generally constructive. On the other hand, funding for the experimentalists has been flaky of late, and his snail-like response times aren't likely to vanish overnight.
We also have a large fraction of the group defending within the next year (1/2 of the non-postdocs). It wouldn't be a bad thing for the group to get a bit smaller, but we will need another experimentalist soon (we'd be down to one lonely student). The only new student we got this year switched groups to join us, rather than being a new enrollee.
I think at this point, I plan to answer questions honestly, but I'm not going to volunteer negative information. The important part is convincing them that GiantU is a good place to be. Advising decisions don't have to be set until well into the fall semester. We've just gotten two new postdocs, and they may have some positive effects on group dynamics by then.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Hooky?
Grad school: when leaving the office after an 8 hour day during spring break when your advisor is on another continent feels like playing hooky.
What do you mean it's still light out?
What do you mean it's still light out?
Favorite Classes vs. Favorite Teachers
Over at Engineer Blogs , there's a lovely discussion on people's favorite classes. For me, this is a slightly tricky question, even if I only restrict it to college courses. My favorite course was not from my favorite teacher.
My favorite class was a "humanities" course (taught be a civil engineering prof, hence the quotes). This was one of the university general requirement courses, and was meant to be a critical writing course on a particular subject. My section discussed failure. Over the course of the semester, we were to develop a class definition of failure, while analyzing a number of engineering and societal failures. There were two books for the class: Why Things Break, by Levy and Salvadori, and Collapse, by Jared Diamond. Part of what made the class my favorite was relating engineering concepts to things one wouldn't typically consider engineering problems, like the collapse of society on Easter Island.
My favorite teacher, on the other hand, taught my Intro to Materials and my Thermodynamics classes. He was by no means the most dynamic lecturer I've ever had, but his lecture style made it very easy to grasp the material for a variety of learning styles. Intro to Materials is a giant lecture, so he had to use power point just so it would be legible in the back of the room. Whenever he was going through equations, he would flip to the document camera and do the math there.
Thermo was a much smaller class, and he could do everything on the boards. The most amazing thing was they way he would write everything down while talking. He never lectured faster than you could take notes, because he was taking them on the board. He also would use one phrasing out loud, and write down a different wording. For some classes, this wouldn't be a big deal. Thermodynamics (Statistical Mechanics for physics majors), on the other hand, can be conceptually tricky, and different wordings click with different people. It's not my favorite class ever, because will very well taught, it's just not particularly fun for most people. He did, however, deliver my favorite professorial quote ever:
With enough coefficients, you can curve-fit an elephant.
My favorite class was a "humanities" course (taught be a civil engineering prof, hence the quotes). This was one of the university general requirement courses, and was meant to be a critical writing course on a particular subject. My section discussed failure. Over the course of the semester, we were to develop a class definition of failure, while analyzing a number of engineering and societal failures. There were two books for the class: Why Things Break, by Levy and Salvadori, and Collapse, by Jared Diamond. Part of what made the class my favorite was relating engineering concepts to things one wouldn't typically consider engineering problems, like the collapse of society on Easter Island.
My favorite teacher, on the other hand, taught my Intro to Materials and my Thermodynamics classes. He was by no means the most dynamic lecturer I've ever had, but his lecture style made it very easy to grasp the material for a variety of learning styles. Intro to Materials is a giant lecture, so he had to use power point just so it would be legible in the back of the room. Whenever he was going through equations, he would flip to the document camera and do the math there.
Thermo was a much smaller class, and he could do everything on the boards. The most amazing thing was they way he would write everything down while talking. He never lectured faster than you could take notes, because he was taking them on the board. He also would use one phrasing out loud, and write down a different wording. For some classes, this wouldn't be a big deal. Thermodynamics (Statistical Mechanics for physics majors), on the other hand, can be conceptually tricky, and different wordings click with different people. It's not my favorite class ever, because will very well taught, it's just not particularly fun for most people. He did, however, deliver my favorite professorial quote ever:
With enough coefficients, you can curve-fit an elephant.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Pseudonymous Naming Schemes
Since I'm not blogging under my actual name, I've decided I need a cute naming scheme for everything (because I can!).
Undergrad institution: Since GEARS has dibs on SnowU, I'll call mine SnowTech. Unless he's in Alaska, or SnowU actually is SnowTech, I'm pretty sure we got more snow...
Grad institution: I'm now at a very large R1 university, henceforth to be known as GiantU
Significant Other: I'll be marrying Mr. ME this summer. He's a mechanical engineer at a large manufacturing company (we'll call them Employer) with an obsession for cars, Doctor Who and and our kitty. The kitty, by the way, is named Kitten. We attempted to give him an actual name, but pretty much failed.
Periodic Boundary Conditions: While my undergraduate program was very much based in classical metallurgy, my current research is in atomistic computational simulations. In order to make the system seem larger, periodic boundary conditions are critical, where if an atom tries to move out of the simulation box, it will reappear on the opposite face, making our solid effectively infinite (assuming you start with a decent sized box). I'll attempt to come up with how that's a metaphor for life later.
... and now back to reading papers. Woo.
Undergrad institution: Since GEARS has dibs on SnowU, I'll call mine SnowTech. Unless he's in Alaska, or SnowU actually is SnowTech, I'm pretty sure we got more snow...
Grad institution: I'm now at a very large R1 university, henceforth to be known as GiantU
Significant Other: I'll be marrying Mr. ME this summer. He's a mechanical engineer at a large manufacturing company (we'll call them Employer) with an obsession for cars, Doctor Who and and our kitty. The kitty, by the way, is named Kitten. We attempted to give him an actual name, but pretty much failed.
Periodic Boundary Conditions: While my undergraduate program was very much based in classical metallurgy, my current research is in atomistic computational simulations. In order to make the system seem larger, periodic boundary conditions are critical, where if an atom tries to move out of the simulation box, it will reappear on the opposite face, making our solid effectively infinite (assuming you start with a decent sized box). I'll attempt to come up with how that's a metaphor for life later.
... and now back to reading papers. Woo.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
You know you're an engineer when...
You use a Gantt chart to help plan your wedding. We're behind our target, but we were deliberately ambitious with our time line planning to give ourselves a nice buffer.
Watching other friends panicking about planning, I'm thankful that 1) I'm marrying an engineer 2) my parents are also engineers and 3) most of the wedding party is engineers (except my sister the architect). Good engineers have a fundamentally different approach to problem solving that is much less stressful for event planning. There's no "oh noes, everything is ruined!!11!!!" mentality. However, there might be an excessive habit of fixing things with duct tape...
Watching other friends panicking about planning, I'm thankful that 1) I'm marrying an engineer 2) my parents are also engineers and 3) most of the wedding party is engineers (except my sister the architect). Good engineers have a fundamentally different approach to problem solving that is much less stressful for event planning. There's no "oh noes, everything is ruined!!11!!!" mentality. However, there might be an excessive habit of fixing things with duct tape...
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