First Day of Classes

So I've decided to keep a blog about my grad school experience up here in Evanston. Let's recap thus far what's been going on up here before classes have even started:

Sept 1- My first permanent day in Evanston. I flew up to O'Hare and Eddie (my roomate) picked me up at the airport. For the ensuing week, I did some serious cleaning, set up all the utilities that Eddie hadn't already set up, and explored Evanston a bit. I slept on an air mattress and lived out of a suitcase, but other than that, all was well.

Sept 9- Mom and Dad came to deliver all of my stuff from NC. They arrived around 10:30 am, and we had unloaded everything by noon, which I thought was pretty impressive. We went out for lunch at Chili's with Eddie, and for a few hours in the afternoon put away all of my random odds and ends. Mom and Dad were able to head out by 4 pm to drive all the way back down to Grandma's in Hope.

Sept 10- I flew out to San Francisco at 7:40 am for the American Chemical Society Meeting. Upon arrival, I caught a shuttle to the hotel and then the BART (Bay Area Regional Transit) to downtown San Francisco. I attended a few talks on bionanotechnology and met up with Larken, a postdoc from the DeSimone research group at UNC. We went to a reception for Dr. DeSimone honoring him for his entrepreneurial endeavors and later went out for Mexican food.

Sept 11- I presented a poster from 2:30-4:30 pm, after having met with Dr. Samulski and Larken and another postdoc from the DeSimone lab to discuss the final write-up of my honors thesis for submitting for publication. Later that night, I briefly attended the SciMix poster session/mixer and got a free shirt and Nalgene bottle before heading back to the aiport.

Sept 12-18- Orientation week for the Materials Science Department. During this time, we heard presentations from every faculty member about their research (roughly 35 professors), went over general department information, lab safety, etc. One day we had fire extinguisher training which was actually kind of fun, despite the rainy weather outside.

Sept 15- Along with about 11 of my classmates, I went out for pizza and a theater production referred to as Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. It consisted of a series of roughly 30 skits performed within 1 hour and were typically comical though occasionally dramatic skits. I had a great time, and it was nice to get to know my fellow students.

Sept 16- I caught up on cleaning and putting things away in my room, and later that night invited Andres and Joe over to watch True Lies and have dinner. They live in the apartment building next door to me and are also first year Materials Science students.

Sept 17- I went to the driving range with Kendra (another classmate, from Purdue) and we went to Steak N Shake afterward for some milkshakes.

Yesterday- Last day of orientation. I also attended a group meeting for the Mirkin group, which is currently my first pick for a research lab. Kendra, Joe, Andres, Eddie, and I watched The Life Aquatic later that night, and I got to sleep early for class the next day.

Today, I had my first two classes, which were coincidentally both my Materials Science ones. I'm taking two MatSci classes and two Applied Math classes. I really enjoyed the lectures, and am actually quite excited to get back into the swing of lectures and coursework. The rest of the day I spent pimping my palmpilot with new applications like a dictionary, map of Evanston, and pdf files of class notes so that I'll actually start using it more. I'm currently ripping music off my cds to put on my computer so I can have some variation in the music I have on my iPod shuffle.

I'm doing very well, and I love Evanston and Northwestern thus far. I'll love it even more once I get my first paycheck and am not scraping the bottom of my checking account. I got an email yesterday from someone at Kodak who was interested in my research on compound eyes at UNC, so maybe they'll be interested enough to fund the further development of my project, as I don't think the Boeing thing ever got straightened out. Anyway, I'll try to post weekly or biweekly, so check up on me every once in a while to see what I'm up to. Until later...