Journeys for Knowledge

Now that I’ve taken care of the major concerns with setting into a new school, I can finally get around to working on my thesis here. Monday was my first full day in the lab, though safety interrupted the middle of week so very little progress was made until Thursday. Now would be an appropriate time to elaborate on what exactly my research for the next year will entail.

The devices my research group builds are designed to detect light in many different frequency bands, for use in astronomy. Since I only have a year I do not have time to design and build my own device, so instead I will be working on a new device called a KID that has just been designed by a scientist in my group. My work for now is to program some simulations in MATLAB to demonstrate some interesting physics behind the operation of the KID, and make some predictions on its performance. In the new year I will use these models to evaluate the actual performance of the KIDs we build and figure out why they work. It’s the kind of after-the-fact question that only a scientist would ask, whereas most people would be content that the device just works.

I have not had much experience with simulations, and even though I’m building off of the previous work of a PhD student, I was definitely in over my head on Monday. The common solution to this problem is to read research papers over and over until they finally make sense. Luckily in the meantime I had safety training to entertain me, where I saw a man electrocute himself, another man drink vodka for science, and a flower shatter due to being frozen with liquid nitrogen. And yes somewhere in there I learned about safety too.

On a less formal topic, I’ve slowly been getting to know more people both within my fellow Churchill grad students and my lab group. Most are still acquaintances just because I have not spoken to them very often, but I can definitively say that I have a few friends as well. I even signed up to learn how to operate the graduate bar, so some nights I’m not feeling too tired I can volunteer and bartend there.

The final welcome event tonight was a formal dinner at hall, which was a nice change of pace from all the wild activities. There were many interesting traditions that went into the event, such as being summoned to dinner by a gong, and standing as the professors, and their families left the high table. We also toasted to the Queen and Sir Winston, for how could we not thank the benefactors that built this college.  A fitting end to my welcome to Cambridge, and the start of routine living in England.