In July I was given a rare chance to combine work with personal leave, attending conferences on magnetism close to home. The first of these conferences was at UC Davis, and was attended by a lot of students from the theoretical unit I work with. This put me in an interesting position, as both traveler […]
With my first year of PhD complete, the time came to finally decide what my thesis would focus on. To help with this, I decided to take my conference leave early and travel to the Italian island of Elba for a workshop on accelerators. Although I have never worked with accelerators, it was the one […]
Unlike my other rotations, this term my work is mostly based in the lab. My goal is to understand how to best grow crystal films for use in solar cells. Since there is very little known about the exact science underlying the growth process for these crystals, I have to go through a lot of […]
Indeed it has been some time since my last post, and quite a bit has happened. In the period between then and now, I’ve returned home, started a new project, and begun to contemplate my future thesis. So let’s dive in shall we? My three week visit home will be the only time I return […]
I apologize for the delay in this blog post, a lot has happened in the last few weeks since moving to Japan, but I did not have internet access at home until recently. In short, my adjustment to life in Japan has not been as easy as I expected, but certainly not difficult. The first […]
The past few posts have been focused on things I have been building in my time at Cambridge, but these have all been simple playthings to amuse myself. Unfortunately, my research is still stuck within the realm of simulation, so to make better use of my time last week, I set up a massive set […]
Growing up in California, my experiences with winter and cold have been mild at best. Now that winter has descended upon Cambridge I find myself responding to the climate in rather unusual ways. Every morning now starts with a game of “How will I Handle the Cold Today”. For example, I still try to wear T […]
As I promised in my inaugural post on this blog, I won’t be updating on a regular schedule because sometimes there just isn’t enough to write about. After taking time to reflect on the last week and a half, I finally have something worth saying. It is quite common to see people complain about having […]
The past week has been a fairly calm one, with just research during the day and relaxing in my room at night. The days have been getting noticeably shorter, to the point where the sun is almost setting by the time I leave lab at 5. Eventually I will be coming home at nighttime, so I […]
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 […]