I don't know if you knew this, but I go to school! I do, and when I do, I take classes! Yesterday and today were the first days of classes let me tell you about them.
YESTERDAYMicrobiology
While the professor was late because she was trying to run off an asston of syllabi, the class was good. There was as much getting-to-know-you as a large class can manage (I think there are about 80 or 85 people in there). It's going to be focused on pathogenic microbes but from the initial course description it sounds like we'll be spending some time on archaea, where most of the extremophiles live, and this is super exciting for me. The people sitting in my immediate vicinity seemed friendly. I realized that as shy as I tend to be, in the classroom I tend to be pretty outgoing, which was a nice realization to have, especially w/r/t planetary astronomy (I will explain further down).
The lab for micro was later in the afternoon, and we did some very basic stuff, largely to familiarize ourselves with lab techniques. We drew slides of staph, B. subtilis, yeast (presumably baker's yeast but it was never specified on the slide), and some spirillum bacteria but they were never specified either. The point is, I got to draw.
Planetary
This class was super fun as it was interrupted by a fire alarm, which was set off because of a gas leak. The building still smells faintly of rotting eggs. We relocated to the student center, where food and drink were purchased and we discussed the text (too expensive) and some of the class (making a web page may be involved, which I look forward to). The important things about this class are (1) I fucking love planets, and (2) the professor I desperately want to do research with is teaching it. SO. Since I tend to not be shy in classes, hopefully I will make a good impression in this class and get to image exoplanets this summer, which is basically what I want to do for the rest of my life. I've begun reading the text and apart from some terrible typos in which Jupiter lies halfway between the sun and Earth and the Galilean moons being Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, and To, it's a pretty nice book. But too expensive.
TODAYExperimental
Dr. Wragg is teaching Experimental and I'm super excited. He is a pretty awesome professor, and I'm looking forward to a lot of learning and doing science. That is the major takeaway from the first class, really. Lots of excitement. And 24 hour access to the lab, so science can happen whenever I want.
Differential Equations
Well. Math is happening. So far the material is very introductory: what diffeqs are, the types that exist, where we find them, why we use them. But let me tell you about my professor. He is French Canadian. He is from French Canadia. He has a French Canadian accent. I am really excited about this class. He's also significantly less terrifying than my calc III professor, who says he fought a polar bear with a knife (he fought using the knife against the polar bear) and won't say where he's from, and is super paranoid and wears the same clothes to class every day and has to go to the other side of the room when you sneeze and we (the physics majors) speculate that he may have worked for the CIA. So math looks promising. And, also, certainly, I'm excited about the math itself, because you encounter diffeqs everywhere in physics and biology so I'll understand so much more about why things work and I'm pretty thrilled about learning and doing some math.
SO that's what's going on. Tomorrow will be more micro and planetary, with full-length lectures in both classes. AND tomorrow Ben and I are going to check out an apartment for next August and I really hope it all works out, because it looks like a great place to live and it's much less expensive than where we are now.
Off to bed.
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