Spring Success 2011 revs up into gear

While my updates have been rather sporadic for the most part, a lot has happened since December. Most notably, I've been working for the Combustion Lab here at school. For about a week straight I worked with Colin until later hours, and didn't get home sometimes until 2 or 3 am. That being said, it was quite fulfilling. I really like working in that lab, I like building some of the apparatuses that we use in our experiments. We made significant progress while simultaneously experiencing numerous setbacks. I even made progress on a project that was started after I joined the group, involving a chemiluminescence detector, taking photographs and plotting real life plots and graphs. This work will be presented in a poster in March, along with a paper with the other stuff worked on over the break, and my name will be included in the authorship. I never expected that this could happen so fast or so quickly, but I'm very grateful to Colin and the group for giving me these opportunities.

Right now I'm looking pretty closely at UC Berkeley and Stanford for graduate school (still looking for others). Berkeley because I like the programs they have in Fluid Mechanics and Combustion research, with a lot of tools at my disposal. I'm interested in Stanford because of their Center for Turbulence research, since turbulence is one of the things that I've come to be fascinated with over the last year. We'll see how these prospects go. I want to take a trip during spring break to visit Berkeley (while simultaneously traveling with friends), so I hope that comes to fruition. MIT is another option, but from what I've heard, I may not really like it there very well. However, rather then dismiss the option outright, I'm going to talk to some recruiters this spring who are supposedly visiting campus and gather my own conclusions from there.

I'm excited that I'm laying down these foundations for my future career, and that I really have the potential to go places.

One of the classes that I'm enrolled in this semester is a cross-listed graduate course that a few undergraduates are eligible to take. While I'm excited about the class, it also concerns me because I know that the pressure's on to perform well in a small class as an undergraduate student. Hell, I spent the better part of the last few hours writing a MATLAB function to help me solve one of my homework problems, not because the problem asked me to, but because it would make the problem a lot easier.