November, Puerto Rico!

Wow, it's November already. Classes are a lot of work, but I'm making it so far. Also, I applied for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which is pretty prestigious (and pays $30k/year as well).

More importantly, however, our research group took a trip to Puerto Rico. There's a chemistry research group at USC that we've been collaborating with for about 20 years, and every now and then we get together to talk about research. Last time was 2003 in Wyoming, but this year we made the trip to San Juan. Pretty much all expenses were covered, and we were there Friday through Monday.

The hotel had live Latin music every night.

Right outside our hotel was... THE BEACH.
The first night, we took a dip at midnight.

During the day the students gave presentations on their research.
As you can tell, it was pretty informal--no suits, no ties, and shoes were even optional.

Dinner in Old San Juan

The evenings consisted of beer pong. If you're not familiar with the game... Two teams of two people, trying to throw a ping pong ball into plastic cups of beer. If one team makes it, the other team drinks it. Some people played until 4am, and kept drinking until 6am. They were visibly hurting at the meetings at 8:30 the next morning, to say the least.

Sunday we took a hike through the El Yunque National Rainforest.

Our research group

The Final Supper, at a Cuban restaurant.

So, now I'm back in reality. It's Thanksgiving, and look what happened last night:

October

Eri came out to visit again at the end of October, but this time it was on UM's dime. For our Engineering Symposium, they paid to fly out perspective grad students who are women or minorities. Pretty sweet.

The Third Coast Kings, had our first gig on Halloween at the Corner Brewery in Ypsi.

Eri as a pirate--Arrr!

Makin' it FUNKY!

We took a trip to UM's arboretum and botanical gardens.

The Sausage Tree looked good enough to eat.

There was a big desert (not dessert) exhibit.

Pretty cool lookin

At the UM Museum of Natural History

Stuff goin' on

Here's various pics from October

Every first Friday the Blind Pig has a classic soul night,
where DJ's play soul from the 60s. My funk band went.

I made this interesting dish... A spelt tortilla, rice, vegetables,
ground turkey, and pepperjack cheese.

So that's where the Transformers hang out

Fewer Hobbits. More tubas. That pretty much says it all.

An example of a single homework problem for Applied Quantum Mechanics.

Free shirt!

While this is actually a thickness monitor for our deposition system in the lab,
it bears strong resemblance to a Star Wars ship.

September

So, school's going. Busy busy busy. But Eri came out to visit, in conjunction with MS&T Conference in Detroit.

Some of my classmates and I have been playing poker now and then. Eri came away victorious, claiming the stagger prize of... $0.

"My precious..."

Eri, striking a Bob Dylan pose.

Stopping to smell the flowers

There's a number of local breweries in Ann Arbor.
Eri sampled some of their wares.

The Bad Plus. Man, do they put on a great show. We were literally within arms reach of the drummer. I'd sum them up as virtuostic, creative cacophony.

We were walking around campus during the football game (which meant it was pretty much deserted), and saw this frat.

Eri and I took a trip into Central Michigan to see some wilderness areas and lakes.

We drove through Hell, MI. To get to Hell, you have to turn left on Darwin, which I thought was funny.

Not mummifying, but trying to find respite from the mosquitoes.
Luckily we found some locals with bug repellent.

The Law Library on campus is a pretty cool building. The upper part looks like an old cathedral, but the underground part is more modern, with big glass windows.

Kind of reminds me of a Swiss bank from a 70's James Bond movie...

Eri Incognito

School's In

So I've been somewhat busy since school started, but here's some stuff that's been goin' on.

Along with school comes classes. And even though three might seem like a light load (compared to the 5-7 I took at UI), it will be more than enough. Here's what I'm taking:

Applied Quantum Mechanics (Electrical Engineering/Applied Physics)
Thermodynamics (Materials Science and Engineering)
Structure of Materials (also MSE)

Which are all classes I've taken before at UI, but these are obviously much harder. Quantum is looking to be exceptionally difficult, but the prof seems pretty good, and there's a TA. The Thermo prof seems good too, although the Structure prof is not a good lecturer at all. But like they said on Mars Attacks, "2 out of 3 ain't bad."

I've also chosen an advisor, Dr. Stephen Forrest. He's a professor in EE, MSE, and Applied Physics, along with being the Vice President of Research for the whole University. His research group, the Optoelectronic Components and Materials group, has been optical devices such as LEDs and solar cells for about 20 years. He mainly focuses on organic materials (in the same broad category as plastics), which will (hopefully) be cheaper than current silicon-based solar cells. It looks like I'll be taking over a new solar cell project from a PhD student who will be leaving soon--I'd describe it, but it's yet to be published so it's still confidential.

At the moment, however, I'm just training on how to use the equipment. I've learned (or relearned) how to use the ellipsometer, atomic force microscope, UV-Vis spectrometer, and other toys that are used to get information about our devices (in this case, solar cells that are about 1mm square). And today I helped clean out the evaporation deposition chamber (woohoo). But soon I'll start training on how to actually make devices and do actual work.

Oh, and here's a random picture from the MSE grad student picnic a few weeks ago.

Done

Ok, so I decided that, two weeks after the fact, I am DONE moving in.

Stir-fry is a good sign that I'm settled in.

I finally got a shelf for all of my CDs and DVDs.