An Update

It's been a while since I last wrote any form of an update, so here goes...

The first year of graduate school is now behind me. It's nice to be working a regular 40 hour/week job again! Things have been very busy despite being finished with classes. (Jackson is successfully behind me forever!) My research group has been preparing for a submission of a renewed project proposal to the Department of Energy, which has been keeping most of us poor grad students working like crazy to get data, references to papers, and fix things when they break. My adviser should emerge from the black hole of the proposal sometime within the next week; with luck, he'll be able to clue me in on the progress we're making with my (eventual) collaboration with General Atomics. At the moment, it looks like I won't be heading out to San Diego any time soon; we're caught up in red tape at the moment.

I've decided that it's time for me to bite the bullet and submit myself as a candidate for the Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics Qualifying Examination to be conducted at the end of August. It's the first of three Big Exams that I'll face in my PhD program at UW-Madison. Six hours of closed book exams which test mastery of undergraduate mathematics, classical physics, and modern physics (my choice of topics which are suited to a physics background), plus an oral exam that's a grabbag of concepts. (Ugh!) I'll be disappearing from work in July in order to be adequately prepared by the exam. In the meantime, I'm enjoying what I have left of June!

For instance: RotS was awesome. So are sci-fi books by Robert A. Heinlein. And of course the fantastic Square RPG Chrono Trigger! (That one caught my obsession for a fun-filled week...) I've also been able to spend some time cooking nicer meals, as well as take a few more nights on the town with Kristen. It's great to remember how nights and weekends should be really spent.

And, as a last note: congrats to the class of '05! I wish you the best of luck in the real world. :)