The short version

Two observations so far:

1. Classes seem lame and kind of stupid so far.

2. My research seems like it's going to be really cool (today's my first day in the lab!), and I'm pretty fired up about it.

More later.

Wound down, winding up

'Bootcamp' was intense. It's over now, and for-real classes start on Friday. I'm taking two courses, each of which meets about two hours, three times a week: Macromolecules and Statistical Mechanics. I understand they are pretty tough, so I'm getting ready to jump in head-first from the get-go. I've got a rotation set up, with Hao Li, who has some cool computational work he's doing related to aging research, which has always interested me a great deal. I met with him last week, and I'm actually really excited about starting there. In fact, I can't remember being this excited about something in science for a long time!

At the end of bootcamp, all the first-year biophysics students went to the annual Tetrad retreat at a Lake Tahoe resort. (Tetrad is another one of the graduate programs. They are quite a bit larger than biophysics/BMI and are oriented more towards pure biology.) Getting free food, etc. was great, but I found sitting through an endless stream of more-or-less random and unrelated lectures to be pretty tedious. All of us in biophysics were tired out from our bootcamp, as well...

Hao's lab, being primarily computational, will, I think, require a fair bit of programming knowledge on my part, and, while I was a somewhat competent coder in high school, I've forgotten an awful lot of that in the intervening seven years. I've decided to throw my energy into relearning C++, and I'm finding that it's quite different from, for example, riding a bike! Hopefully I can have the basics down before I'm called on do to any serious programming as a part of my job.