'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.
No comments:
Post a Comment