Becca Stareyes

So, I passed my exam. My committee did ask me to do an outline for my thesis, with some dates, and we discussed whether or not an earlier project I did should be included, but I passed.

Today also marked the beginning of the Cassini Extended Mission. I celebrated by heading down to a toast with all of the Saturn people (except the summer student, one researcher and Steve Squyres, whose life has been consumed by the Mars Rovers, and, thus, has done very little with the moons of Saturn). I then fell asleep and decided that heading home for the day would probably be good.

I am currently reading, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann. For those who don't know, Richard Feynmann was a famous physicist, and Surely You're Joking is a book of his writings. As it happened, the last essay I read last night was called "Monster Minds" and was about Dick Feynmann as a grad student at Princeston. He had come up with an interesting idea, and so his adviser had asked him to give the weekly seminar. And then started mentioning, "Well, I mentioned this to Dr. X and Dr. Y, and oh, yeah, Dr. Pauli is coming in from Europe, and Dr. Einstein doesn't normally come, but I asked him to this time", and Dr. Feynmann mentions being well and truly freaked out.

It makes me feel better. It's just my A exam. At least I don't have to talk about physics in front of Einstein.

(The essay had a nice conclusion -- Dr. Feynmann mentions once he started talking, he just focused on the physics and forgot about all the smart people in the audience.)

My A exam is at 10 AM. Expect a post around early afternoon my time telling people how I did.

My practice for my A exam on Friday went well -- I got a lot of questions, but thankfully most of the comments were along the lines of 'organize your talk better'. I also spoke to my advisor and got some plots on Saturday. He reminded me that I am allowed to shunt questions off if I'll answer them later, and to say 'I don't know -- I haven't done that yet' and 'well, I haven't done that yet, but if I can speculate...' (in other words, to make it clear when I am talking out of my ass and when I think I should know it). Which is funny, since that's the exact opposite of my problem with my qualifying exam -- I would just say 'I don't know' if I couldn't answer it perfectly.

My advisor also asked me to make an Important Mission Decision for Cassini. Well, not an especially important one. Seems one of the observations we're planning doesn't have enough data volume, and we can't go begging for more, since the Enceladus folks are also on that day's run and they are short as well. My advisor's cut out all the obvious things, and asked me what the best thing to do to get rid of 1/3 of the data we take without losing much science, since I'm the one who works with this kind of observation. Hee! Power!

In under 48 hours, I'll either be getting a Master's Degree (and cleared for a Ph. D) or being told to pack my bags. I am a bit scared. Better then I was, since my peers and my advisor seem to think I can do it.

So, I set the date of my A-exam (the date where I take an oral exam to get my Master's Degree and the right to start my Ph. D. dissertation) -- July 1. I've started reading up for it, and soon will send around the form that tells the grad school I'm taking it.

In happier news, I got a Tegaki-E blog, so see web-doodles