(no subject)
Nov. 9th, 2007 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meanfreepathSo my NSF got finished around 40 minutes ago. While in terms of GPA I don't think it's as strong as it was last year, I think the essays are significantly better all around, the difference between knowing something and hardly knowing anything about soft condensed matter, what's worth studying, and how to go about it. Moreover, I was much more explicit in addressing the NSF's dreaded "Broader Impacts" criterion -- upon rereading last year's personal statement a year later, I realized how much space I had wasted waxing philosophical about how awesome physics is when other things would have been far more important to mention.
The E/M exam this morning cannot be said to have gone particularly well -- I didn't manage my time too well and didn't really get a chance to write anything for the last problem. It seems to have universally been thought of as long, though, and so I'm not too worried.
I will close with a pair of humorous but crass bloopers from NSF essay drafts.
In one essay, where I meant to write "help others experience," I got the spacing wrong and ended up typing "help other sexperience." No, I'm applying as a physicist, not as a sexologist, although we did watch a movie of sperm cells swimming in Fluids as an example of microorganisms swimming with low Reynolds number flows, and I would not be surprised if certain bodily fluids exhibited interesting non-Newtonian properties.
When I laughed and told one of my classmates, a high-energy experimentalist, about this, he responded with one of his own. In a draft, he had referred to the new accelerator soon to come online at CERN as the Large Hardon Collider. Apparently a colloquium speaker mispelled "hadron" in the same way on a slide last year.
The E/M exam this morning cannot be said to have gone particularly well -- I didn't manage my time too well and didn't really get a chance to write anything for the last problem. It seems to have universally been thought of as long, though, and so I'm not too worried.
I will close with a pair of humorous but crass bloopers from NSF essay drafts.
In one essay, where I meant to write "help others experience," I got the spacing wrong and ended up typing "help other sexperience." No, I'm applying as a physicist, not as a sexologist, although we did watch a movie of sperm cells swimming in Fluids as an example of microorganisms swimming with low Reynolds number flows, and I would not be surprised if certain bodily fluids exhibited interesting non-Newtonian properties.
When I laughed and told one of my classmates, a high-energy experimentalist, about this, he responded with one of his own. In a draft, he had referred to the new accelerator soon to come online at CERN as the Large Hardon Collider. Apparently a colloquium speaker mispelled "hadron" in the same way on a slide last year.
