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Nov. 4th, 2005
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Nov. 4th, 2005 10:08 pmGRE studying proceeds apace. I'm definitely not doing as well as some of the others in my year, and I'm worried. There are some people who just have an uncanny physical intuition that I just don't have... I certainly am no Einstein or Feynman, but I'd hope that I'm at least generally competent at what I do.
At any rate, I've compiled a working list of formulas that have come up on the GRE problems that I either didn't know or hadn't immediately come to me. So even though I've called it "General Physics Formulae", there are a lot of omissions of things that I definitely know I know (e.g. there's not much under classical mechanics). Things will get added to it, surely. The current list is here. Obviously not all of it is can be memorized, but sometimes I've listed formulas in their entirety for completeness (e.g. it would be silly to memorize the normalization for the Ylm spherical harmonics, but one should know that there's an e^im\phi dependence and that the highest power of cos or sin theta in the associated Legendre functions is l.)
And because of all this, and going to Denver, I have not written a word of my thesis, not done a jot of data analysis, in multiple weeks. This is pathetic and problematic. My advisor tends to be very hands-off, so there's no one breathing down my neck, but I don't like the way things are going.
There are days where I wonder how much more research/thesis writing/studying physics I could have done had I not decided to become a firefighter and had not spent much of the summer in fire school. Had I spent most of Sundays working this summer, I'm sure there would have been more progress... as it was I seldom got much done on weekends. I don't know... if there's one valuable thing I've learned from becoming a firefighter, it's that physics isn't life.
Get me the hell to May...
At any rate, I've compiled a working list of formulas that have come up on the GRE problems that I either didn't know or hadn't immediately come to me. So even though I've called it "General Physics Formulae", there are a lot of omissions of things that I definitely know I know (e.g. there's not much under classical mechanics). Things will get added to it, surely. The current list is here. Obviously not all of it is can be memorized, but sometimes I've listed formulas in their entirety for completeness (e.g. it would be silly to memorize the normalization for the Ylm spherical harmonics, but one should know that there's an e^im\phi dependence and that the highest power of cos or sin theta in the associated Legendre functions is l.)
And because of all this, and going to Denver, I have not written a word of my thesis, not done a jot of data analysis, in multiple weeks. This is pathetic and problematic. My advisor tends to be very hands-off, so there's no one breathing down my neck, but I don't like the way things are going.
There are days where I wonder how much more research/thesis writing/studying physics I could have done had I not decided to become a firefighter and had not spent much of the summer in fire school. Had I spent most of Sundays working this summer, I'm sure there would have been more progress... as it was I seldom got much done on weekends. I don't know... if there's one valuable thing I've learned from becoming a firefighter, it's that physics isn't life.
Get me the hell to May...