Back Once More

Hello world. Sorry I've gotten out of the habit of blogging! I'll be catching you up as possible with all the fun stuff that I've been doing this semester.

To begin with, I'm currently taking electromagnetism, astrophysics, probability theory, and introduction to computer organization and architecture for my full classes. I'm really enjoying all of them-- though I will freely admit that astrophysics is kicking my butt at the moment. The computer science class in particular is totally fascinating; we started off talking about the 1's and 0's in terms of voltages and creating circuits using basic logic gates (OR, AND, NOT) and have since progressed to assembly language.

Outside of these classes, I'm still taking organ and loving it. I'll try to post a video soon! I'm also continuing my astronomy research and my job with the physics department, which is usually close to 15 hours a week. Right now that includes working as a TA for two labs, helping at our weekly observatory open houses, manning the department office, organizing physics colloquiua, and whatever else I can squeeze in.

Finally, I'm president of SPS this year! I love the freedom that comes with being in charge of the organization, and I've had a lot of fun with it. In particular, I've been working on making our meetings more interesting, so I've led discussions about recent big news in physics (gravity waves! neutron star collisions!) and brought in people to talk about career paths and research opportunities. I also led a three-day trip to Oak Ridge National Labs last month-- I'll post about that later because it was amazing and deserves its own page.

Being president has also presented lots of challenges as well. I've had to work on my propensity to do everything myself, as well as have less fun conversations with people about following through on commitments. While I may not love every aspect of leadership, I am learning a ton outside of the classroom this year.

Anyway, all of this is to say that if you haven't been hearing from me it's not just because I am dissing you. But I'm definitely trying to catch up on my blog posts over the next couple of weeks!