Week 4

Long time no blog! Sorry to those of you who read my blog regularly. It's been hard to keep up with posting. Anywho...

Last Thursday I had Electrical Safety Training. It was an all day session so you can imagine I was exhausted at the end of the day. I am also deathly afraid of electricity now. I was afraid to plug in my phone charger after the class haha! Some of the material was common sense, like "Don't put your fingers in an electrical socket" but some of it was practical knowledge about working with electricity in a lab setting. Also, realizing how many volts are in a carpet shock was scary! (I can't remember the exact number but it was pretty big) On Friday I helped set up an experiment that I will help run tomorrow. It took a long time because the software was acting up on the computer and it wasn't syncing data to the equipment. Hopefully we'll fix that tomorrow and start running some gosh darn experiments!

So it turns out I was able to register for the conference in Santa Fe this week. The only downside is that I had to pay $600 out of my pocket, but I will be reimbursed later. Luckily I just got my first paycheck deposited and I was able to afford it (for now...that's more than I pay for rent in Tally!) Hopefully I will get reimbursed ASAP so I can spend my hard earned money on better things like clothes and mani-pedi's haha (hey, I'm still a girl remember :P)

The conference is all day, 5 days a week. Tomorrow I have another training session so I will not be able to go to the conference (by the time I get out, all of the scientists are going on an excursion into various parts of NM). After training I will go to the lab and work with Yoko, the postdoc I have been working with on the probe and setting up the experiment I mentioned above. On Thursday I will go to the conference again, and then on Friday (my day off--I have every other Friday off) the conference lasts a half day so I will ask if I could skip it so I can get my car fixed finally.

On a different note about the conference, it is called the International Conference on SCES (Strongly Correlated Electron Systems). Don't ask me what that means because I have no idea. All I know is that most of the talks and posters revolve around correlated electrons and condensed matter physics stuff, things I don't understand. I didn't get that far in the classes as a physics major and I was just about to take quantum mechanics, so I am very clueless about every aspect of this conference. The only topics that makes some sense to me are things involving superconductors and materials science stuff like lattice structures and phase diagrams (thanks Hellstrom! [my materials science teacher last semester]) It made me feel better when I spoke with my mentor and he said he barely understood what was going on too. I guess the talks were too specialized for anyone not specifically in that field because a lot of other people from my lab were talking about not understanding the talks either! Personally, I'd rather be at a conference about cool engineering stuff and listen to talks about how they build this cool stuff and look at posters that show their cool designs of their cool stuff..I guess this is how I know I chose the right major, haha!

On a side note, I have a 4 day weekend coming up! (That is, if I am allowed to take my Friday off) I was unaware that the 4th of July was on Sunday which means we have Monday the 5th off! I don't know what I am going to do with all the free time, or what I'll do for the 4th but all I know is I have 2 sweet movies to see ASAP (Toy Story 3 and Eclipse..I know, I'm a huge geek :P) Hhhokay later kids.

Peace & Love,

Val