Back To School

What's going on with me as I get back into school.

I decided to go back to school and am well on my way. I was accepted to Florida State University and offered a teaching assistantship, which was replaced by the GAANN Fellowship. I will be pursuing a PhD in Applied/Computational Mathematics, which should take 4 or 5 years. I officially begin in Fall 2008. This year I will take Foundations of Computational Mathematics, Partial Differential Equations, Methods of Applied Math, as well as some seminars. Because of the fellowship, I won't be teaching this year, which is awesome! I'll have much more time to focus on my studies.

I actually started this summer to get a head start on things. I took Complex Variables (MTWRF) because I'd never had a class like that before and I need to know it for the second semester of Foundations of Computational Mathematics. I also took Engineering Mathematics 2 (MWF) for exposure to Partial Differential Equations. Both classes actually met at the same time of the day, so on MWF, I had to decide which class I was going to. As an added bonus (note the sarcasm), Engineering Mathematics 2 began at the beginning of the summer, so I had to catch up on everything. Despite all of this conflict, I did rather well in both classes and most definitely passed them.

Right now, I have a break before Fall classes begin. I'm a bit nervous like I always am before a new term. I'm also a little confused as to whether I'm affiliated with the Mathematics Department or the School of Computational Science or both. I guess at the moment it doesn't matter. I also need to speak with professors to try to figure out what types of things I might be interested in studying. So far, I like PDE's, but I've only had a little exposure.

I also have yet to meet a single student in my program. This will probably change when all the rest of the new graduate students arrive. There will be approximately 40 of them to add to about 13 of us who started this summer. Hopefully when everyone gets here there will be some sort of "meet and greet" so that we can at least meet. I've already met some of the old graduate students, but definitely not nearly all of them.

Pictures!!!!!!

Yay! I finally listened to Brent and downloaded the Gallery plugin for iPhoto. That made it so fast to upload pictures. Before it could take up to 5 mins for one picture. Now I can upload 30-50 in the same time. So now, all of the pictures that I'll ever post from Mexico are there. Most of the pictures still don't have captions, but if anyone wants to know what was goin on, they can always ask me.

Back

Whew. I'm back in the U.S. and have been for about a week. My internet connection in my dorm at UDLA was so slow that I gave up on uploading more pictures. Now that I'm back, I can do it much faster. I just uploaded the rest of the Puebla album and all of the Tlaxcala album. Then I created albums for all of the rest of the pictures that I want to upload. I'm way too tired to keep going with this tonight, but when I'm done, all of the albums will be full and I'll post another blog.

Math Club

Hey Math Club!!!! How's everyone doing? Make sure you pay attention to Brent; he knows what he's talking about! :) Brent has been ever so nice and has allowed me to use his webspace. I have been putting up pictures from Mexico. I still have about 50 pictures that I haven't posted yet, but eventually I will. So if you'd like to see what I've been up to, feel free to visit the gallery. If you want to talk to me, email me (Shirley has my address) or call me. If you email me, I'll give you the number. Have fun skiing/snowboarding!!!

Mexico

I'm at the Universidad de las Americas (UDLA) in Cholula, Puebla in Mexico for the semester. For right now I will be using this site to post pictures from Mexico. I probably won't create many more blogs after this because I don't like people knowing my every move.