At UCR. Visiting UCSD and UH next week.

Hey, I'm at the computer lab of UC Riverside right now. Its a nice campus. Reminds me of UMass + 20 degrees. However, as far as I can tell, the town of Riverside is nowhere near as nice as Amherst. Anyways, interesting developments on the grad school front. I talked to some people yesterday. Didn't get a chance to talk to probably the most interesting professor of all, although his research is in a field I never thought I would go into. (talked to him a little bit.) anyways, the interesting thing i found out is how high energy experimental particle physics works. apparently, everyone who is involved in experimental HEP as it is known live near CERN in Geneva for either half the year or the whole year! I never expected this, I thought once you gained seniority as a grad student you might be lucky to be sent over there for a month or two. No, apparently, after my first year, depending on which professor I choose as my advisor, I shipped on out over there!

Now of course, being a part of history at the heart of the largest and one of the most important physics experiments ever would be very exciting. And some of you, especially Dad, would say living in Switzerland or France would be great. But I don't want to live in boring old Geneva! I want to live in sunny southern California, (or perhaps Hawaii.) 5 years in Geneva would be tough, as well as moving back and forth between Geneva and Cally ever six months.

(Nice aside, though, one professor whom I didn't request to speak to requested to speak with me, and seemed very eager to get me to be her graduate student. However, this probably is partially due to the fact that she will have no more grad students at cern and thus will lose continuity/funding unless she gets someone asap. ad the way this Prof does is, is you go to Geneva for the whole year, not 6 month stints)

So this adds another dimension to the graduate decision. Along with this comes the realization that if I am just gonna go work on a huge particle accelerator, a place where your research questions are limited to a set of about 6 or 7, why not do that under the brand name of the best school possible? After all CERN (well, the LHC more specifically,) is the LHC, and that will be on my resume no matter UCSD or UCR, so as for the degree, why not go for the best brand-name?

As far as Hawaii goes, they have connections to neutrino experiments in Japan. While the neutrino is the most fascinating particle to me, I am afraid that there are less research opportunities with it. It is so hard to see, and so much stuff that can be done on it has already been done before. I will have to scope out the sitch when I go to Hawaii and perhaps UCSD. However, if Hawaii like UCR ships off its experimental physics grad students to the actual experiments, then I could look forward to being shipped off to Japan; I am sure you know my preferences of living between Geneva and Japan. However, it is Tsukuba Japan, so I am not sure how boring that area is, would have to look that up. Kind of wished I had visited there, but really, I never expected grad students to just be shipped off to experiments. Heck, maybe that is just UCR.

As far as theory goes, well, ya, I do prefer theory, and I could do theory and stay in Cally or Hawaii, but a) the neutrino theorist at UCR named Ma seems like an Old Dog with not much bark left, plus he says there is no more theory left to do on the neutrino, and b) i heard a couple horror stories about grads going from theory postdoc to theory postdoc until they couldn't handle the ruthless treadmill and quit. experiment seems better job security. if i did theory at ucr, itd probably be with a guy named Wudka, he seems like he'd be a good advisor.

oh well, that is all for now. the thick has definitely plottened with the understanding that exp HEP grads go to the experiment they are working on. good or bad? both? gonna have to think about this.