During Qual

The qual hit first on Friday, then packed a second, six-hour punch on Monday. Overall it didn’t go terribly, but also not as well as I expected.

The first part of the exam was Mechanics, followed by a break and then E&M. I sat across from Jake, but I made an offhand comment before the exam about how he rattles the table and I think he took it in a bad way. Not that it mattered much during the exam. With me, I brought my i-pod to listen to Minecraft music, my blue hoodie which I used to study in the East Asian section of the library, and an old scientific calculator that some student had left in the lab.

There were some straight forward section of the whole exam was Mechanics. We had a pendulum on a spring and an impulsive, delta function force. The hardest one in that section was a cylinder rolling in a corner with friction on two ends. There was also a relativistic decay problems with neutrinos which I messed up. For that one, Travis went up to Elias and asked if we needed to treat the neutrinos with mass, but Elias had no idea what was going on.

“Problem 6?”

“No, problem 3. Do the neutrinos have mass.”

“There’s no problem 6.”

“Right, but how about problem 3?”

There were two other hilarious moments. In one, Ryan T. asked which it meant to be in “equilibrium.” In another, Johnny K. asked what a GeV was. That last one is unbelievable to me.

Overall, it didn’t go too badly. (Later I would learn I got a 78 on this section)

E&M packed more of a punch and freaked me out somewhatt. The most straight forward problem was a strange, clylindrical charge distribution which I used Gauss’ law on. Second was a solenoid, which I thought I did correctly but might have messed up on. There was debate afterward about whether the changing magnetic field inside would induce an electric field outside. The other two problems were surprising! One was an array with two antennas that had a satellite flying overhead. It said not to use the doppler shift, but to find some modulation in the received signal. I had no idea what was going on until Learned (proctoring for some reason though he wasn’t on the committee) hinted that we should treat it like a double slit experiment. Unfortunately, I studied the single slight experiment well, but not the double. Ugh! Finally, they had a waveguide / cavity problem. Just coincidentally Elan and I had been discussing them the week before the exam so I had happened to look it up. Lucky for me! (I got a 60 on this section)

After the exam that day, I went against Slava’s advice and had some drinks at TGs with the guys. At that point, another Friday of studying wasn’t going to do me any good. I did manage to get a little review done for quantum and thermal over the weekend, though.

Day two started with Quantum which I felt pretty well about. This time, Jake conspicuously chose not to sit next to me. He’s the type of person that will hold a grudge over something like that “rattling the table” comments (seriously). Instead, Mike sat with me. I like Mike and I feel like were on a similar level in terms of understanding, so I was glad to have him nearby. Humorously, when quantum started, he flipped through his exam and started laughing. I flipped mine open and chuckled a little when I saw there was a multiple choice problem (with lots of icky questions). Then I flipped again and saw a Lambda Hyperon problem and really started laughing. Dr. Pakvasa strikes back! I didn’t think he had got any problems on the exam at all, him being retired and all. We also had a double delta function which I had been expecting the whole time we were studying for qual. I even suggested to Sejin that it would be on the exam days before, but he didn’t study it. It’s a long one, but luckily they said we only needed to solve for the even number solutions. The fourth problem eludes me at the moment. (I got a 60 on this section.)

Thermodynamics was where I got hit the hardest. I was well prepared. I knew my gasses, my derivations, and all the relevant formulas, but I completely fucked it up. To start, there was a photon gas problem. I know the photon gas inside and out, but the problem was asking for you to solve for two dimensionless constant. The only problem is, I couldn’t get them to be dimensionless! Turns out they had units / dimensions after all and Jason was just being a stereotypical theorist and setting all the constants to one. God damnit! I wasted an hour on that for nothing then ended up deriving it from scratch just to show I knew the problem. Next came a reasonable problem about the Van der Waals equation. I totally knew the equation and what to do, HOWEVER Dr. Vauss (I’m assuming it was his problem) assigned 40% of the points for deriving a non-linear face transition from the distribution – a topic which he conspicuously did not teach at all in class. He even mentioned it a little, didn’t do the derivation at all, skipped the the answer, and said we would cover it in a week or so. Wonderful. I basically lost half the points on that one from the outset. I forget the third problem and the last problems was about magnetization and free energy. I completely messed it up. I left this section feeling completely devastated, knowing I should have done way better with the knowledge I had. I had a hard time even talking about it afterward. (I got ~51 on this section)

Kindly, Josh, Lisa, and Serge took us up on the ridge to smoke a spliff and that made me feel a bit better. Now, it was all up to the committee. I like most of the guys on the committee but my competition was fierce and there was no telling how they would grade. (overall, I passed with ~63 on the exam!)