Physics 279y is a no-credit seminar course specifically for undergraduate students in The Department of Physics and Astronomy. It is supposed to be in an informal environment where upper-year students and Physics Professors talk about possible careers and new scientific topics.
Being the introvert that I am, I really was not looking forward to this because I was expecting showing up, participating actively and discussing our “opinions”, therefore, I was very apprehensive when I walked into the room. There was actually a lot of people in the room, I was surprised. But later on, I realized why; it was a combination of second, third and fourth years in the Department. I felt somewhat out of place, because there was only one other Asian person in the whole room; the rest are probably all at North Campus, the infamous building usually associated with everything Biology.
Five minutes into the “lecture”, I was no longer nervous. The course overview just talked about the schedule of the Seminars and expectations of the students. Some scheduled seminar topics were high school physics education, climate change, eye physics, the X-15 Rocket Plane, microgravity science, paper physics, gender issues in science, and something most probably along the lines of condensed matter, surface science, and/or ion scattering. I think the topic that raised my eyebrows, and consequently raised my excitement, was paper physics. Never before have I heard that term before. At Michelle’s later, I wiki’d it and there was no result. So then I googled it, apparently it had to do with the material that is used for paper, types of fibers and everything along those lines. (There was stuff about NMR and lots of other Spectroscopy language that I don’t understand.)
And, the last schedule seminar topic was my guess, because the presenter is Lyudmila Goncharova (on the overview, her name is misspelt as Goncherova), who is my Professor for Physics 208. I was actually looking forward to it because her area of research was quite interesting.
Moreover, supposedly the school is forcing every professor to put Western’s Plagiarism Policy in every course outline in every first lecture of the year/semester, the lecturer in charge said, “No cheating, because there’s really no way you can cheat in this course.” There was an universal chuckle and some laughters. However, you have to pass this course, and the only way to do that is if you skip less than three classes each semester.
In other words, this is completely a bird course, except it wasn’t about birds. Felix Lee commented in the first Chemistry 213A lecture that the course wasn’t a bird course, but also added there was one, it was actually about birds. Heh.
After the last scheduled seminar, the last time scheduled for class was November 29th, and there will be a end-of-term party. Interesting.
Then we were asked to fill out a questionnaire, asking us about the kind of thing we expect from this course, I almost froze in my seat right there. I didn’t know what I wanted, so I was quite nervous on getting the questionnaire to be passed to me, when I got it and read some questions, I almost freaked, because some of the questions were very specific and I’ve actually never thought about them. I looked at the top of the questionnaire, it said, “Name (optional): _______.” I was quite relieved, so I just wrote my initials.
I really need a cellphone.
I saw Madagascar at Michelle’s house today, it was pretty fun. Her parents also gave me some fruits =). I’m very thankful when they asked me over for dinner because I wouldn’t have known what to eat for dinner.. *lol*