Preparing for Berkeley

It's been a quiet couple of summer months, so there hasn't really been much for me to post. There were a few periods where I hadn't heard anything from Berkeley in a while and I started to get paranoid that I wasn't getting some of the emails I should have been, or things must have been getting lost in the mail, but everything has worked out okay.

I realized that people in the graduate program at Berkeley probably try on purpose not to inundate us incoming graduate students with materials and paperwork until we arrive. I just bummed around all summer, deciding to relax and have a slow couple of months. So I certainly had graduate school on my mind and was even a little impatient to get started on the days when I felt bored. But some people were much busier--they might have spent their summers working two jobs or volunteering in a developing country, and they wouldn't have had time to bother filling out pesky forms and emailing back and forth with professors and graduate students.

My summer ended up being more chemistry-free than I would have liked. I didn't have university library access, so I couldn't really read journal articles unless I asked someone who was still in school to email them or to borrow a VPN login to my school's network. I read part of "Designing the Molecular World" by Philip Ball, a book that explains the frontiers of several areas of chemistry research to non-chemists.

Since arriving in the Bay area I've just spent some time getting things in order. I got my Berkeley public library card, bought a bike, and went for a few hikes. Orientation started this week and things are somewhat busier now; more on that soon.