The Second Day

It has been overcast for most of the time I have been here in South Bend, and today was no exception. As I was walking past Touchdown Jesus to my office in the drizzle, I spied two people in long black robes walking across the quad. My first reaction was "Dude, Notre Dame has some hardcore Harry Potter fans!", but then I realized they were just a couple of priests. I am still getting acclimated to the number of clergy on campus.

I had Mathematical Methods and Intermediate Fluid Mechanics today. Math Methods is going to be covering all the advanced math principles that we will need to do our graduate level work. However, quite a bit of what will be covered in the class has already been introduced to me in Quantum Mechanics. I can't say that I understand it, but at least it will be somewhat familiar. I also get to use Mathematica again. Yipee! I thought I had escaped that torture device, but today I installed it on my laptop. Fluid mechanics also startled me a bit because much of what we will be covering seems to be things I have already been introduced to in various courses at the University of Tulsa. So thanks to all my professors at TU for setting me up to be a competitive grad student.

I also attended the first 15 minutes of Intermediate Thermodynamics, the class which I am TAing. Out of the six students registered, four of them showed up today. There are two TAs. I am so grateful that I don't have to grade homework for a class of 70 this semester.

The professors here also require us to use a format called LATEX when creating technical documents. It is a text based program, and I have to wonder if there is not a slightly more user friendly and newer alternative in use.