Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that I choose Notre Dame, but there are many things that are taking time getting used to. I was walking from my office, located at the very north tip of campus, to my class on the opposite side and I started to feel rather lonely. I am so used to a small campus where not only is the walk across very short, but I also could see many familiar faces along the way. I miss walking into a building and at least recognizing most of the people. I miss having people to chat, eat, and study with. Lately I have been so busy that I don't have time to get to know people, and I am sure most other people are experiencing the same thing. It is also painfully obvious how few girls there are in engineering. According to the TU website, 29% of the graduate students are female in the College of Engineering and Natural Sciences. On the ND website 38% of all graduate students for the entire university are female. There were probably about 30 new students added to the AME department this year and I think only 3-4 are girls, which means that for my year it is about 10% female. At Tulsa even though girls were still the minority, there were plenty around to talk to when I just wanted to have girl talk. The academic culture is very different. At TU, I enjoyed knowing all my professors and feeling that they truly cared about my success even though I was a mere undergrad. Here, it is very apparent that the professors are more here for their research and graduate students. Even though they are here for the grad students, some of them still manage to be less accessible to me that any of my professors at TU.
On the plus side, next week is fall break and I will finally be able to make some progress on my research. I will be going hardware shopping with my undergraduate research assistant, Andrew. I really hope one of the store employees asks me what project I am working on so I can watch their face when I say that I am building an artificial heart using their plumbing department. I plan to have fun because this part of the research is full of problem solving and requires some creative uses of different components.
