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One of the great things about the Princeton astrophysics department is its small, intimate size, while being contained in its own building - Peyton Hall. Creature arrives at Peyton hall on a lazy Thursday morning. |
| A few years ago, the University commissioned a sculpture by Richard Serra, famous for his use of large curvy sheets of rusty metal. This one is called "Hedgehog and the Fox" and was erected right in front of Peyton Hall. Creature takes a moment to admire the artwork that adorns the campus. |
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One of the perks of being a Princeton grad student in astrophysics is that you get your own office and computer. Creature starts his day by coming into his office and checking email.
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As a grad student, you are expected to be constantly working on a project - semester projects for the first two years and the thesis project in the final two. However, four semester projects tend to turn into three, and "semester" tends to become "year" or "multiyear." This, in turn, means that Creature is frequently working on two or three projects at the same time. Creature now goes to print out a draft of his paper. Good job creature! But creature is careful. A friend of his got sucked into the manual feed once, and now has words all over him. |
| Even though grad students have their own offices, usually most people keep their doors open. Creature goes to chat to a fellow graduate student about cosmology. "Why don't you rephrase that using the higher order slow roll parameters? Yeah, like that!" |
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The first two years as a grad student are spent with roughly equal time in semester projects and studying for classes; again, all of this is "in theory"; usually Creature studies without working for a few weeks, and then works without studying for a few weeks, or something like that. The four classes that Creature takes are stars, ISM, dynamics, and extragalactic, each one semester. Creature also had the option to take high-energy astrophysics and plasma physics, but decided not to. The idea is that when generals comes (at the end of the second year, in May) you can pick four subjects from the above six, and most people pick the former four. Most people study about a month for generals. Creature studied three weeks straight. |
One great thing about Princeton is that all the awesome people who for some weird reason aren't already at Princeton come and give talks. Creature goes to listen to a talk. What an intriguing idea, he thinks.
| After goofing off for several minutes/hours, he resumes work on his project. Oh no! Creature has discovered a bug in his code, rendering a whole week's work useless! |
| Creature was not making much progress on his project in the afternoon, but it was time for tea! So creature went and joined the discussion. "Interesting point, Robert! I wonder if you can do that with the SDSS?" |
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| Later on, when none of the professors are looking, Creature likes to play pingpong in the pingpong room. |