To say that I'm nervous or worried or stressed really doesn't express it. I rushed through the finals for my classes so that I could spend this week focusing on studying, but it feels like I get burned out on studying awfully quickly these days. At this point, my labmate and I have spent hours quizzing each other and working through longer and more complicated problems than we think we'd be handed on the spot; we got quizzed by older grad students; we've reviewed years worth of notes. I think I'm at the point now where I just want it over with. Reviewing is not going to do any more for me--all I can do now is try to keep my wits about me and stay calm.

...and make sure that I can derive Bernoulli's equation with my eyes closed...

I sincerely hope that I hear soon that she's alright.

Edited to add: She is okay, though very shaken. Some of the people shot were her friends.

I moved to Ithaca, NY, and joined the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University last August. As a first year student, I was not immediately attached to a research lab, so my first semester was spent taking three graduate courses and essentially shopping around for an advisor.

In December, I received word that I'd been officially placed with Dr. Zellman Warhaft, along with one of the other first-year students. Since the only other student in our lab defended his thesis in January, we've actually been working in the lab pretty steadily since December, so that we can learn as much as possible before he leaves at the end of the summer.

We work in experimental turbulence research, and our current work is motivated by a desire to understand the role of turbulence in cloud formation, a factor that is little understood by current theories and models and which, we suspect, may have a large impact on global warming predictions. My first couple of months in the lab involved learning the basics of hot-wire anemometry--along with a great deal about the topic of turbulence in general.

A few weeks ago, during our Spring Break, we moved over to our other lab space, where we have a cool wind tunnel set-up where we spray water droplets into the air flow and then track them using a video camera that moves alongside the tunnel at the mean speed of the flow. This, of course, requires a much more complicated apparatus, and it's a set-up that only one or two other places in the world have, which means that we have a pretty cutting-edge way to view the physics. I basically spent my Spring Break taking hundreds of videos on that apparatus, and yesterday we moved the laser sheet and started working on a new experiment, the results of which I expect will be presented at the APS Fluids conference in November. (I don't know yet whether I'll be attending said conference, or whether my name will just appear somewhere in the presentation as an afterthought.)

One nice aspect of my research group is our close collaboration with a simulation group here at Cornell led by Dr. Lance Collins and with Dr. Eberhard Bodenschatz's group in Germany. In fact, at some point in my studies, I will probably spend a summer doing research in Germany, which thrills me.

In other matters, it's been quite a change moving from Cleveland to little Ithaca, but I've found a lot to enjoy. When the weather is nice, I can easily go hiking or walking in the woods or in one of the many gorges that run throughout the town. I missed that a lot more than I realized in the years since I left Arkansas. Ithaca also has periodic festivals downtown that I've found very entertaining; there's something very nice about being able to walk around and see families and children and life outside of a university campus. It's a nice reminder that there is a world outside of life on the Hill.

There's more I could say about Ithaca and Cornell, but I think I'll leave those matters for another day.

It's been a crazy weekend. On the one hand, it's very exciting to graduate and process and don a morterboard--but at the same time the prospect of saying goodbye to so many friends and faculty is depressing beyond belief. I've been cartwheeling between enthusiastic and maudlin since I handed over the last of my research to Dr. White on Thursday. Now that I have my diploma in hand and no more commencement events to look forward to, I have to say that we've taken a definite turn toward the maudlin.

So here's to four years that brought me friends, and knowledge, and challenges; to four years full of laughter, and stress, and learning; to four years in which I learned about who I am and about the person I'd like to become; to four lovely springs and four bitter winters of walking across an ever-changing campus; to the four years of Hundert's reign; and to the best four years of my life thus far.

Goodbye, Case--though perhaps only for now--and thank you.

In other geeky news that I managed to miss while worrying about finals, one of my childhood idols, Eileen Collins, has announced that she is retiring from the space shuttle program.

"President Edward Hundert and Provost John Anderson will dedicate a very special apple tree on campus in ceremonies at 12:30 p.m. on Arbor Day - April 28 - on the Case Quad between Adelbert Hall and the Rockefeller Building. The tree, already planted, is a direct descendant of the one legendarily used by Sir Isaac Newton in stating his theory of gravity. The tree was donated to Case by Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation and former Case adjunct faculty member. Refreshments of apple cider and Fig Newtons will be served. For more information, contact eric.dicken@case.edu, or at 368-3189." #

I may have to check that out next Friday (if I'm not going to the Honors ceremony), both for the sheer geekiness of it and for the apple cidar.

(No, fresh, homemade apple cidar for nine months out of the year was not an influence on my decision to attend Cornell for graduate school. Really.)

All I wanted to do was some simple data analysis in Matlab on the data I spent seven hours collecting on Saturday. Is that so much to ask? According to your website, Matlab users need only have a network connection to use the program. My laptop is currently hardwired into the Case network, and, yet, I am getting nasty error messages from KeyServer, which isn't supposed to have anything to do with Matlab anyway.

Do you want me to download a newer version? Is that it? I'm supposed to spend my afternoon downloading a 1.18 GB file and reinstalling one of the largest programs on my computer, am I? I'm a busy person, Software Center, and this is not at all funny. It still won't be funny tomorrow morning when I have to go tell my advisor that I don't have results for him because Matlab refuses to load.

So do you think we can possibly move things along? This doesn't have to be difficult or painful.

Thanks!

Nicole Sharp

ETA: The KeyServer server hiccuped and Matlab blew up on me. The new installation involved infinite loops. I had to go into safe mode to fix things. But all is now well because Matlab works again.

Taking a look at the search terms like I have in the past suggests that a lot of it may have to do with the the vote of no-confidence and Hundert's resignation. Although there have been 22 searches for "nicole sharp" and one for "nicole sharp case" (i.e. 7.5% of the keyphrase searches that turned this blog up), 33.2% of the keyphrase searches had something to do with a combination of the following: President Hundert, the vote of no-confidence, Hundert's resignation, and Lawrence Krauss. (Watch my stats continue to rise as I use these words!)

Other popular general topics include:

• Graduate school (10.2%)


• Space and the Space Shuttle (6.3%)


• SOURCE in general (2.4%)


• MIT (2.4%)

That last one continues to amuse me to no end. Googling for "mit nerds" brings up one of my entries as the second result. Because people on the Internet don't read very closely, I've actually gotten e-mails from people asking how much I like studying at MIT. This would be part of why I have that "about" link sitting at the top of the page. I keep meaning to write an entry purely about who I am so that maybe I'll stop getting e-mails from people asking about MIT and whether I can pass their idea about how to fix the space shuttle on to NASA. I'm an undergraduate, people!

Such interesting things happen when one has a blog...

In brief, the LabView program accepts user input as to the desired circular motion to execute and the number of measurements to make along the way. It calculates where it should be stopping to take measurements, then executes the first of many moves, pauses to take data, does some fairly hefty calculations on the data (see screenshots 1, 2, and 3), saves that data, moves to the next point and repeats the process.

At the end of all of this, I have a file containing spatial, temporal, and statistical information for every point in the flow that I map.

I'm absolutely thrilled that everything worked smoothly the first time I ran the full program. I guess that means that I did a good job programming all the little pieces along the way. This means that I'll be going into the lab tomorrow when fewer people are trying to go in or out of the lab (and thereby messing with the airflow) to spend a few hours mapping out the ion plume. At the end, I should have some nice visuals for my research poster at the SOURCE Symposium on April 20th.

(Speaking of SOURCE, how is it that I have two news items on the front page of their site? Maybe they're falling behind on updating that?)

• Duke University
  • Status: invited to visit, accepted, offered a first-year fellowship
• University of Virginia
  • Status: invited to visit, accepted, offered research position and fellowships
• Case Western Reserve University
  • Status: accepted
• University of Notre Dame
  • Status: accepted
• Cornell University
  • Status: invited to visit, accepted, offered first-year fellowship and full financial support thereafter
• University of Michigan
  • Status: invited to visit, accepted, offer multi-year fellowship

It was pretty shocking to get accepted everywhere and to get four financial offers. How I managed to do so much better in applying to graduate schools than I did applying to undergraduate institutions is beyond me.

In any case, I went through and carefully considered each offer, both financially and in terms of what would be expected of me at each school. I also spent quite a bit of time reflecting on each of the four schools I visited and whether I felt I would fit well with the departments and their research interests.

In the end, I decided to accept Cornell's offer. I won't be tied to any one research project until after my first semester, but there are at least two professors in the department that I would be thrilled to work with. I also have to admit that Cornell was the most exciting of my school visits. I really got into talking about the research with professors and students there, and the atmosphere of the department was one I felt comfortable in. I didn't spend as much time exploring the campus and Ithaca as I might have liked--Charlottesville was very much a factor in favor of UVa--but I'm confident that I'll enjoy my five years there.

It was a tough choice, but now that I've made it, I'm ready to start looking forward to this summer when I get to go back to Ithaca to find an apartment. I can't wait to get out on my own. In some ways, it's like going back to those exciting couple of months before college started. Some days I get up and all I can think is, "I can't wait to start graduate school!" We'll see if I still feel that way in, say, November.

That's something that I never wanted to find myself saying.

I find such things easiest to handle in an unordered list, so that's what you're getting. I'm serious when I say "unordered" here. This isn't some kind of list of ascending or descending preference.

• Duke University
  • Status: invited to visit, visited (9-11 Feb), no formal acceptance or financial offer yet
  • Thoughts: I enjoyed my visit to Duke a lot. The campus is gorgeous; the people were good; the women's basketball game was absolutely fantastic and really made me nostalgic for the U of A games I used to attend when I grew up in Arkansas. Unfortunately, the research didn't really grab me.
• University of Virginia
  • Status: invited to visit, visited (23-26 Feb), formally accepted, fellowship offer on the table
  • Thoughts: I wasn't considering UVa all that seriously until I visited. Not only are UVa and Charlottesville great, I fit in very well with both the department members and the other prospective students. The downside is that I still haven't spoken with the professor there who would be my advisor if I matriculate; he was out-of-town when I visited. I'm expecting a call from him this week. I've actually been offered multiple fellowships on top of the department's base graduate student stipend, which is very flattering. The irony here is that I was waitlisted when I applied to UVa as an undergraduate.
• University of Michigan
  • Status: invited, upcoming visit (16-18 March), formal acceptance, no offer of financial aid yet
  • Thoughts: Michigan's aerospace program is quite highly ranked. In fact, I surprised a lot of people when I turned down their undergraduate program in favor of coming to Case. At the time I felt like Case's program was better suited to what I needed. We'll see if Michigan's program is more like what I need now when I visit next week.
• Cornell University
  • Status: invited, upcoming visit (9-12 Feb), formal offer of admission and of financial aid
  • Thoughts: Cornell is definitely the most prestigious department to which I applied, and I was absolutely floored when I received my acceptance letter from them. There's a professor there who I'm very interesting in meeting this weekend because I feel like his lab group may be a good match for me. I haven't decided where I'm going yet, but just about everyone else has declared that I'll be going to Cornell. I'm not sure whether the thought delights or terrifies me more.
• Case Western Reserve University
  • Status: accepted, no financial aid
  • Thoughts: I admit it. Case was my back-up. I also, frankly, couldn't consider it too seriously because the professor I'd be interested in working with is also the one pushing me steadily out the door.
• University of Notre Dame
  • Status: nothing yet
  • Thoughts: I wish my mailbox weren't consistently so empty.

So that is the current state of affairs in brief. I have to say that it feels really good not only to know for certain that I'll be going to graduate school next year but to know that I have choices about where I'll be going. Spring Break is going to be resarch between a sandwich of graduate school visits, and, with some luck, I may get to squeeze in a chance to see some high school friends. I've got a friend at Cornell and several at Michigan, and, since my family doesn't live in Michigan anymore, this will be my only real chance to see them for an indefinite amount of time.

Well, okay, maybe I shouldn't say that I'm shocked. I'm shocked that a vote of no-confidence has been put forward, but I'm not at all shocked that Krauss would be the one to do so. It sounds like just his sort of attention-grabbing ploy designed to capitalize on the recent resignation of Harvard's president as well as the poor press we got from WKYC. The campus seems to be relatively quiet about this prospect, with a few exceptions. First there was a message from Hundert in the Case Daily, followed by a message of support from the chair of the Board of Trustees there today. There was an excellent post by Aaron Shaffer in support of the President, and today, what should show up in my RSS inbox but this ridiculous photo on photos.case.edu.

What strikes me about all this doomsday talk is that there's little or no substance or reasoning with it. Just how is Hundert making us "the most failed university in the country"? Yes, we're having some financial problems, but, guess what: other universities are, too. Just because we, as a private institution, have not suffered the sorts of problems that many public universities have had the last several years does not mean that we're going to get off scotch free, especially given the growth we've seen as a university in recent years.

I've been here just as long as Hundert has, and, looking back on that time, I'm astounded by the amount of change I've seen. I won't claim that all of the changes have been for the best, but I firmly believe that Case has improved by leaps and bounds in the last several years. I have full confidence in President Hundert's ability to continue making Case a better place.

My final semester here at Case has begun. It's difficult for me to think about, to be honest. It seems like freshman year was a long time ago and that, simultaneously, it wasn't nearly long enough ago. Mark and I observe to one another often now that we wish we could go back to being freshmen. As much as we appreciated that time, I don't think that we appreciated it enough.

The semester is promising to be an interesting one. I've limited myself to 12 credit hours, an all-time low for me. There is pressure from certain areas to take more, but I have serious doubts as to whether I could handle another course on top of all of work already cut out for me. So far I have two projects, my senior project (a continued pursuit of all that SOURCE work) and an as-yet-undetermined aerospace design project that will have something to do with exploring Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Beyond that, I'm taking Propulsion and Advanced Fluids II (Viscous, Incompressible Flow) and awaiting letters from the graduate schools to which I've applied.

And, of course, there's always my work with the Writing Crew. (I'm doing office hours as I type, in fact.)

Perhaps this semester's projects will lend themselves to some blogging. In the meantime, I hope everyone's spring semester is going well.