Antepenult

Antepenult is an obscure Ultima clone, created for the Amiga in the 1980s by Paul Falstad, and distributed as shareware. This summer, I learned about it by stumbling onto the CRPG Addict blog; the writer Chester Bolingbroke is playing his way through old computer games in the role-playing-game genre. He’s an excellent and engaging writer, and my quick skim of his first two articles convinced me that I should give it a try. I did not read these closely so I would avoid detailed spoilers. After all, the fun part is solving the puzzles for yourself!

 

Unlike Nox Archaist, which pays homage to the Ultima series, but is much more streamlined with modern design sensibilities, Antepenult is indeed a child of the 1980s. And it really is an Ultima clone – down to most of the graphics and much of the gameplay. I’d classify it as a mishmash of Ultima II, III, and IV. You’re a single player; there is no party. You consume food. There are basic weapons, armor, and supplies (torches, keys, gems). You can obtain other special items, some of which provide the equivalent of magic. You get gold by fighting the same denizens you’d see in Ultima. It feels very familiar. You begin near a castle and a town; and the ruler of the castle sets you on your quest. Basically, you need to conquer evil and save the world. Nothing new there.

 

You begin in the land of Havilah. If you’ve read the bible, some of the non-player characters (NPCs) have biblical names, some are the early church fathers, and then there’s a whole bunch of Greek mythology thrown in. I met Homer and Asaph in the same hallway of a city. They were composing songs and poems about the evil that had come and my eventual victorious quest. To complete said quest, I needed to explore different towns and worlds and talk to NPCs. I was given a list of items to collect, and many of the NPCs strung me along by telling me the next person to talk to. The four elements of Earth, Water, Air, Fire, feature prominently. I had to discover how to access these different worlds. And if you guessed it, the waterworld is called Atlantis and its king is Neptune. Two towns in that world were Tyre and Sidon. Yes, it’s a mishmash. And the special items you collect are Ultima-cloney. I won’t say much in case you ever want to try the game yourself.

 

I’d never used an Amiga before but I was able to eventually get FS-UAE working several moons ago. So as not to interfere with my workweek, I only played Antepenult for some number of hours each weekend. I took copious notes and I started to make maps. When I really got stuck, I would skim the CRPG Addict’s articles and get a clue as to how to proceed. This didn’t happen very often and it has been interesting to compare Bolingbroke’s play-through with my own. We used similar strategies overall, and occasionally got stuck in the same spaces. But any seasoned old-school Ultima player would probably do the same things. Some patience is needed. A teenager today would probably find it b-o-r-i-n-g. But someone who played Ultima as a teenager will feel the nostalgia when discovering some clever and amusing parts in the game.

 

Here I am at the final castle of the big bad boss.

 

After defeating him, instead of getting a “Congratulations! You won!” message, I got confused as fire and black spots suddenly started appearing and I wasn’t sure what to do and whether I needed to run out of the castle. Everything goes black.

 

I wake up in a restored castle Pergamum and as I walked through the hallways I am thanked by its many inhabitants for saving the world. Asaph was one of them. As were a number of the church father namesakes who gave me clues for my quest. One character who I saved from a high school in hell sets up a possible sequel. (I thought I killed the hag, but apparently she got away. I must have just killed the daemon inhabiting a body that claimed her name.)

 

The king of Havilah, Lord Hypnos, tells me how to return to my own world. Very Ultima. When I enter the portal to do so, there’s an amusing sequence at the very end. Another hint of a possible sequel. No sequel ever came. According to Bolingbroke, this was Falstad’s only game and he programmed it when he was young, and before adulting became a fulltime job.

 

I’ve now read in detail all Bolingbroke’s Antepenult articles. If you’d like to just get a sense of the nostalgia by living vicariously through his playthrough, you won’t be disappointed by his articles. If you want the full experience, get an Amiga emulator and give it a go. My copy was unregistered which makes the game harder when you’re in Tartarus, but not insurmountable. In his articles, Bolingbroke provides enough information whenever you’re stuck. My overall rating of Antepenult? It’s not as good as Nox Archaist, but it has some very clever bits. When I finish my adulting phase-of-life, maybe I will take up writing a retro-game themed on the four elements. I have imagined some of my own clever bits. Maybe my game will be the Antepenult sequel.

Exam Readiness

Augustine of Hippo (circa 400 A.D.), in a remarkable chapter on the nature of time in Confessions, confesses the following:  If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not”.

 

This is why I tell students that it’s very important to try and explain aloud their answers to conceptual questions. You think you know it in your head, but you actually don’t know what you don’t know until you try to verbalize it or write it out in full. Several years ago, I revamped my daily study guides to phrase what students needed to know in question form, and I also added “test yourself” questions to each of the study guides. Whether or not students use them effectively is an open question, but this semester I have assignments requiring students to turn in a subset of their answers. (The students get full credit for the attempt regardless if they got the answers right, wrong, or something in between.)

 

In my course materials, I have a section on “how to be successful in this class” that informs students what they should be doing from the get-go. I also provide detailed information on what students should read before class, and the main things we will cover in class. It’s short and pithy. Students follow it to varying degrees, or at least they claim to do so. But if they really wanted to be successful in any class, they should read Daniel Willingham’s new book, Outsmart Your Brain. It doesn’t just provide strategies; it explains the why behind them. It also explains why your brain’s instinct is to resort to less optimal strategies that require less effort but give you a false sense of thinking you’ve learned when you haven’t. I’ve read many of Willingham’s research articles over the years but these were not aimed primarily at students. Now there’s a good book I can recommend to students!

 

Each chapter of the book also ends with notes to instructors on how to facilitate student learning. A number of those are things I already do in my classes, but there were others I had forgotten or not thought as deeply about. This week I’ve been making a better effort to not assume students know how and why I have organized the material for each class in a particular way; I’ve been making more statements about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we will proceed. I have not been putting these up on a slide, because as Willingham says, students just copy things from a slide regardless of whether it’s useful to them or not instead of paying attention to what I am saying.

 

So how should students prepare for exams? They should prepare a study guide, according to Willingham. Turns out I already help them with this by posing questions in my guides. But Willingham has helpful tips of how to pose questions bidirectionally and at multiple levels. And he tells students you need to memorize some of your answers, not necessarily word-for-word but meaningfully. Forcing oneself to recall in different places and at different times works best in solidifying the material. And saying it aloud, of course! While I encourage students to study together, Willingham explains why this is useful, and how to do it effectively. When students discuss with each other their fragmented knowledge, it introduces variation to how questions and answers are posed. Different individuals help notice things others have missed. And students can test each other! Being tested is one of the best ways to prepare for exams.

 

Chapter 7 (“How to Judge Whether You’re Ready for an Exam”) had some particularly good reminders. It’s not enough to ‘understand’ something when someone else explains it, you have to try and explain it yourself – and not just in your head. Rereading can mislead you into thinking you know something you don’t really know it; rather you just have a passing familiarity and unless you’re forced to recall (without looking) you won’t know if you actually know. (Willingham recommends letting at least thirty minutes pass between reading and testing yourself.) I’ve stopped giving previous year’s exams to students because they fail to utilize it effectively, either giving themselves a false sense of readiness or going into a panic. (Read Willingham’s book for the explanation!) In distinguishing learning from performance, Willingham recommends overlearning – essentially “study until you know it, and then keep studying… It protects against forgetting [even though] it feels as though it’s not working.” He has a great quote from a friend when he was in college who said: “When leaves blowing around on the quad look like organic compounds to me, I know I’m ready.”

 

There’s also a chapter on how to take exams including what’s effective and what’s not. This mirrors some of what I highlighted from Barbara Oakley’s book. But I liked the early chapters on the importance of active listening in lectures, how to prepare for a lecture class, how to take notes, and how to reorganize one’s notes. Willingham thinks students should take their own notes in class, regardless of whether the instructor provides notes or slides or recordings. He also explains why being in class and engaging your mind right there and then is more effective than missing class and getting notes later from a friend. There’s an interesting section on whether one should do the reading before or after the lecture – that’s dependent on how the instructor organizes the class. And he gives good advice on how to ask good questions – ones that don’t annoy your instructors or your classmates.

 

Willingham reminded me that most students don’t take good lecture notes. It’s for a variety of reasons and he provides tips to students on how to improve, but I particularly appreciated his reminders to instructors. These are things I need to pay more attention to:

·      Talk more slowly. (I talk too fast sometimes, okay, maybe most of the time in class.)

·      Signal when something should be written and pause to allow time to write it down. (I’m getting better at this.)

·      Distribute copies of figures/visuals; let students know which ones they don’t need to copy. (I think I’m good at this. Maybe, maybe not.)

·      Students copy what’s on slides, whether doing so makes sense or not. (I’ve become much more judicious in the way I use slides.)

I liked Willingham’s suggestion of how students should work together and share lecture notes. Very importantly, it is not by dividing the effort among group members, but rather that everyone should take as complete notes as they can, and then once-a-week get together so each person can fill in any missing gaps and compare how different people organized their notes to see if any improvements can be made.

 

One thing that is emphasized in Outsmart Your Brain is how effortful learning actually is. Our brain would prefer to conserve energy and get away with quick-and-easy pattern recognition, maybe. I can’t speak to other fields, but the natural sciences are full of phenomena that are counter-intuitive, conceptually challenging, and theoretically abstract. Yet, they are crucial to understanding the field. Chemistry is hard to learn. I know it from my own experience as a learner, and I certainly see the same for my students. I hope to convey some of the tips and explanations from this book to my students.

Curator and Guide

Pondering what I do as a chemistry instructor made me think of the role of a curator. I’ve never met a curator in person, but I have seen their invisible hand when I visit a museum or a gallery. Someone decided what will be displayed, how it will be displayed, and what information will accompany each of the displays. There is likely a theme that collects various objects together. Sometimes this is made explicit in the information given; other times it is not.

 

I have gone on a guided tour before. In some cases, it was a Walkman and headphones that talked me through where to walk and what to look at. In other cases, it was a live human being who could also answer questions and engage in back-and-forth conversation. The guide adds another layer of detail to whatever is being displayed, calling attention to some features while making no mention of others. Time also plays a constraining role as a live guide moves you through one display to another. A Walkman guide with a pause button, or no guide at all, allows me to decide how much or how little time I will spend with a particular exhibit.

 

The author of a textbook could be compared to a curator. Most students have never met the author, and in many classes, the textbook author never makes an explicit appearance. But the textbook arranges the material in a particular way following a particular logic. When I use a textbook as part of a class, I am akin to the guide. I add flourish to some areas while downplaying others according to what I think is important for my students. But since I have eschewed using the textbook in most of the classes I teach, I have become both curator and guide.

 

It's been freeing in some ways; I feel less constraint in rearranging the material the way I deem fit. But I’ve only reached this point of feeling that I can be a curator after I’ve taught a course multiple times and developed my own internal logic of how I personally think the material should be presented. There is no one right way. But some arrangements work better than others, certainly in chemistry where a significant chunk of the conceptual knowledge is hierarchical. Concepts build on each other and the complexity ratches up. It’s more work to be both curator and guide, instead of just focusing on the latter, but it’s work that I enjoy.

 

A museum guide has never given me a quiz to test my knowledge after the tour. In my job as an instructor, I can’t stop at being just a curator and guide. I also have to be an evaluator. Have you learned something from this tour of chemical knowledge? What have you actually learned? Can you demonstrate that you have learned what I wanted you to learn? This is not the most fun part of the job for instructor or student, but I admit that I am eager to know what and whether my students learned. I start grading exams almost immediately after the exam is over, so students can get their feedback by the next class period. But it also gives me feedback so I can improve what I do as a guide and as a curator. A museum might get feedback from a visitor based on their interactions. A curator almost never does, at least not directly. In any case, my students help me improve my role as curator and guide in the breathtaking tour of the chemical world!

Life in the Rocks: Cold Version

I vicariously followed the adventures of Tullis Onstott and his colleagues in Chapter Nine of Deep Life. Nunavut, Canada, is cold, cold, cold. Could there be life down in the rocks below the permafrost? If so, it might tell us how to hunt for life on Mars below its barren surface. While I mentioned the challenges of field work in my previous blog post, and how I am ill-suited to undertake such arduous, reading about it is exciting. I recommend Deep Life for the blow-by-blow accounts.

 

In this icy cold chapter, the scientific team successfully isolates a prokaryote that makes its living via chemolithoautotrophy. That’s chemistry in the rocks where you make your own food by using energy from the redox gradient from rock chemistry. The autotrophs we are most familiar with are green plants which are photoautotrophs. They make their own food with energy streaming down as photons from the sun. Trying to determine what this microorganism does or how it makes its living is challenging. You have to chop up its DNA, determine its sequence, then try and match it up to known sequences that code for proteins that do biochemistry you’ve seen before.

 

They got to name their organism: Desulforudis audaxviator. It lives through reduction of sulfur compounds (desulfo), it is rod-shaped (rudis), and it is a ‘bold traveler’ (audax viator) thanks to having genes that indicate flagella for motility. They even have a scanning electron microscope picture (read the book!). But what was shocking is that it also had the genes for a complete nitrogen-fixation pathway. That’s very expensive biochemically. Were these just a relic or does the microbe use them? I don’t know. It’s acetyl-CoA pathway also resembled that found in archaea. That’s of interest to me in relation to my origin-of-life research.

 

The author has a great cartoon picture (shown above) showing its potential biochemistry from the sequencing data. They have the audacious proposal that radiolysis provides energy that splits water producing H₂O₂ which oxidizes pyrite (FeS₂) providing sulfate for the microbe. H₂ is also a byproduct for more reducing power! Mineral transformations in the environment are included in the cartoon, which I thought was a very nice touch that you don’t see in a biochemistry textbook. This microorganism might have been able to make a wide range of co-factors including cobalamin (for vitamin B12). It has a typical wide range of transporter proteins providing info on what might go in and out, and it has the usual carbon fixation pathways that I’m interested in.

 

It’s amazing that micro-organisms are found in tiny cracks of rock in the tens of nanometers wide. Very little water can penetrate in, yet somehow enough does for it to make a living in thin films of water just nanometers thick. I’m dumbfounded. Life does find a way to adapt, even in the freezing cold below the surface where stones are turned into bread. Could something be found on Mars? I don’t know. But it will be very expensive to find out and you’ll need quick-thinking knowledgeable Swiss-army-knife folks who know how to adapt.

Armchair Science

My office chair has armrests. Yes, I’m an armchair scientist.

 

Why am I thinking about this? Because I am halfway through Deep Life by Tullis Onstott. It’s about the hunt for microbes miles below the earth’s surface. And how do you get there? Down the mines. The book introduced me to the field of subsurface geomicrobiology, but it’s not a typical science book. It’s more of a scientist’s adventure book that goes through the highs and lows of everything from the roulette wheel of grant funding, the whims of mine-bosses and customs agents, what it’s like to be sweating miles beneath the surface, and how to find MacGyver-skilled people. It’s about field work in the extreme.

 

I, on the other hand, as a computational chemist am as far away from field work as you can imagine. I sit comfortably in my office building and analyzing molecular structures from my desktop computer. All the number-crunching work is done by a high-performance cluster sitting in a cold room a building away that I can access via the internet with a few clicks on my keyboard. I’m an old-school command-line guy who uses the mouse as little as possible. I do regularly get up from my chair and walk two floors down to teach a class. (I eschew elevators.) I haven’t taught general chemistry lab in several years so I don’t even have an excuse to set foot in an experimental lab. However, I do go to our chemistry demo room a few times each semester to show off stuff in my chemistry lecture classes.

 

When you’re a field scientist who needs to collect living samples from deep-enough mines, your choices are constrained. You have to convince a mining company’s management that you’re not a spy or a saboteur, that you won’t slow them down, that you won’t cause an ‘incident’, and that it is to their benefit to let you go down their mines. To get good uncontaminated samples, you also need to scratch past a cave wall surface, and that means having the necessary equipment. And because these microbes are obligate anaerobes, you need to make sure they survive the trip to your makeshift lab so you can perform the analysis. The oxygen all around that’s life to us; it kills them. And some of them may be toxic. And you might need a laminar flow hood for your work, that somehow you have to get into your ramshackle on-site quarters.

 

I wouldn’t survive in the field. I have poor hands in lab that also regularly shake due to a neuromuscular issue. There’s a reason I am a theorist. I also thrive on having an organized schedule, having control over my time, and not constantly being thrown into chaotic situations. I have little in the way of MacGyver skills. When you’re out in the field, unpredictability is the name of the game. You have to adapt. It’s something I don’t think I’m good at. If the zombie holocaust descends, I will probably perish quickly, or join the robotic horde depending on what type of zombie-virus we’re talking about.

 

I do enjoy discovering new things though! If I didn’t, I probably wouldn’t be an academic. But I do it through reading and running calculations, at least in my work life. I like learning new things even though I may not have the physical dexterity or strength to perform them. And discovery is always exhilarating! Now that I’m older and well aware of my physical limitations, I see many advantages of my life as an armchair scientist. And I’m happy to live vicariously through reading the adventures of folks out in the field and in the deep.

Bending the Elements

When discussing Aristotle’s elaboration of the four elements as the foundation of matter in my first day of an introductory chemistry class, I used to spend five seconds poking fun at the 2010 movie The Last Airbender. I only watched it once (for free on DVD) and I thought it was very poor. I had high expectations. An interesting theme that incorporated Earth, Water, Air, Fire, into daily life. A famous director. What could go wrong? It was a disappointing mess. Elemental was not great, but much better. And I had recently proposed teaching a non-majors class titled Earth, Water, Air, Fire, Life!

 

Then several years ago, a student suggested that I watch the Nickelodeon animated TV series that the movie was based on: Avatar, the Last Airbender. A second student piped up to support the first one and both thought the TV series was very well done. I’m very glad that two brave students on the first day of class were willing to challenge me on my poking fun at The Last Airbender. I should say they didn’t think the movie was all that good either, so we were in agreement there, but they encouraged me to give the TV series a chance given my interests in ancient ideas about elements. I nodded politely in response. But in my mind, I was skeptical. I associated the name Nickelodeon with children’s cartoons. (I didn’t watch these growing up in a different country.) Could anything good come out of there particularly when I associated it with Sponge Bob Square Pants (which admittedly I haven’t watched either).

 

Some years passed. I forgot about it. But then this summer something prompted me to watch the TV series. Maybe it was a conversation with my summer research students or maybe prompted by something I read, I don’t remember why. Anyway, I look at my local library catalog and they had the DVDs of almost the entire series (missing one disc in Season 3). So, I settled down to watch Season 1. Episodes are just 20 minutes long, and they were good! The main protagonists were interesting characters and I found the story engaging. I also cheered whenever Appa, the flying bison, got something interesting to do. Appa reminds me of the enigmatic Cat-Bus in My Neighbor Totoro.

 

I’m most of the way through Season 1. My quick synopsis: there are four nations and each of them has practitioners in the art of manipulating their associated element. The Fire nation has attacked the other three and has been dominant. Remnants of the Earth and Water nations have fled or are in hiding, protecting themselves from the conquering Fire nation. The Air nation seems to have mostly disappeared. The main protagonist, Aang, is the reincarnated Avatar who supposedly can be a master of all four elements and end the war. But he’s only twelve years old, and having learned air-bending skills when he was young, still needs to master the other elements. Hence: Avatar, The Last Airbender.

 

The most visual aspect is how to manipulate the element of your specialty to do your will. Earth-benders manipulate the stuff of earth from the ground itself. Water-benders can move water to do their will. Fire-benders seem to mostly create fire and launch them as fireballs (great for war). Air-benders can move air and utilize its currents in their own movement. Three things seem to be needed to manipulate an element: innate propensity, the movement of your arm, and mental focus. Not everyone in a nation has the ability to bend matter. Those that do undergo training to learn the mental focus and the arm movements. Manipulating matter mainly consists of being able to collect it, shape it, and throw it, often against the force of gravity. It’s similar to magic.

 

Of the four elements, air is the lightest and should be the easiest to manipulate against gravity. From a molecular perspective, you need to apply higher pressures in one vicinity to channel the molecules into a lower pressure area. It’s not obvious how one would do that, but a skilled air-bender can generate powerful winds and cyclones suggesting that quite a bit of energy may be involved. Since N₂ makes up almost 80% of our atmosphere, perhaps an air-bender has a special connection to these molecules in their gaseous form and can magically command or will them to move in a particular way. Essentially the air-bender needs to overcome the entropy and cause these molecules to take a low probability macroscopic arrangement.

 

For water, only one substance is involved: molecular H₂O. Perhaps water-bending is similar to air-bending in this regard. The water-bender has an affinity to manipulate the movements of this molecule and overcome gravity. I’ve seen water benders create waves, push water, pull water, and turn it into ice. So the water-bender needs to also have the magical ability to control the hydrogen-bonding between water molecules. Essentially the water-bender uses arm movements that cause bulk water to mimic that same movement. Maybe there’s a hidden force that can be turned on and off by focusing the mind that provides an unseen action-at-a-distance relationship between the arms/hands and the substance H₂O.

 

Earth is a little trickier since there are a whole bunch of substances that make up the earth. Sand is mostly silica but rocks can be made up of all sorts of elements. The primary distinction between Earth and its Water and Air counterparts is its solidity. Air-benders manipulate the gaseous state. Water-benders manipulate the liquid state. Earth-benders manipulate the solid state. But there seem to be limits. Earth-benders don’t manipulate all solid substances. They seem to certainly move ‘natural’ non-man-made stuff, but there is some inconsistency on whether they can manipulate man-made solids: concrete, metal alloys, and the like. So are they limited to some elements but not others? I don’t know. Could water-benders manipulate pure ethanol or mercury which are also liquids? Or are they restricted to H₂O? An air-bender who manipulates O₂ could be a killer. Can Aang move different gaseous substances in different ways? I don’t know.

 

The fire-benders seem to mostly use their art to create fire and launch it as a projectile. Chemically to make ‘fire’ you just need a combustible material and energy to get the chemical reaction started. There are small amounts of methane and other combustible gases in the atmosphere. Do fire-benders essentially manipulate the reaction of methane with oxygen? That might be a sort of air-bending? There’s no sign that they start using a solid combustible. And water seems to put out their fire. Or maybe they use friction as an energy source? Again, I don’t know.

 

The chemist in me seems to be trying to peg element-bending abilities with the chemical substances most involved. But maybe there’s a better way to think about it that I haven’t stumbled upon. Regardless I’m still enjoying the TV series and I’m glad my students encouraged me to give it a chance!

First Week: Fall 2024 Edition

I just have two classes this semester, my usual General Chemistry 1 and Physical Chemistry 1. Once again, I am teaching the Honors preceptorial, but with the smaller incoming class at my university (probably impacted by FAFSA woes), I only have fifteen new academic advisees instead of the usual twenty in my G-Chem 1 class. This morning, I recited all of their names correctly in class. Hooray! Like last year, I’m having each of them visit me during my drop-in (office) hours so I can learn a little more about each of them as individuals. I’m always delighted to get to know new students and they seem like a good bunch!

 

The one major change I’ve made to my G-Chem class is ditching the textbook. While I have chosen a decent online textbook as a reading reference that also has relevant practice exercises, I am supplementing the reading by providing Class Notes for every lecture. These do not recap the lecture in detail, but rather note the key concepts. Students still have to come to class to see the examples and engage with the explanations of the conceptual material. I will also continue to employ Study Guides. I’ve made some minor rearrangements in content. Nuclear chemistry has been moved back to early in the semester. I chopped up the standard chapter on liquids and will sprinkle it throughout the semester, and intermolecular forces has moved up earlier. I’m also making some minor moves in the chemical bonding section and stuff related to wave-particle duality. So there’s some amount of work on my part, but it’s not a major overhaul. The big question is whether the students are sufficiently prepared for the exam without the usual online auto-graded homework. First exam is at the end of the third week, so we’ll see.

 

I am not making many changes to P-Chem, just minor tweaks to most of the material with some minor rearrangements to the last two weeks where I go into different chemical bonding theories. Last year, I did expand Valence Bond Theory and I did culminate the class by examining why triplet molecular oxygen is such a strange molecule. But it didn’t feel as streamlined so I need to figure out how to do this better. I only have eight students, and I had five of them in G-Chem 1, G-Chem 2 or both. Most of them know each other, and that’s a good thing because I tell them that P-Chem is a team-sport. I’m encouraging them to work with each other on problem sets, visit me often to ask questions, and study together for exams.

 

On the first day of P-Chem, I couldn’t get through the material I had prepared. On the first day of G-Chem, I barely got through but rushed a little at the end. It could be that both classes were a little more interactive – perhaps students are more willing to speak up in smaller classes? But the other thing I’ve noticed over the years is that I tend to spend a little more time pontificating early-on about the nature of chemistry, science, and model-building to understand the natural world. I think this approach pays dividends later, or at least I hope so.

 

It was a busy week because in addition to a bunch of first-week administrative meetings, I also trained two new research students. Because of differing class schedules, I wasn’t able to train them together, but that’s okay. I did spend time last week putting together tutorials for the new research software we’ll be using. I think I did a relatively good job because there weren’t many typos and the two students (when asked) said they thought the guides were clear. I have two returning students (from summer research), one of whom has learned the new software and the other one will do so this afternoon. The semester will be less productive than the summer research-wise, but I’m looking forward to writing up the good work that my students did this past summer. I also have a potential new collaboration but I’ll need to delve in a little more to see if it will be a good fit.

 

Whew! It’s been a great first week. Tiring, but it’s so nice to feel the energy of being back on campus with students who are excited to embark on their first semester of college or coming back from the summer and reconnecting with their friends.