First Week Spring 2019

In keeping up with the tradition of blogging about my first week of classes every semester, here is the Spring 2019 edition.

First, you might be wondering: It’s already February! Shouldn’t you be further along in the semester? The reason we start late is because there’s a three-week intersession where students may take intensive classes both on-campus and at study abroad sites affiliated with the institution. I’ve never taught during this January-term because I think I would be too drained when the spring semester begins, but I’ve become increasingly tempted to do so as the international opportunities have blossomed over the past five years. (New Zealand would be my top choice since I’ve yet to visit LOTR sites!)

Anyway, my first week went normally as far as I can tell. On Day One of my classes I spent some time on the big picture: In G-Chem 2, it’s all about Energy – thermodynamics, kinetics, equilibria. In P-Chem 2, it is mainly statistical thermodynamics – connecting the macroworld and the microworld. I start off with gases; we’ve covered non-ideal gases, the virial equation, the van der Waals equation and critical points (making use of the correspondence principle); this is a first taste of how physical chemists go about connecting macroscopic properties to microscopic (actually nanoscopic) properties. Next week we get into statistics and the Boltzmann equation.

My G-Chem and P-Chem classes are quite a bit larger compared to last semester. This will mean more grading overall and busier office hours, but it shouldn’t be as bad as previous years because of my new experiment with annotated self-grading. Since that process went well last semester, I’m employing it again this semester in my classes. We’ll see how it fares with the larger groups.

I have four returning research students from last semester. This week I had individual meetings with each of them to go over their projects and research trajectories for this semester. Our high-performance computing cluster was upgraded over winter break and things seem to be chugging along smoothly. Since I chose not to take on any new students (because I go on sabbatical in the upcoming academic year), I didn’t have to train any new students the past week.

What did I do most of January? I started preparing for classes and putting together my syllabi, but I also made surprisingly excellent progress on my own research project – enough to see the full shape of a manuscript. The week before classes began, I was able to make the key figures and schemes for my paper and compile some of the data tables for the manuscript (from the much larger set of raw data). I wasn’t able to work on the manuscript this past week because I was busy getting ahead on my class prep, but I should be able to make some more progress in February. The first week of classes also brings increased administrative work, all of which I was able to complete in a timely fashion.

So, hurrah to a successful first week of the new semester overall!

P.S. To see my first week adventures from last semester (with links to previous first week posts), click here.