It has been many years since I’ve written a post in this blog. You could say I experienced some setbacks in my PhD career that I didn’t feel proud of and lost the desire to write and post about it. Now that I have graduated, have more time on my hands, and have the freedom and responsibility to mold the career ahead of me, I feel that it might be valuable to make updates to my personal website.
This is the second part to my post on my Graduate School Year-In-Review 2017-2018 where I write about my experiences as a teaching assistant in the Physics department, my lab rotations with Wendell Hill and Amy Mullin, and some of my extracurricular activities.
My first year as a graduate student had been a challenging one, as I had expected it to be. I took a three graduate level classes (a full load) each semester from the Chemistry and Physics departments while being a TA each semester for undergraduate Physics courses on experimental physics, one in electronics and the other in optics. I went to a number of memorable talks. I also did a lab rotation each semester, one with Wendell Hill’s ultrafast laser lab and the other with Amy Mullin’s optical centrifuge lab. During the earlier half of this year, I participated in battle assemblies with a local Army Reserves unit, before transitioning into the Individual Ready Reserve. I had also participated in the George Washington Birthday Marathon Relay and the Terrapin Triathlon. From these activities I had met many wonderful people, struggled through hardships, learned many new things and gained valuable experiences.
After graduating with my bachelor’s in 2016, I was stuck in limbo on what to do next with my life. I had not completed any internships as a student, primarily due to the fact that I most internships took place throughout the summer, which were occuppied by military training for the Army Reserves (i.e. Basic Leader Course and Annual Training). I also had not applied for graduate schools starting in the Fall of 2016 because by the time applications came around the previous year, I’ve only worked as an undergraduate research assistant in Hudson’s group for a few months. I wasn’t sure who I’d ask for letters of recommendation or if I even wanted to go to graduate school. Along with having to take the GRE and having to decide which schools to apply to and which research groups in those schools to decide to be interested in, I felt that the whole applications process would have been very disruptive to my studies. I just wanted to graduate with a good GPA and possibly some sort of honors.
Today, my TerpConnect account has been set up, allowing me to have my own personal website in the University of Maryland directory. I decided to have it redirect it to my github pages website, just so I don’t have so many websites scattered over the internet.
Yesterday, I spent most of the day at the Tech Fair LA job fair, which featured the LA mayor, Eric Garcetti, as one of the speakers. I can’t remember the last time I saw a public official in person – that is if there was ever such a time. There is a first time for everything.
Yesterday, I implemented Bootstrap into my GitHub Pages site with the help from the site w3schools. Today, I implemented Jekyll following these instructions.