Rachel's First Week of School

"Week" is really an exaggeration, since school started on Wednesday, but whatever.

Rachel learned last week that she is the entire incoming class of Astronomy graduate students. This has its good points and bad points: good that the department is not overworked in trying to orient loads of new people all at once but bad in that she is the center of attention; which is something Rachel doesn't really like.

One quirk of her department is that they don't tend to post meeting times for the graduate-level classes in the class schedule. In the last few days before the term, they post a first-meeting time then discuss when the class will meet. That makes planning a schedule for the semester a bit annoying, but leaves the schedule flexible, I guess. She now has a schedule that has classes Monday through Thursday with Fridays off. My schedule will also be that way, so we can plan on running some errands on Friday occasionally, though we'll probably plan for it to be a (home)work day for each of us.

None of Rachel's classes are large. The biggest one had 9 people, but several of those people probably won't be returning. (The classes are listed for both graduate and undergraduate students, and Yale has a "shopping week" for the undergraduates where they attend many classes during the first week or so to determine if they want to take the class or not. 5 of the 9 are undergraduates, so it is likely that at least 2 or 3 of them will not return.) One class consists of just 2 people. (Personally, I'd rather have 9-11 students in the class if I was a student; that's a small enough number to allow for individual attention as needed, but a large enough number to create some aspect of anonymity for the students. I like that number as an instructor, too, but for slightly different reasons.)

Once surprise for Rachel was when a professor she had never met told her that since she was interested in solar physics, she should stop by for a chat next week. She doesn't know for sure how that professor knew she was into solar physics, but since she's the entire incoming class it seems possible that everyone knows her interests.

In all, Rachel had a good first week of classes and expects to fit in well here.

Side note: As I write this, we are anticipating the arrival of Tropical Storm Hanna sometime tonight. The latest predictions show the center of the storm passing right over us sometime between 10:00pm and midnight with sustained winds of 50 mph and rainfall of 4-6 inches. This is not a common occurrence here, as most tropical storms miss New England completely, but it does happen occasionally and people in general do not seem overly concerned, so I'm trying to take a lead from the natives. If I can work in time between my orientation session for UNH and my hockey game tomorrow, I'll post a post-storm update.