Alas we are finished! The first year of the PhD is finished and I am happy. Happy for it to be over. Happy for it to have happened. Many things have occurred in the past year that have made it…. interesting. Unprecedented, you might say.
I took Zoom classes and stayed indoor for the majority of the first half of the year. Fires raged outdoors, COVID ravaged the world, and I was left alone indoors. Luckily I had roommates and friends which I could see with sufficient (free!) COVID testing.
The second semester was when things started opening up which was anxiety inducing.
I had a few tense moments with my roommate about what activities were okay to do.
He was much more willing to take on risks while I was much more conservative, especially when my partner’s parents were not fully protected by the vaccine.
But as we all got vaccinated and as Berkeley began to open up, things got better between us.
We now go out to see vaccinated people regularly and things are a lot better between us.
I hung out with my girlfriend quite a lot. Along with her dad, we hiked through Redwood Regional, Point Reyes, Mount Diablo, Tamalpaias, Briones, Tilden, and more. We spent some days baking and cooking and playing video games and walking her dog and exploring Berkeley. I feel like my undergraduate lifestyle didn’t allow me to relax like this and am glad that things have changed.
Socially speaking, I’ve met some people in my research group, started playing soccer, and even Taiko! I’m excited to really see in person all the friends I made online and explore Berkeley doing the things I really enjoy: Playing Taiko, listening to jazz, and caffeinating up everywhere in the bay area.
Academically speaking, I had a great time. I learned many things in Prof. Altman’s PHYS 216 Special Topics in Many Body Physics and even more in Prof. Littlejohn’s Quantum Mechanics II. While it was not fun doing so many problem sets week after week, the clarity and comfortableness I now feel with quantum mechanics is beyond anything I have felt before in physics.
Unfortunately, condensed matter is more of a science of approximations and so it is unlikely that I will be able to feel as comfortable with its foundations. Statistical mechanics, on the other hand, is a precise field which I hope to understand formally and intuitively to the same degree that Professor Littlejohn helped me feel about quantum mechanics.
In terms of research, I continued to attend the group meetings of Professor Analytis and plan on working with him over the summer. His research group focuses a lot on strongly correlated materials, topological insulators, and spintronics. I know a lot about the first two and very little about the last. Hopefully I can show you all what I’ve been up to soon!
-Koh
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