-15/05

It's been an interesting couple of days. I've been hanging out with a classmate of mine, who came back to give her PhD entrance test+interview here at IITM. And having finally cleared my course work, I can work full time on my project work. I'm in high spirits, pretty much what I'd be feeling it'd be like to finally get to work on a research topic again. More on what I'm working on later.

It's been an amazing semester. I've learnt a lot, a hell lot, maybe even more than last semester. There's just a buzz of thoughts in my head but the two that stick out. The first is that I'd like to keep doing courses to learn new things, not just in physics but other parts of science. I've learnt that it's hard to learn something new by oneself, it's hard to motivate oneself to keep trying. And personally, I learn a lot more in a classroom that I'd probably do on my own. I'm not saying that I haven't learnt anything on my own, it's just that when it comes to topics in science, I've learnt more in a classroom. The second is that I don't feel relieved that my end semesters are over, in the sense that I didn't really feel stressed out about the exams anymore. I was just getting used to them and, I think, getting good at them. I guess we'll have to wait for the grades to know if I was daydreaming again or if I actually gave my best.

The summer is just beginning and all I hope for is to maintain this level of enthusiasm and work through it...

Popular posts from this blog

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these
Read more

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)
Read more