It’s 2024 ! First official quarter of graduate school is finally done with. I took three courses: Introduction to Astronomical Research and Teaching, Introduction to Astronomy 2, and Observational Astronomy. I feel very happy with my outcomes and enjoyed my time taking the classes. I felt extremely supported by the instructors, my first-year cohort, and the general astronomy community at Santa Cruz. Coworking hours (2-hour Tuesday and Thursday working sessions) were extremely valuable to talk about ideas and work through problems with others.
I created cheat sheets under the resources tab for each class. Broadly, I learned and became more familiar with
I have gained the most impact from applying the concepts of growth mindset and metacognition onto my academic, research, and personal life. I feel much more comfortable analyzing how I am learning and how to improve my learning experience. Combined with thinking that learning new things are possible with the correct support, I feel much more prepared and less anxious about graduate school than how I felt early September 2023.
I feel like this past quarter has been a lot of just getting accustomed to life in Santa Cruz as a graudate student, and preparing myself for the future. I have been developing tools and setting practices that I hope to continue over the next couple years so I can develop cool skills. For example, I wasn’t crazy familiar with LaTeX coding and I developed a fear that I’m going to be forgetting lots of the stuff that I just learned from classes this quarter. So to help my future self that may need to understand something (say the definition and application of enthalpy), I created a cheat sheet for my classes with Overleaf. I want to be kind to my future self and set myself up for success. I think that documenting in an organized manner where I am essentially talking to myself will help.
For 2024, I want to continue these practices (including making quarterly-ishh posts here). I want to keep working to better myself and give myself the best chances at success, and this perspective (which I have practiced couple times at UChicago) was more formalized as “growth mindset”. Outside of academics, I have been developing an API for Cholla that is going to help me when analyzing simulations. I also want to be kind to my body and take some physical education classes. I’m taking tennis next quarter with two other first years and I’m super excited for that ! I want to make the time to take as many PE classes as possible. My thought process is that if I start collecting knowledge on different exercises (tennis, scuba diving, soccer, basketball, weight lifting, volleyball, martial arts) and actually practice them, then I can only improve my physical health (with a healthy diet). It’s like collecting infinity stones, or upgrading my character (both physical and knowledge) in a video game. I have the time and resources available to do this, so I want to continue doing this in 2024.
I would like to be consistently reviewing and asking myself a couple things (copied from an advising form that isn’t used)
Here’s to an exciting, consistent 2024 !