After Olin

Starting this fall, I'll be at Columbia University, pursuing a PhD in the Applied Physics & Applied Math department. I'm in the applied math - atmospheric science track, and I'm really excited about this.

I've known for a long time that I was interested in fluid mechanics and thermal-fluid systems, and my mechanical engineering courses confirmed that these really were my areas of interest. I also found through my courses and projects that Olin that I loved math modeling, and so I started looking into any programs where I could do fluid modeling. For a while, that meant I was looking into lots of different departments, including math, applied math, mechE, chemE, and oceanic and atmospheric science. Through reading geophysical fluid dynamics papers and looking at NYU's Atmosphere-Ocean Science and Math program, I decided that the research I was most interested in was in the atmosphere/ocean space, but my top choices of programs were NYU and Columbia, the two where I would be in an applied math department. After visits to all the programs where I was accepted, I was most excited about and comfortable at Columbia.

SCOPE Stories Week 18: Sine's a Nice Function

Today was the end of a three-week sprint after having no SCOPE last week due to an Olin Monday  on Wednesday. This is also my last SCOPE day before spring break; I'm missing the next two for grad school visits. We spent today doing a lot of technical work -- finishing up development of a model, cleaning up numerics in the implementation of an old model, testing, and working on the user interface.

My accomplishment for today: simplifying some work I'd done earlier this week by talking to one of my teammates and our advisor, finding a mistake, and figuring out that a particular sine series has a very convenient sum. (I'm still trying to think about why, but hey, evenly spaced things are nice.)