I'm flying home, to Pittsburgh, tomorrow to celebrate the holidays. A couple posts ago, I complained about writing up my research essays for the National Academies fellowship I'm applying for. Well, I finished my essay on my graduate research, 1200 words, and it turned out pretty well, and it wasn't nearly as painful to write as I thought it was going to be. Now I'm working on the proposal for my future research, which is the heart of my application. That essay is a maximum of 3000 words, about 10-12 double-spaced typed pages. I've pulled up about 75 articles on frequency doubling in optical fibers, which is the research I'll be doing when I start out at the Air Force Academy, and I'm slogging through those articles now, but it's not too tedious and I'm learning, so I won't complain yet. I'll read the articles on my plane trip home, and during my free time over the holidays, and hopefully by the time I get to Colorado Springs, on January 10, I'll be ready to write out my proposal.

Posted at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (144) | TrackBacks (0)

On Monday of this week, I got a "Welcome Letter" from Windtree Apartments giving me the address of my new apartment. So I now officially have an apartment in Colorado Springs. My move-in date is January 10. Everything is happening pretty fast now. I went out to lunch with all of my labmates at Rice yesterday for the last time, and I'm going to the Rice Physics Department Christmas party today. I'm flying home to Pittsburgh on next Thursday, and then as soon as I come back to Houston, on January 3, I'm going to be packing my stuff up and moving to Colorado Springs.

Posted at 9:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What happened this week was that I've pretty much got an apartment in Colorado, the Windtree place that I linked to in my last entry. I just have to wait for them to check out my rental application, which has never been a problem for me. I've also arranged for a moving company to transport my furniture and other big stuff. The moving estimate was $1266, which, well it's a lot of money but it was just about the lowest estimate of the ones I got. And the moving company follows the 400N Tariff standard in their estimate which is good? I guess? At least according to the guy I talked to on the phone, all of the reputable moving companies follow the 400N Tariff standard. And he also said that their moving company has no complaints with the Better Business Bureau, which is something that sooner or later I have to check to make sure. But I've managed to get most everything taken care of for the move. I ordered a "moving kit" online, which is just a bunch of moving boxes and tape and a marker and bubble wrap. So, the way it looks now, I'm coming back to Houston (from Pittsburgh, where I'm spending the holidays) on January 3. On January 5, the moving company is coming to take my furniture. I might spend a day or so in Houston to finish cleaning my apartment and packing up the small stuff, and then I'll head out to Colorado in my car. So, probably by January 8 or thereabouts, I'll be in Colorado Springs. Now that I'm done with all of my moving preparations, I have to work on my application for the National Academies Fellowship, but argh, there's so much writing involved with that. Not only do I have to write up a 1000+ word research proposal, but I also have to describe my past research in a 1000 word document. I hate hate hate science writing, because you have to be very careful that every word is accurate, and, by its nature, it has to be in rather dry and terse language, which is as boring to write as it is to read. The experiments are much more fun, but unfortunately you can't take the fellowship review committee down to your lab to do the experiments with you. Anyway, I've started the essay on my past work, and I was hoping to finish it today, but I may put it off until Monday. I've been so busy making moving arrangements this week that I feel like taking a long weekend and letting all of the changes that are happening sink in.

Posted at 9:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, as many people who are friends and family of mine already know, I have some very big news from this past Friday - I now have a job!!! On Thursday and Friday last week I flew out to Colorado Springs, Colorado to tour the Laser and Optics Research Center at the Air Force Academy and give a presentation there and also to go through an informal job interview on Friday. My presentation put a few people to sleep, and, not having done a whole lot of laser stuff in my graduate career, I was a bit lost in trying to understand some of the research they were doing at the Laser and Optics Research Center (LORC), but I did well enough in my visit that they offered me a job as a postdoctoral researcher before I flew out on Friday. I accepted the job, and before I left, we also made arrangements for my employment to start very soon, on January 1, although I emailed the lab yesterday to tell them that, because of the holidays, it's going to be impossible for me to move out there by then, so it might be better to start my paychecks later in January. I don't want to start my new job by ripping off the lab, getting paid as a no-show. Right now I'm looking into apartments in Colorado Springs. One of the postdocs at LORC said that the place where he lived was very nice, and also, coincidentally, if I mentioned his name as a referrer, he would get a break in his rent. But I don't have his email address, and I don't remember what place he recommended. I've found this place searching around online, and the people who live there have so many good things to say about it that I almost can't wait to be there to see if it really is that good. To put it in some perspective, Windtree Apartments, where I'm thinking about moving, has an approval rating of 89%, while the apartment complex in Houston where I now live, Andover Richmond Apartments, which is a perfectly fine apartment complex in my point of view, only got an approval rating of 33%. This is because dissatisfied tenants are more motivated to write in and rate the apartment complex than satisfied tenants. And, according to the reviews I linked to, there is apparently a "cutey" named Ashley who works in the office of Windtree Apartments whose number all the guys are dying to get. Maybe she'll be impressed by the fact that I'm a "Dr."... I'll have to get some business cards printed up before I move. But that's what I'm busy with now, looking for a place to live in Colorado and trying to figure out whether it is worth it to move all of my furniture from Houston to Colorado. After I'm finished with that stuff, I'm going to work on an application for a National Academies Research Fellowship which would be good for me because it would mean higher pay and benefits (which the postdoctoralship through the Air Force Academy doesn't give me), and it would be good for the Air Force Academy because someone else would be footing the bill for me. So, it'd be pretty nice if I could get one of those fellowships.

Posted at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (632) | TrackBacks (0)