I’m a doctor! Not the usual kind of doctor, but blood, sweat, and tears were certainly involved.
In 2020, I graduated from UC Berkeley with my bachelor’s degree and wrote a blog post summarizing my undergrad years. Finishing grad school has been a similar transitional event in my life, but also one which many fewer people experience. I think now is a good time for reflecting back on my experiences in grad school and hopefully demystifying the whole process a bit.
My PhD is in physics from Caltech, but I spent the vast majority of my time doing astrophysics in the astrophysics building (the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics), especially on the half of the third floor allocated to the TAPIR group (a contrived acronym which presently stands for Theoretical AstroPhysics Including Relativity and Cosmology).
Looking back, my grad school experience was mostly ideal. It lasted five years, no longer or shorter than I wanted it to. While I had my own share of frustrating moments of being stuck, my growth as a researcher was monotonic and accumulated steadily over the years to the point where I now feel pretty autonomous and independent as a researcher. Although I was certainly exhausted by the end of this whole thing, I still haven’t had enough of academia. I’ll be starting next month in a prestigious prize postdoc position.
Unlike undergrad, my grad school experience highly deemphasized classes and placed personal recreation at the center of things. My experiences during these years therefore lack a lot of the simple structure that would usually be introduced by a rigid academic calendar. I think this typical of most people in my position. I consider this a fair warning for the following to read much more like a stream-of-conscious regurgitation of all of the things I can remember doing during these years, written during the point in time where the number of such things is maximized.
Continue reading “Tales from five years as a Caltech Physics PhD student”
Nicholas Rui 