Week 1, Day 2

My quals for the PhD program in nuclear science and engineering at MIT are going to happen in the first or second week of February 2026, so I’m blogging my progress on my work (master’s thesis, qual practice problems, research, classes) to keep me on track and motivated.

I woke up at 7:30 am today, which is closer to my usual (or wanted) schedule. I’m gonna aim for 7 am tomorrow, so I need to go to bed around 10 pm. This morning, I unpacked my luggage, cleaned the bathroom, grabbed a bagel from Black Sheep Bagels, and took the bus to my MIT office. I listened to a couple chapters of Empire of AI by Karen Hao while got ready and during my commute. I’ve got no meetings or classes today, so I can have some concentrated time to work. I’m also gonna start tracking my hours again today. I go through phases in life where I track what I do throughout the day. I started tracking in high school to tighten up my productivity. And now that I’ve made it to grad school, I usually am pretty good about effectively using my time, but since I’m studying for quals, I really want to track where my time is going and adjust if necessary.

Things I accomplished today

Classes

I did another problem for my 22.QTD pset, but I got stuck and had to ask a friend for some help. I will try to finish it tomorrow. The questions were to practice using the Baker-Campbell Hausdorf equation.

Research

Completed a Managing Hazardous Waste course. Bleh. Safety is important, but I had to complete it four times because the website would not mark it as complete.

Quals

I worked through another sub problem on the practice problem that I have, and I did some review on cavity-atom interactions, rotating wave approximation, the Jaynes-Cummings hamiltonian, etc.

Miscellaneous

I went to the gym! I did a mix of upper body and lower body workouts. The upper body ones were the exercises I didn’t get to finish yesterday. I also cut my own hair. It’s a little bit botched (yikes) right now. I need to fix it up tomorrow.