OMG, Students!

New students arrived on campus on Friday. I had no real reason to interact with them, but I ended up talking to two new students. It was glorious! One was a bit lost, so I walked with her until we found an orientation co-ordinator (given that I wasn't actually helpful). The second sat with me at lunch, clearly not guessing I was faculty (I was wearing grungy clothes).

Today was the Departmental Fair. I had extremely high hopes of having a cloud chamber demo. I tried. I failed. I think the problem might be the alcohol I am using; it is 95% ethanol which might not be pure enough. Most people use pure isopropanol or methanol. My back up plan was the Wimshurt machine. That also didn't work! Presumable humidity was the problem; it worked excellently in April.

Feeling like a scientific failure, I was kept up quite late by the kittens and thought about what else I could do. I recalled a cool circuit that responded to 'touch', but couldn't actually find record of such a thing in the Art of Electronics lab manual. A bit of googling resulted in something similar, which I had working fairly quickly and took with me to the Fair.

My circuit ended up being a bit more successful than I anticipated. I encouraged people to touch some bare wires - an LED would come on, but then stay on when they removed their finger. Touching different wires would turn it off. A few people were surprised that it stayed on, even after their finger was no longer completing the circuit. Some people seemed to be too resistive, and it didn't work for them. The mathematicians didn't trust me.

The best part of the fair, of course, were the students. I wasn't particularly helpful, since I don't actually know departmental/college policies yet. And most of the students wanted to ask about Astronomy. But, I got to meet at least one student that I will have this fall and talk to others who seemed really enthusiastic - I think I'll see them soon. My favorite quote of today "I want to learn everything!".

I definitely need to get my act together for the first day of classes on Wednesday. I have a lot left to do! I am still inventorying electronics components (they keep appearing in new places), but I also want to practice my lecture for the first day of class for each of the classes. And I need to put together more reading quizzes, homework, lab guides, etc.

On Tuesday, we have Convocation. I don't think MIT or Stanford had such a thing... or else I didn't go. But this time I get to wear my fancy-schmancy robes. The science building has a special closet for us to keep our robes in. I know that faculty eventually get sick of going to these sorts of things, but it is particularly exciting when it is my first one!

On Thursday, I have a meeting with a senior administrator of the college to talk about establishing a new scholarship. I've already pulled some notes together for the meeting. I don't know if this will be easy, or if I'll really need to do some work. But, this is part of why I wanted to be at a small college - I can easily set up meetings to talk with the person in charge of anything. I'm particularly excited to get this scholarship going - of course, setting up a meeting to talk to someone is easy, but creating the scholarship might be hard. It seems like it should work, both strategically and based on the values of the college.

I've been enjoying my 'job' this summer, but now it really starts since students are here. This job rocks!