Summer School Starts

This is what happened on Wednesday the 3rd:

I got up at about 8 and took a shower and such. Today was the first day of the summer lecture series. It started at 9 with some information about cyber security and the program in general. Then one lady gave a lecture giving an overview of many of the topics we will cover throughout the rest of the lecture series. She was a British lady and had quite an accent. According to the Egyptian man I was working with, the people with an England-ish accent are harder to understand if you aren't good at English already. He hadn't studied much English except for reading papers and such, so I doubt that he would have had a good time at the lecture. He is a PhD student though, so he isn't even in the summer student program.

After the lectures, I ate a Biscoff spread and Nutella sandwich and some weird peanut flavored cheetos type things. I then worked on trying to figure out more of the gas research I was supposed to work on for Archana Sharma. I didn't get very far, and at 5, there was the "welcome drink" for summer students. It was in a room that was about 30x40 feet but there were tables with the food and it was packed. There was lots of cheese and cracker things and some really good fruit. It felt pretty awkward in such a small room for 150+ people, but I learned a few more names of people. After that, Zack, both Alexs and I played Frisbee with some other kids that were out on the field already. It was a rainy day today so the field was nice and soft for my bare feet, but it was also raining at the time, so it was slippery and eventually we quit because it started raining harder.

After the frisbee, I had dinner with Zack and got a big plate of French Fries for 3.90 CHF, a pretty good deal compared to the rest of the food there. Then, we went back to the hostel, into one of the lounges on our floor (the fourth floor) and played several different card games with everyone and eventually the game "Things." To play that game, everyone has a small slip of paper and then someone reads a topic. Yo have to write down a response to the topic and then someone reads all of the responses. Then the person starting to the left of the reader gets to guess who said each thing until eventually all of the slips of paper are used up. You get a point for a correct match-up and whoever has the most points at the end wins. One example was, "things you wouldn't want to share across the dinner table." It was pretty funny and fun.

This was from Today:

Ok, a little bit about my day. Today was not that exciting at all, but I did do a couple interesting things. First, I woke up at about 8 to get ready to go to the summer lectures. The first lecture was on the Stardard Model (our model of all particles including quarks and leptons and the interactions that hold everything together). It was pretty interesting, because he used group theory (a math class/subject I have taken) to start explaining it. He mostly just explained group theory to everyone first and in the following 4 lectures on the same topic, the lecturer will show how this group theory applies to the different types of matter. The next lectures were on statistics. They were a little more dry, but I did feel like I learned somethings, which is good. I learned the difference between probability and liklihood. Probability is the chance that a given event will occur whereas likelihood is the chance comething will occur given a specific value for a parameter. Actually that doesn't sound exactly right, but it is something similar to that.

After the classes, I ate lunch and then went to one of the CMS buildings to work on the gas and ionization energy problem that I was given. I didn't get terribly far again, but Felipe and I are meeting with Archana tomorrow to talk about it and to hopefully make more progress. I'm not actually sure the point of what I'm doing, since all of these ionization energies for gas mixtures and such are already well determined, but hey, I'm glad to learn about it anyway.

After work was over, I studied some vocab for the GRE and waited around until 6, when I headed to the soccer game with Zack and Alex S. There were actually several soccer games which were between various teams from CERN and around the area. The summer students even had a team, but they lost 1-0. It was fun to watch. It made me miss soccer a lot. I hope that this spring I can find a team to play on, or maybe even just sign up for the soccer class. They had a free barbeque to go with it, which is what got us to go, but we had to leave before they gave our any of the delicious looking sausages and burgers.

After the soccer game Zack and I met Tina at the movie Pi, which was a super weird scifi movie about a mathematician who goes crazy looking for patterns in nature. There are lots of CERN clubs such as sports or other activities and one of them is the cinema club, which puts on the movies every Thursday at 8. I wouldn't suggest watching that movie, because it was kinda abstract and hard to follow like cloud atlas, except I still don't know the point of it and it was in black and white and had weird music and the camera went all flashy-white a lot. That was a terrible sentence, but oh well.

That was all of my day really. After that, I just came back, went for a run around CERN and then typed this up. After this weekend, there will be some more pictures. We are planning to go on an 11 mile hike up to the top of the Jura mountains on Saturday!