Explosive Donut

A lot happened this week:

I PASSED QUAL(IFYING EXAM)S!!
I’m now officially a doctoral student! At Harvard, we have to give a 45min-1hr presentation about our research to the four professors on our quals committee. I think it’s mostly to make sure that you are equipped for doing research and will be able to make it to (and successfully defend) your thesis defense. I know some other places use it to weed out a certain amount of students, but it’s not like that here. We don’t even need to take a written exam of answer standard questions of any sort. In typical Harvard fashion, my advisor handed me a form to fill out for my future thesis defense (at least two years away).

Melody’s going to Johns Hopkins
Obviously I’m much more mixed about this one. One one hand, I’m glad that she’s gotten into such a prestigious school. On the other hand, Baltimore is a bit farther away than on my same block. We’re going to go back to the long distance thing when the time comes, but enjoy the next five or six months in the meantime. At least the flights will be shorter this time. And…

I got a Wii!
It took me a few weeks, but I finally managed to obtain a Wii. They’re still very hard to find. I’ve been binging on it pretty hard the past couple evenings, but Melody really seems to enjoy Mario. She can collect stars while I play the hard parts, so it’s fun for both of us. It’s really a good thing that it didn’t come before my qualifying exam!

I’ve got to stop getting cappuccinos/espressos from the Harvard cafes. They come from these totally automatic Starbucks machines. Burnt beans and air-injected “foam” do not make a good coffee.

Maybe I should get a second espresso machine for the office.