Houston is a warm place.

I finished my honors project. Printed, binder-clipped, and placed in Dr. Reinsma's hands for binding :)

Chemical Synthesis of Inorganic Nanomaterials for Energy Harvesting Devices
-check it out in the library next quarter!

And I finished the only paper due for this finals week, so I'm taking a mini break before starting to study spectroscopy (not as fun as it may sound)

I brought back a sunburn from Houston, TX, as I went down last week to visit Rice. But, I don't think I'll be going back to get more sun as I don't believe I'll be attending grad school there. The campus was probably the most beautiful place I'd been to - I felt like I was back at Stanford in some areas of campus. The campus was also HUGE, especially for only 3500 undergraduates and 1000 grad students. Apparently, one of their major donors owned a construction firm and just built them buildings in lieu of donating dollars. He built them a 70,000 person stadium, but I guess you can't do anything on the small scale in TX...

One of corridors that made me think of Stanford

But, I will be back down in TX this July flying on NASA's micro-g plane! I'm with a different team this year, with two people based at UPenn, two at Rose-Hulman, and I'm still at SPU. Hopefully going in to this trip, we'll be better prepared. As difficult as it was to go through the engineering issues last time, I feel way more prepared to help this team get our act together before we get to Houston! And we have a more diverse team, so I think we can our experiment pulled together with more ease. And some of us will be at Ames this summer, so we can work on the experiment together for a bit before we have to ship it to Houston.

Here's our new team website:
https://sites.google.com/site/microg2011/

We're dropping balls into different types of sand - should be fun!