I started out through two weeks of chemistry lectures, barely keeping up with my grad student as he bombarded me with the basics of pseudopotentials. The week before last week, I was assigned to work on manganese and iridium, and so naturally I thought the lectures were over.
And, of course, I was incredibly wrong.
Last week, right when I thought my brain was about to implode from the weight of chemistry knowledge, I had been promoted to "Atlas (the titan from Greek mythology that holds up the entire world) of chemistry wannabe." I plunged head-first into phase two of my learning--which focused on performing the calculations to produce models for atomic structures--and this time, from the unidentifiable calculus symbols on the whiteboard to the incomprehensible words he was speaking, I genuinely thought my grad student was attempting to summon something.
Luckily, Dr. Venanzi's chemistry crash course helped a lot to cushion the brute weight of the information, so I was roughly familiar with the topics before walking in. On the other hand, there was quite a lot that I did not understand entirely before I joined the lab for the summer. In two three-hour lectures, Rob talked me through the basics of quantum mechanics and through the earliest stages of density functional theory so fast he could rival John Green's US history crash course. Rob is a fantastic teacher, and I learned a lot of fantastic and interesting information in the last week thanks to him.
 |
General Formulas/Derivations for Kohn-Sham Equations
|
This week we also had a visiting professor talk about his research, and I had the chance to have lunch with him and my PI. Unfortunately, my PI is once again out on trips--this time to Korea--so I won't be seeing him for another week. Until then, I plan on completing my DFT education and hopefully become capable enough to complete calculations.
--Chris
No comments:
Post a Comment