|
Phys(ics)Geek
|
|
"Anyone NOT majoring in physics should press ALT-F4 now... and then bang their heads repeatedly against the keyboard"
I was sitting around today thinking a lot. And one of the things I kept thinking about is my choice of career. Now, this is something that I think about a lot. Don't ask me why... I have no answer. All I know is that usually I end up going to my next advanced physics class with a smile on my face. So anyway, I was thinking today about this topic (no, I'm still going to grad school for theoretical physics, don't worry), and I was thinking about what my life would be like if I weren't a physics major. So I present the conclusions of my experiment in two comparative case studies... Case Study #1: Life as a physics major... a typical day. Wake up at 8am even though it's a Tuesday and you don't have class until 4. Spend an hour checking email and coding the kickass header file for your two loop self energy calculation project you dreamed up in the middle of the night. How do you know you dreamed it? Because on the dry erase board hanging above your bed there are the words "dilog miscalculation" scribbled in what can only be dream-writing. At nine it's time for your run... you jog the route you decided on for the week and while you run, you're doing integrals in your head. You get pissed halfway through because you can quite remember how to break the natural log up into hyperbolic trigonometric functions which would REALLY make the one that you're working on easy. You settle for what you think is right, only to feel stupid when you return home to your 600 page integral table and see that it breaks up easily into a cosine and an arcsinh squared. By now it's eleven and you've showered and gotten dressed. Instead of doing the normal thing and going to the lab, you decide to stay at home and code. You sit in the living room watching the second season of The Simpsons on DVD while writing header files and even a few source files for two different coding projects, the aforementioned two-loop project and a new-supersecret project that's going to get you published... for the third time. You work through lunch and seven Simpsons episodes (which, you know by heart, ya loser). You grab a coffee and a sandwich for dinner on your way to your late class, a boring ass E&M class. Where you are forced to come to the board and do a calculation. It takes you 6 minutes to do, and 40 minutes to explain to the lesser-minds watching you. What? You can't calculate the energy in an ellipsoid with an infinitely small wire carrying current, I, 'cause to me its trivial. So your class wraps at six and rather than going to your intro astronomy lecture (Please, you run the observatory... a lecture on pulsars is beneath you), you head home and patch your windows box, recompile the kernel on your linux box, and reinstall OS X on your iBook... 'cause you wanted to tweak some things... That was MY day... now... time for another life... Case Study #2: Life as a philosophy major... (As a physics major dreams of it.) You wake up around 9 and hoover up some cheerios before walking across the quad to your 9:20 "Feelings" class. You fall asleep and get woken by the unhappy teacher, but say "I was 'feeling' tired." and get an applause. Your next class isn't until 11 so you go to the Cardinal's Nest and eat a pita sandwich... you'll have to play some ultimate frisbee tonight to make up for all the food you're eating. After your 11 o'clock you realize you have a paper due by midnight, so you rush off to your room to look up some bullshit off of Google to throw into a paper, which will undoubtedly earn you another A. After all, any moron with half a brain can throw a philosophy paper together. After all, it's all interpretation anyway! You email the prof the paper around 6 and decide to go chill out on the lawn and work on your tan until the sun goes to far down in the sky to sufficiently give you that lovely, cancerous, hue that you so desire. Then, dinner... pizza and beer. Yum. You wake up the next morning on the steps of Hanby with some girls panties in one hand and a bottle of wild turkey in the other. Hmm... must've been a fun night. Shit, hos... you've got class in 10 minutes... you've got just enough time to go scarf down some cold pizza for breakfast... better hurry! Yeah... I SO picked the wrong major. Later. (P.S. If I offended anyone, so what. This is my world fool... don't make me print my emacs *scratch* buffer, bizzitch!!!) Feeling:
|