McCormick Interview - Outreach 101 + QUALS

I was interviewed and given a semi-prominent placement in Northwestern’s McCormick Magazine for the outreach work that 2011-2012 NU-IEEE President Curtis Wang and I have put together. Permalink to article. It was a really nice writeup and really great to get to throw out a mention of Joyce Stark!

In other news–I had a crazy couple of weeks due to preparing for (and eventually, taking!) my PhD qualifying examinations. They consist of a panel of three professors questioning me on intricacies of material that I’ve been learning over the last couple of years, namely: Numerical PDE methods, Analytic PDE methods, and optimization. Professor Kath had a particularly interesting question where I derived the heat equation from a minimum-energy problem. The exams went for 95 minutes, followed by a 5 minute deliberation, after which each professor came out with handshakes and congratulations.

It was a great day!