Italia!

I'm about to go to Italy for three weeks. I finally got a camera and took some pictures of my apartment and work. I'll start posting as soon as I land.

Providence

It's time. Am I ready? Not quite. I did not see some people that I really wanted to see, and I did not do as many things as I wanted to do. But such is the story of my life, and so it goes on.

Providence, here I go.

Brown it is

It's been a while since I last posted. School was awful for the last couple (couple? I'm being conservative here) weeks. I needed to graduate and taking 7 classes was not particularly easy. I have a take-home nuclear physics final left to do, and that's it. No more undergraduate.

My graduate school decision has been made. God, it was one of the toughest decisions I've made (perhaps comparable to my change-of-major-drama). In a nutshell, here's what happened:

I got accepted at Brown, Yale, UCLA and the University of Washington.

1) I go to the University of Washington. Seattle is an amazing city, and the department is just phenomenal. The guy who has the best experiment in the world in Axion searches, Prof. Leslie Rosenberg, is there, and he says he could take me as his graduate student. "Dang, I'm coming here".

2) I go visit Yale. DAMN, I was even more impressed. They were offering me a lot of money, and their department is pretty good (not Berkeley- or MIT-good, but up there). I met Prof. Dan McKinsey, who has a good experiment for dark matter detection called CLEAN, and after talking extensively to him during dinner and lunch, he mentioned that he wanted me to go to Yale and join his group. Badly. Later on in the day, I was walking through Yale's campus in the afternoon, and I wondered around the Museum of Rare Books, or something like that. Quite a sight - they had one of Gutenberg's Bibles, first edition. Then I sat in the auditorium, and an orchestra from Yale's music department was performing. That's when I said to myself: "MAN, I can really be happy here. That's it, Yale it is". I even bought a Yale t-shirt and everything.

3) I go to UCLA. I say, "man, this place has to blow me away to top Yale. Anything less than that will not be enough". Well, guess what. 30 seconds after stepping into the physics department, this really interesting (and overtly excited) Japanese guy grabs my arm and says "come, come, let me show you something very exciting". And I'm like, "who are you???". He's like "you're Carlos, right? ok, come with me!". So, the guy shows me very, very confidential stuff about new ideas he has for detecting dark matter, and he is so excited it's even contagious. Turns out that this guy is Prof. Katsushi Arisaka, who - as crazy as life is - was the graduate student of Toshi Koshiba, Nobel Prize winner for his discoveries on neutrinos in the experiment SuperKamiokande, in Japan. After talking to him for 2 days (he got me so excited about everything that I just kept coming back in breaks to talk to him), he says to me: "Carlos, I need one motivated, good graduate student to carry on my work. I want you. You will be for me what I was for Toshi Koshiba". Dang. I'm tempted, but I'm still not completely sold. Prof. Bob Cousins, who is the no. 2 in the world for the CMS collaboration at the LHC in CERN, Switzerland, tells me during my visit (he was conference calling from Switzerland) that he wants me to go there and work with him on the LHC, the most energetic particle collider ever created. But I'm still a little hesitant. So I talk to the secretary about $$$ matters, 'cause as far as I was seeing it, living in LA was incredibly expensive and what they were offering was not enough (turns out they gave me the wrong figures). She tells me that, from the Fellowship I received - which turns out to be the best UCLA offers - they're paying me TWICE as much as anywhere else. It's slightly less than my Motorola salary when I was an engineer. Ok, where do I sign?

I thought about this for a long time. It seemed that the University of Washington and Yale were out of the picture, and I still had Brown University in the back of my mind, which had been my first choice for so long because of several reasons, the most important one being Prof. Gaitskell, who would be a phenomenal advisor.

After several weeks of pretty bad stress and lagging in my classes, I finally decided to go to Brown and turn down UCLA's offer. Was it hard? Yes. Did I make the right choice? I think I did. Some people that I highly respect do not agree with me, but I am convinced I've made a good decision.

I will leave for a future post the reasons why I chose Brown. But for now, my future is in Providence, Rhode Island. I'm moving there May 30th, and I'll be flying to Italy (free!) for 2 weeks because Prof. Gaitskell wants me to learn as much as I can from his experiment Xenon10, which was announced to be the best in the world a couple of weeks ago.

It's an exciting time, and I look forward having very interesting changes in my life.

Salsita

Have I mentioned how much I LOVE salsa dancing?

God, it's been a couple of months since the last time I danced. My body NEEDS to do it. I was going to go today with Jen, but the concert I was in took too long and I ended up not going. ARGH.

Whatever place I choose for grad school, it better have some good salsa clubs around.

Spring Break

I went to Rocky Point with some buddies this past weekend. My cousin is the general manager of the biggest, nicest hotel in there, and he gave us an unbelievable discount (2 double rooms for $89 a night, breakfast included!).

None of my friends had ever gone to Mexico. I guess Rocky Point was not exactly the best first impression, but it was a start for them. Sadly, though, I got really sick the day we left, and it got worse down there (I guess loads of beer and late nights didn't help). It was fun, though it could've been better without the coughing and fever. I guess my mean game didn't do much when I couldn't quite talk without coughing and sneezing like crazy. Well, I tried. Fun times, but better luck next time.

CERN calls

It was 10:00 am. I had just slept a mere handful of hours. I was up until that morning finishing up a 20-page essay on the nature of physics collaborations. The interesting part of some of the modern physics collaborations is that they are colossal - the new experiments at CERN (such as the Large Hadron Collider -LHC) involve 30+ countries and require more than 6,000 scientists and engineers. CERN was my "poster boy" for the paper, and I talked about the pros/cons of working in such a collaboration. I think my criticism was focused a bit too much on the bad parts, but it was mainly because I, at the time, did not think that working in such huge collaborations was a great idea for a graduate student.

Then I get the phone call from Prof. Cousins (see my previous post), from CERN, Switzerland. He is the 2nd in command - worldwide - for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector for the LHC. Prof. Cousins was really nice and started telling me about their program and what would a graduate student do. He mentioned that he would really like me to join his group, and if I did, I would spend this summer at CERN, the following summer as well, and then move to Switzerland until I finish my PhD.

Now, that's an attractive offer.

He also mentioned that I got for sure the Eugene Cota-Robles fellowship, which turns out to be their top fellowship. It's a four-year, five-figure monetary award, with summers included.

I felt the urge to go back to my essay and erase all the bashing I did on CERN. After all, when somebody puts the dish in front of your face, things look slightly different than before.

UCLA is definitely back in this game. Since I got my rejection letter from Cornell and I haven't heard from Michigan St., I can safely remove them from the list (they were at the bottom, anyways).

1. Brown (Prof. Gaitskell)
2. UCLA (Prof. Cousins, Prof. Saltzberg)
3. Yale (Prof. McKinsey, Prof. Lamoreaux)
4. University of Washington (Prof. Rosenberg)

Update

A 1. Brown
R 2. MIT
A 3. University of Washington
A 4. Yale
A 5. UCLA
__ 6. Cornell
__ 6. Michigan State

On the bad side, Prof. Hudson (from MIT), who has been very helpful and supportive since I met him during the summer, recently called me to let me know that I did not get into MIT. He said that it was a close call, and that Prof. Sciolla tried to back up my application, but it wasn't gonna happen; they had even fewer spots than usual since there was an over-acceptance of students last year (every university accepts a higher number of students than the number of available spots since they know that some people will turn down the offer to join other places; however, the number of people who accept is out of the university's hand, so they have to compensate year-by-year by varying the number of spots available - this year was a low acceptance one).

On the good side, l finally got the acceptance letter from Brown. Prof. Vallis personally e-mailed me, and I've been recommended for their fellowship. I'm eagerly waiting to see this offer!

UCLA offered me an extra fellowship - for Hispanic students - that is even better than the last one. A professor at UCLA (Prof. Bob Cousins) e-mailed me and said that he wants to give me a call to talk about joining their department. He is currently at CERN, in Switzerland, so we have to work out the time difference (pretty much my morning is his night).

UW proved to be a much better place than I originally expected. I've got a lot of thinking to do.

UW

I'm in Seattle. I flew in on Thursday afternoon and I'll be here until Sunday.

GOD! This place is unbelievable! Seattle is probably one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen. The University of Washington blew me away today! They have one of the biggest, friendliest, most collaborative, most prestigious, most creative physics departments in the country. I finally met Prof. Leslie Roesenberg, who is the world leader on dark matter searches for axions (he has a very elegant experiment, the ADMX, that is looking for microwave resonance on a cavity), and I had a great impression of him. He was just hired a bit ago by UW, and that's mainly the reason I applied here. I thought I was coming here because it was free (the UW dept. pays for everything: airplane ticket, hotel, meals - even lots of free beer today at the tavern... but don't tell anybody), but I was really blown away by this awesome department. It is such an intellectually stimulating place to be at. I also met Prof. Adelberger and I got a chance to talk to him for a very long period of time at the UW dinner (he was sitting next to me). Adelberger is such a celebrity... I was so excited to be talking to him. He is looking for 1/r^2 deviatons of the very well known Newton's law over sub-millimeter scales (about 50 microns), and this work directly proves the existence of extra dimensions, axions, among other things. Adelberger has been incredibly successfull so far in lowering the upper limit for extra dimensions and some of his grad students are currently pursuing other experiments.

This weekend is gonna be awesome. I'm really liking this place.

Feeling small

How do you tell a scholar you've contacted in Malawi, Africa, who sent you one of the most touching e-mails you've ever read about current need in the region, that your local chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) does not have the necessary resources to take on such a project?

As the secretary of EWB, I have both the privilege and the burden of contacting people around the world. We recently started a new team, and we were deeply interested in some projects in Malawi, Africa, through talking to local contacts. I e-mailed many, many people in Malawi and only one responded: Mr. Fanuel Kapute. He is a scholar at the University of Malawi and he was incredibly interested in working with us. He sent me many e-mails stating current need, and he was glad to know that we were interested in helping his community. I told him that we were a new and small team and that we were still deciding on a first project. He sent me, in turn, probably the most moving piece of writing I've ever read, and I was challenged.

Last week, we (EWB) had "the meeting", in which we would ultimately choose a project. After 3 hours of deliberation, we decided on a smaller project in Nicaragua, and it was hard for all of us to give up Malawi. It was a fair decision. For Malawi, we had to raise more than $25,000 dlls in a short period of time (and this is a conservative estimate), and that, for our chapter, was out of hand. I felt bad nonetheless.

I e-mailed Mr. Kapute today. I explained the situation. I can't help but feel *this* little.

UCLA

I got into UCLA today. Man, now I don't know what I'm gonna do! They awarded me the "Physics Division Fellowship", a nice 5-figure fellowship for academic distinction. It would've been easier to decide where to go if I only got a simple "we accept you", but now it's also this that I'll be saying goodbye to if I choose not to go to UCLA.