Milestones 2

So, after a weekend where I felt ready to quit graduate school (thanks Spotty and Whines for being there for me during an emotional collapse), I ended up giving my first ever real presentation Wednesday morning, about the Hamiltonian formalism for photons. The presentation is a weekly one in which members of the group fill the rest in on their research, and I volunteered for it two weeks ago -- whether an ordeal or not, it's a good idea not to be forced into such things. The presentation went fairly well, and hopefully all future ones will be easier on me emotionally. Thankfully, I took the opportunity to practice it the night before, which helped me considerably when it came to facing down postdocs ready to question the entire validity of my approach.

What I considered the centerpiece of the presentation, a derivation of the photon Hamilton equations from the assumption of stationary phase using a variational method, was stopped two-thirds of the way through by my professor, who said everyone there (a dozen-and-a-half graduate students and postdocs) should know how to do it already. (As it happens, later on one of the graduate students asked me how I got the equations of motion anyway.) Lots of good questions were asked, though for some of these questions I only thought of answers after the presentation. Clearly I need to work more on giving an overview of my work, and connecting it to current research. But, once again, hooray for milestones, and now it's relatively easy going until qualifiers.