The Political Physicist

Well, it’s that time of year again. The air is turning cold (or, in today’s case, rainy), the last pay-cheque from my summer job went into my back account, I’ve made sure I’m stocked up on all of the supplies I’ll need, and another semester is about to start. I’ll be entering the third and penultimate year of my astrophysics degree (my god, it’s scary how quickly the time passes). I guess I’m supposed to be dreading this time of year, but I’m really not.

I’ve had a 4+ month break and now I’m sufficiently recharged to be ready to start school again. Quite honestly, classes will be a nice change of pace, after spending four months of writing data analysis scripts for one of my profs. Not that there is anything wrong with doing that for a summer job—it was a nice change from classes at the start. But, as they say, variety is the spice of life. So learning some actual physics again, rather than just crunching numbers, sounds good to me.

The other reason I’m not sad that school is starting again is because my social life actually improves during the semester. All of my friends in Halifax are classmates and only a few of them were around campus over the summer. And none of them were other people from my year. So outside of office hours (when we shouldn’t really be talking much anyway) I had virtually no social life. Now, though, there will be plenty of people in the physics major’s work-room (well, we get some work done there, anyway) to talk to and plenty of time spent together doing homework. Honestly, hours spent collaborating on homework sounds altogether more enjoyable than hours spent in isolation killing time.

So, all things considered, I’m kind of glad that school is starting again. Just not quite as glad as I will be when it’s over come May.