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The existence of exotic R^4 scares me. I mean, sure, exotic spheres, those are fine; spheres are fickle things, as any algebraic topologist will tell you. But R^4? R^4 is parallelizable, it's a vector space. How can there be exotic R^4s?

I'm back, I guess. Starting the new semester in a fit of uncertainty and depression.

So, hope everyone had a great summer! You may now return to loathing my stupidity.

buck up mon ami... just keep putting one foot in front of the next until you can't stand it anymore... than do it a little bit longer. Sometimes it felt as if the point of my graduate program was to utterly and completely destroy any illusions of self-worth that I may have harbored. Near the end I thought there was no possible way I could finish. I was on the verge of giving up more times than I can count (and as a mathematician I can count quite high), but even when I knew it was hopeless I kept trying... and it paid off (even the nightmares have almost stopped). What are you taking this semester?

Thankfully I'm done (yay!).... but I've applied for an NIH grant (I've moved into bio-informatics).... My "training program" needed to be beefed up a bit so I'm currently sitting in on undergraduate biochemistry (which has been surprisingly fun)... other than that I'm working from home: My wife has a tenure track job and we've moved to a completely different state; however my post-doc advisor doesn't care if *where* I work so I've kept my job. It's pretty sweet actually.

Hmmm... Have to say that I've somewhat steered away from QFT recently as well. I still need a little, but I'm not really heading down the high energy physics route. Finite difference schemes, algebra, some functional analysis and whatnot are more important to me now, as much of my 'work' revolves around computational physics. And heh... If you want to go to harvard (or anywhere for that matter) then I'd recommend applying regardless of your GPA. (Unless they slap you with a massive app fee or something).

gey wanderer: You say you're now involved in bioinformatics? Strangely enough I've been brushing shoulders with a lot of bio inf people and I even have the opportunity to do some modules this year. Apparently it's a big field for people with an education in the more mathematical aspects of physics. (My degree is half experimental, half theoretical). This question is horribly vague but... What's the computational aspect of bio inf like?

The sort of bio-informatics that I do uses some basic stats and probability theory, quite a bit of discrete math, and a fair amount of data structures and algorithms. About half of it depends upon using tools that have been written by other people (this means knowing how to use programs like BLAST (a sequence searching algorithm), Eland (to align small samples against a reference), and Edena (for de Novo assembly)).

Our system looks a bit like this (I'm lying in a few places to simplify the explanation):
The organism that we study has a 100 million base pair genome and roughly 6 million 32 base pair samples (called 32-mers) taken from the sample genome. Those 32-mers are aligned against a previously prepared reference genome and then we examine all places where the 32-mers from the sample genome differ from the reference genome. We then predict which of those differences that we think are real by examining how many samples agree with the reference genome and how many disagree.... a random subset of the differences are selected and checked using conventional sequencing technology (over 99% agreeement!) From this we have a reasonably good idea of EVERY genomic change that has occured in the sample genome relative to the reference genome. There is a caveat: Places in the reference genome that are too similar to other places in the reference genome can't be analyzed using this technique(this is about 18% of the total genome).

Of course this entails a lot of data manipulation, so the other skill set you need is being able to program (R and PERL appear to be the favorites... but C or C++ are also very useful when you need to do something fast!)

If I think of anything else I'll expand on this a bit.

EDIT (I should stress that this technique finds almost all of the Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (also called SNPs)-- these are the sites where one base-pair has changed. There are other techniques needed to discover short insertions and deletions, reshuffling, and large insertions or deletions (including changes in copy number))

Thanks for the advice, Layra. I guess I'm partially paranoid 'cos I'm applying to the various scholar/fellowships to go to Cambridge, and they definitely seem to care about my GPA (as well as letters, of course).

But grar! I can't believe these applications are due so soon! I haven't even chosen a senior thesis advisor or topic yet, and now I need to apply for all the possible fellowships for all the universities I could apply, and then choose which unis to actually apply to (and do it). Grarg frustration anxiety fear overwhelm-edness.

It's not for Cambridge that everything is due so soon, though American applying to British school implies I have to apply earlier. I won't be able to study there without some sort of scholar/fellowship, and those applications (the ones whose deadlines haven't *already* passed) are due in early-mid October.