Graduate School Begins
Posted by: Adam Fuson @ 2005.12.31.1928

Returning from San Francisco in September I slept at the Robinson's house before driving to UC for my first day of classes as a graduate student. After graduating from mechanical engineering in June 2004 with JimBo and Bull, I had taken a year to work at Callahan and trucking company and race bicycles. However, with the help of Ivan Maldonado I had registered for classes in nuclear engineering and was excited to learn some completely new material.

Signing up for five classes immersed me in totally new topics. John Christenson taught reactor theory, which focused on the motion and interactions of neutrons within a nuclear reactor. Ray Wood occasionally showed up for his radiation effects class, though sometimes he was pulled out of town for international conferences and to do the work of those relocated by relief efforts for hurricane Katrina. His class concerned the effects of radiation on basic materials such as steel, petroleum products, electronics and several others. Adrian Miron, who handled Dr Wood's class once or twice also taught an introduction to health physics, which presented the basic biological effects of radiation. Sam Glover learned and taught a monte carlo analysis class, which turned into a MCNP5 class. MCNP is an ancient computer code used to simulate nuclear interactions. Finally, Kumar Vemaganti, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the University of Texas, Austin, helped about 12 students including Jack Galloway and myself through an introduction to parallel computing. Unfortunately, none of us were programmers, so we did not generate a lot of code. Instead we mainly tried to quantify the advantage of using parallel computing systems and modified existing code to be more efficient and fit our own purposes.

Also, as required all nuclear and radiological engineering graduate students must attend the weekly seminar shared digitally with OSU students. Each week a professional presents his work with the students and faculty. I signed up for too many classes this quarter even though they were mainly introductory classes. More seems to be expected from graduate classes, and often more freedom is given in the direction of the learning. Still I am very excited about the new work to be done, and look forward to another quarter at UC. In the days to come I will be completing applications for summer internships before the winter quarter gets started.

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