Wednesday, December 31, 2008

How did my 2008 go ?

Everyday Life

The everyday life was usual as in the past. Some of the chores were to help my daughter with her homework, to organize and participate in a get together periodically like MO:MO parties, Dashain and Tihar celebrations, etc. Most of the time was spent in internet - improving personal website, visiting the facebook and writing blogs. Other day-to-day activities were checking e-mails and reading all kinds of news papers that are published all around the world !! There was not a single day that passed without clicking on the following websites:
http://arxiv.org/,
http://prola.aps.org/,
http://kantipuronline.com/,
http://mysansar.com/,
http://sajha.com/sajha/html/index.cfm,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/,
http://www.cnn.com/
There is no question that the following website was highly clicked on:

http://www.google.com/.
The visits to the following web pages was also made at high frequency:
http://groups.google.com/group/nps_nepal?pli=1
http://physicsworld.com/cws/home.
Thus walking to the office after morning tea/coffee, spending the morning at university, coming back to home for lunch, going back to the university and spending the rest of the day until dinner becomes ready and come back to home and chat with friends and family - was a pendulum-like life of the year 2008. Oh, we also visited the Niagara Falls and the 1000 islands in the month of August.


Research and Academia

I was continuing my research work on the BEC-based atom interferometry, under a distant supervision of my adviser as he was in sabbatical for about a year and half in University of Colorado, Boulder. He came back to the University in January 2008. Therefore, I started learning more research skills under his direct supervision right from the beginning of the Spring semester. I participated in the 2008 March Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in New Orleans, Louisiana. I presented my research work on Single and double reflection atom Michelson interferometers in a weakly confining magnetic trap in that meeting. After my return from New Orleans, we had a campus wide poster presentation at WPI, which WPI celebrates annually as the Graduate Research Achievement Day (GRAD). I made a poster presentation there on Theoretical Analysis of single and double reflection atom interferometers in a weakly- confining magnetic trap. I was more than happy when the first research paper was published in Physical Review A in April, 2008 ! I was awarded the Graduate Research Government(GSG) Conference funding award by the GSG at WPI. I gave a presentation on Theoretical analysis of a free-oscillation atom interferometer in a weakly confining magnetic trap at Harvard University in May, 2008. I was awarded the Graduate Research Assistantship (GRA) for the summer of 2008. I also got an opportunity of teaching a summer course on Waves and Oscillations at WPI. I got an award of Graduate Teaching Assistantship (GTA) for the year 2008-2009 in August. I learnt research skills in theoretical atomic physics in this year more than ever in the past. Thus, I enjoyed 2008 with teaching, research and normal everyday work !

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