Letter from Boston

New School Year

By MASAKO YAMADA

Although the semester has not yet officially started, thousands of new students have already arrived on campus. There are a number of orientation sessions before classes begin. Incoming freshmen have their own orientation activities, as do international students. The university tries to get them settled in before others return to campus.

The arrival of these students marks the end of my summer vacation. For many graduate students, summer vacation does not mean anything in particular. For instance, my day-to-day schedule in the lab did not change too much while the undergraduate students were away.

Summer vacation didn't really mean much to me and the new semester shouldn't mean much to me, either. After all, I will still be working in the same lab, and the new students will not affect my life too much.

However, for some reason, I feel a renewed burst of energy now. The back-to-school atmosphere on campus and around the city of Boston is undeniable and the excitement has rubbed off onto me. Campus tends to be very quiet during the summer — many of the college services are cut back — and after a couple of months, the quiet seems almost oppressive. There is always something fresh that a new school year brings, and the new students are the harbinger of the chaos of normal university life.

I have already been at Boston University for as long as I was at Wellesley, but I still feel enthusiastic about graduate school. I was graduated from college after three years, and I clearly remember feeling relief at being able to go on to the next stage of my life a year early. I'm actually surprised that I still like being in school.

In college, I was able to take courses to my liking, engaged in a lot of extracurricular activities, interacted with people from different fields of study and spent my summers off campus. Even then, however, I couldn't wait to leave. Now, I study only physics and I spend most of my time with the same small group of people, but I haven't gotten sick of it. In fact, I can imagine being here for another couple of years.

I sometimes wonder how this can be. The three years I've spent in graduate school have been uniform in a certain sense, but I suppose there have always been little goals to add excitement to the work: required courses, home work assignments, finals, comprehensive exams, oral exams, conferences, collaborations.

I've never had particularly large visions with regard to the study of physics, but I've hopped from goal to goal, and three years has gone by in a flash. All I can say is that I'm glad I stayed on this path.

There is always something new to learn. One of the new things that I'm looking forward to this semester is taking an elective physics course in the study of polymers. Since most of the students taking the course are senior graduate students, the problems in the class look as if they will be more interesting than the drills we were forced to do in our introductory courses.

On the other hand, the class also looks as if it will be much more relaxed, since the course is not a requirement. I have the feeling that this kind of relaxed yet challenging atmosphere is the most satisfying one for learning in the classroom.

In the past year, my focus at school has gradually shifted from classroom study to research. This is considered to be a step up. It has been a gradual, but large, change for me. However, I am looking forward to experiencing homework sets and finals again.

Egalitarian round-table discussions are crucial in doing good research, but perhaps because of my many years of Japanese lecture-based learning, I still find it very satisfying to sit in front of a blackboard and process information that is fed to me by a knowledgeable professor. I will have to sweep out some of the cobwebs in my brain to resume that kind of thinking. This is the sort of variation that makes every semester interesting.

Shukan ST: Sept. 10, 1999

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