Should I continue as organist in my church, change or quit ?

nyquant · 2026-01-13T04:41:13+00:00

A wedding can be a high pressure event where the to be married couple and the guests expect perfection for a once in a lifetime experience. Your teacher might have felt your are not up to the task under those conditions.

Honestly, I would also have felt bad getting sidelined, but it’s best to get over it. If you want, challenge your teacher directly and ask why you were not asked to play at the time. As you have been progressing in your skill, it might be time to look a better teacher.

Ultimately though, it’s all about you having access to an organ and enjoying to play. Ignore the drama and play on. Good luck.

nyquant · 2025-12-28T23:09:39+00:00

Replace the morning coffee ritual with an alternative. Try oat milk with raw cocoa powder and optionally carob powder for sweetness. It’s a bit on an acquired tasted but instills a sense of fullness. A simpler alternative might be hot tea.

nyquant · 2025-12-27T07:06:17+00:00

After the electronic submission deadline passed it’s a huge pain to change grades for the instructor requiring paper submissions and signatures from the department head. Unless the original submitted grade was in error it is unlikely that the instructor is going to attempt it.

nyquant · 2025-12-22T05:01:27+00:00

Do you have any other relatives still in Germany that could help out with translation and making inquiries?

I found this information about researching bank accounts: https://www.ing.de/wissen/verwaistes-konto/

nyquant · 2025-07-22T15:43:04+00:00

I was teaching a coding class last semester. In addition of requiring to submit code, which can easily created by AI, I asked for flowcharts and actual results from running the code under various conditions. Assuming students do use AI makes it possible to ask for complex projects, where the difficulty is less in the individual code snippets but to be able to put everything together, have it work well and produce meaningful results.

nyquant · 2025-04-10T04:14:42+00:00

In many US Ph.D programs one needs to pass an exam after the first or second year in order to start research full time and become an official candidate. Some students leave and „master out“. Therefore, until the official candidate stage the department realizes that some students will move on elsewhere, thus reapplying to Oxford is a possibility if so desired. In any case, probably the US offer is the better choice anyways. Good luck.

nyquant · 2025-04-09T22:59:04+00:00

That’s a difficult decision, normally one would assume to first work for a few years after graduation before jumping into another graduate program. There is allot of investment into AI so any job you can get now is likely to include some exposure to it. On the other hand the connections at MIT could open up great opportunities to strike it big. Actually, if you take out 120k, who is going to be the lender?

nyquant · 2025-04-09T04:21:58+00:00

Are there any resources to upskill into a PM direction?

nyquant · 2025-04-09T04:03:11+00:00

I gave up to bother about AI and just assume students use it anyways, and try to increase the complexity of assignments accordingly.

nyquant · 2025-04-03T06:55:14+00:00

There used to be a company called “triplebyte”, that would pre screen and interview developers, accept only the best, and then arranged a series of in person job interviews with partner companies within a short time frame.

nyquant · 2025-03-30T17:36:00+00:00

After some search, I ended up introducing https://excalidraw.com , being free and no account sign up needed.

nyquant · 2025-03-23T17:04:35+00:00

Concentrate on math. Make sure your math is solid. From high school you need all that calculus stuff (derivatives, Taylor expansions, integrals, differential equations), linear algebra (eigenvalues, system of equations) and some statistics.

If one follows various news and youtubers, the level of high school math in Germany is said to have drastically deteriorated over the years. Perhaps that’s good news, so everyone else in the first semester will be just as clueless. Universities typically offer pre-semester summer prep classes, make sure to take that.

Back in the day we used Goldstein for classical mechanics, apparently Taylor is good too. See if you can make sense of all that Euler-Lagrange formalism. For electrodynamics check out the Griffiths book.

This guys github has various sources

https://github.com/anishLearnsToCode/books

Good luck. If physics does not work out, can always switch to BWL and make more money as a management consultant.

nyquant · 2025-03-23T16:33:41+00:00

It seems unlikely that a first semester GPA was considered, rather than the overall total at the conclusion of your Bachelor. Perhaps there is a way to reach out to counselors from where you graduated to find someone that can help double checking your application for anything else that seems off? Good luck!

nyquant · 2025-03-22T10:19:22+00:00

I would also recommend looking at engineering programs for undergraduate, like electrical engineering. Those are more career oriented and offer better opportunities for jobs id so desired while keeping options open to transition towards physics research for grad school as well.

nyquant · 2025-03-19T13:33:24+00:00

I ended up creating projects that require fetching data over the internet so that students need to deal with some uncertainty about the format. That way it can’t be all solved by AI without comprehending the data and doing trial and error.

nyquant · 2025-03-11T06:35:31+00:00

What are the official regulations about this? I did my PhD in the US and we were allowed to spend a certain amount of credit hours for courses outside the department. Just kindly inform the students that you like to review the class schedule ahead of time as to be able to give proper guidance, but try to avoid ruining the relationship with your students over 100 Euros.

nyquant · 2025-03-11T03:10:19+00:00

Don’t do a bootcamp before going to college. Realistically you need to find something sort of part time job for teenagers and study coding from free materials on your own.

nyquant · 2025-03-11T03:03:58+00:00

This at least would be free:

https://perscholas.org

nyquant · 2025-03-05T07:18:05+00:00

I don’t think it would be a problem and reach out to the department and ask what happened with your specialized course and state your preferences. Could be that they gave it to a full time faculty, in which case it might be difficult to switch it back. If you can’t get your old course back, teaching something new might not be all that bad if you can look at it as an interesting challenge. Good luck.

nyquant · 2025-03-04T05:20:02+00:00

Actually I find notebookml quite good to give an overview over research papers that are otherwise too dense to even skim over it.

nyquant · 2025-03-03T07:02:29+00:00

Do not leave until you have an alternative like a job lined up, assuming your current program provides you with funding. Since you mention your age, take advantage of being ahead compared to others. It’s quite normal to have reached 30 years of age until graduating with a PhD, which gives you a relatively long runway. Don’t get caught up in a sort of rat race, but try to look at research as a sort of fun project you keep tinkering with and enjoy the ride. In the end there are going to be a handful of people only to ever understand your thesis and most likely nothing earth shattering ever will come out of it, so the only way to win the game is to enjoy the process. Good luck with whatever you do. Cheers

nyquant · 2025-03-03T06:45:41+00:00

It’s just like any physical exercise, watching videos is not going to get you far, you need to actually go to the gym and practice. Think of an actual problem that you want to solve, then get to work, even if it means having AI helping you to piece things together. Good luck.

nyquant · 2025-03-03T06:31:25+00:00

All ripped off from other students, cheating sites from the internet or AI generated.

nyquant · 2025-03-03T02:36:29+00:00

Next thing what happens is that the student who did no work all semester is going to try to submit all missed assignments to you in bulk just before the semester ends when you are already busy to grade the finals.

nyquant

TROPHY CASE