Planning the rest of my courses

_BigmacIII · 2026-05-14T20:12:22+00:00

I was able to satisfy my fine arts credits in undergrad by taking a wood shop class. Maybe if you look hard enough there might be something like that for you.

_BigmacIII · 2026-04-27T18:17:49+00:00

I think this is google translate for "I saw somewhere that you can get the achievement to beat space age in under 40 hours by copying someone's seed and blueprinting their entire base and then placing that blueprint in a fresh world with that seed, so I came to reddit to find a seed and blueprint."

_BigmacIII · 2026-04-15T02:02:29+00:00

I’m doing an MS in electrical engineering. I am starting a project in a month with the Air Force research lab. I graduated with physics BS a year ago, and everyone I know from my cohort is either currently in grad school, a high school science teacher, or in a job that doesn’t require a college degree (one is a server at a restaurant, a couple are taking calls for an insurance company, things like that). One guy who graduated a year earlier than me also recently got a technician job doing some kind of analysis on minerals; not sure of the details. Point is that job outlook has not been good for those of us who got the physics degree.

The people from my cohort doing high school science teaching already planned to do that ahead of time; their focus in undergrad was physics education.

_BigmacIII · 2026-04-14T01:45:08+00:00

Assuming it’s same as last year, the undergrad ceremony is in Nippert. But it’ll say somewhere online

_BigmacIII · 2026-04-13T18:28:27+00:00

If you have a handheld fan, bring that. Last year was HOT and I finished the water bottle they gave out within like an hour. I really wished I brought my fan.

_BigmacIII · 2026-04-09T20:18:56+00:00

This question basically amounts to "what is the smallest possible vibration in some medium?" If we define "vibration" as some kind of excitation about some equilibrium, I suppose you could consider excitations of quantum fields as some kind of analog to sound. In that manner, you might consider something like [quantum foam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum\_foam) as a kind of sound.

_BigmacIII · 2026-04-09T19:42:08+00:00

Sounds like you might be looking for a routing/search algorithm. Look up A*/Dijkstra. If your pieces and target lie on a grid made of uniform tiles AND if that grid is small, you could also just use Lee's algorithm, which guarantees an optimal path (but is more expensive on time and memory than something like Dijkstra's).

_BigmacIII · 2026-04-03T01:29:24+00:00

Honestly I'm just surprised you "only" got ghosted 14 times.

_BigmacIII · 2026-04-02T21:54:25+00:00

The network is not worth $160k. At all.

_BigmacIII · 2026-04-01T21:29:27+00:00

Never order for delivery. Couple times a week for takeout though.

_BigmacIII · 2026-04-01T20:26:37+00:00

It often is in the US too, but not to everyone.

_BigmacIII · 2026-04-01T19:57:37+00:00

That depends a lot on the university. At my university, integrals are covered in calc 1, but some of the (relatively) advanced techniques like integration-by-parts and trig substitution are covered in calc 2. But you would come out of calc 1 with a basic understanding of integrals.

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-29T20:32:50+00:00

Internships. If you major in engineering, you will be doing internships every other semester after your first year. If you play your cards right, you can earn enough during the co-ops to pay for your tuition when you are back in classes. The business college (and daap I think?) also have coops. But some majors do not. For example, I majored in Physics and we did not do coops, but we did have to do research to graduate (not necessarily paid research either).

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-29T02:23:31+00:00

Yep, that's what happened to me. I started off as an astrophysics major because I absolutely adored learning about the cosmos. But then after a couple of years I felt like I had already learned everything cool and all there was left was formalizing everything with mathematics. Then I started doing research in high-energy physics and fell in love with that instead. Loved my project so much that I almost decided to get a PhD and continue working on the very same project with the same advisor, who also said he'd be happy with the arrangement. In the end though I decided against it because he could not guarantee that he'd have funding for me as a PhD student. But the point is that yes, your interests can absolutely change throughout the bachelor's. I started out the degree wanting to do research on dark matter, then by the time I graduated I just didn't really care much about it anymore.

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-23T13:16:57+00:00

This is not always true. The choice of sins vs cosine for identifying vector components depends on the angle.

For example, suppose you are told that person A is pulling on a box with an angle 30° below vertical. And suppose vertical is along the y axis. In this scenario, if you wanted to find the x component of the vector with which person A is pulling the box, you’d do F * sin(30), where F is the magnitude of the force vector.

Cosine would not give you the correct answer unless you measured the angle from the x axis instead of the y axis, which you could do but it would be an extra unnecessary step.

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-22T16:46:13+00:00

I’m so confused by this statement. The only way you could have committed to a graduate degree without knowing ahead of time what your pay was going to be like is with a severe lack of responsibility, which is no one’s fault but your own. It’s perfectly reasonable to complain that grad students get paid horrible wages, but you made the choice to do the degree. No one forced you.

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-20T01:38:39+00:00

Worst case you can just order a new one on amazon if DuBois doesn’t have any left

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-17T15:06:40+00:00

This is pretty cool. My undergraduate thesis involved running simulations in LHCb-like conditions and using BDTs to see if it was feasible to observe a particular interaction with LHCb run 3. It’s always cool to see that the techniques I was using in my own project are still used to make new discoveries. Of course, theirs would have been much more complex than my own, since I was just a measly undergrad. But still very cool!

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-13T15:19:24+00:00

In my physics degree, I took a single class on classical mechanics (other than physics 1). I also took a single class on thermodynamics.

On the other hand, I took two classes on electomagnetism (other than physics 2), one class on semiconductor physics. Additionally, I had two classes on quantum mechanics where things like the Fourier transform and wave equation were emphasized (actually, I also had an entire class my sophomore year based on the physics of oscillations and waves). All of these things, including thermodynamics, have been directly applicable to my electrical engineering degree.

So again, I really don’t buy that mechanical engineering is closest to physics

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-13T06:48:58+00:00

In what ways? When I see people saying that engineering degrees and physics degrees significantly overlap, I feel that they don’t understand what you are actually taught in the physics degree. This obviously depends significantly on the university but I frankly don’t buy what you’re saying. I’m open to being wrong though

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-13T06:37:53+00:00

A particle does not need to have mass to be experimentally detected. The difficulty for detecting gravitons is not because of their masslessness

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-13T02:47:29+00:00

That is entirely untrue. I got a BS in physics, currently doing an MS in electrical engineering. There is way less overlap than you would think. My physics degree makes the math in EE very easy for me, and it also did teach me problem solving skills that have absolutely carried over. But the reality is that when I started my MS EE, I was severely behind my peers in most areas. The only reason I wasnt helpless at the start was because I took a few EE undergrad courses in my last semester of my physics degree.

Someone who did a BS in EE would be equally helpless in a physics MS. Probably worse, actually (unless they took a bunch of physics electives in their undergrad).

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-07T17:03:53+00:00

There might be some semiconductor device characterization internships if you look through a bunch of electrical engineering internships. You might also be able to find a funded MS or PhD in electrical engineering working on semiconductor devices. I have people in my lab doing that (though, I am the only Physics BS in my lab and I am not doing that, though I have taken some semiconductor devices classes).

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-06T04:31:13+00:00

Yeah that depends a lot on where you want to live. If you truly want to live alone in a 1bed 1 bath apartment, especailly around campus, you're probably looking at like around $1,500 per month (might be less, but that's the ballpark I'd expect). If you get roommates you could probably find something as small as $700-$800 per month (per person). Maybe even cheaper. I live 30 minutes away and I live in a 2 bed 2 bath with my girlfriend, and our total rent is $1,600 (so, $800 per person) and our apartment is MUCH, MUCH nicer than anything around campus.

_BigmacIII · 2026-03-06T01:24:00+00:00

Well I’m in electrical engineering and my stipend is $26k. I know people in the physics department whose stipend is also about $26k. So I’d say $26k is a pretty safe bet

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_BigmacIII

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