Many orientation activities

Orientation week continued in a similar vein, so I'll just briefly outline the events that are fairly similar to what has gone before.

Wednesday morning: campus tour. It went a bit further east than I'm used to, towards the Sloan business school. I have already seen the areas of campus that I'll frequent, though.

Wednesday lunch: international students lunch (free food). Included a demonstration from campus police about the safest way to tell someone the time.

Wednesday early afternoon: physics orientation (free food). This included a slide outlining all of the requirements for a PhD - there are only nine, and they fit on half a slide.
1) General exam part I
2) General exam part II
3) General exam part III
4) First specialist course (in my case, Solids I)
5) Second specialist course (in my case, Solids II)
6) First breadth course
7) Second breadth course
8) Thesis oral defence
9) Thesis

Wednesday late afternoon: ultimate frisbee with some undergraduates, who saw me wandering aimlessly through Killian Court (I had too little time between activities to do anything useful) and invited me to join in.

Wednesday early evening: welcome reception in Barker Library (under the dome). Cheap food. I met my second Australian classmate, as well as quite a variety of other first year students.

Wednesday late evening: Crossroads Irish Pub (I mentioned my Irish Pub rule earlier, didn't I?) with other physics students.

Thursday morning: graduate welcome address, featuring "three of MIT's great minds": Phillip Sharp, Frank Wilczek and Alex Chan.

Thursday lunch: followed the welcome address (free food).

Thursday early afternoon: more ultimate frisbee, this time with some other physicists.

Thursday mid afternoon was the moment of truth: an email arrived inviting us to go to the physics office to collect our exam results. I opened the envelope and read...

Dear Matthew
Congratulations. You have passed Part I of the general doctoral examination.
Sincerely,
Prof. Thomas Greytak
Associate Department Head for Education

Obviously, I was very happy with that.

Thursday late afternoon: cake with many other physics graduate students. I was interested to note that although all members of the department were invited, professors seemed less eager to take advantage of the free food: the only one I saw there has just set up a lab, and so needed to recruit students.

Thursday early evening: welcome banquet (free food - in fact, free beer for those who wanted it).

Thursday late evening: karaoke night at the Thirsty Ear. Much to Ben's disappointment, his request (on my behalf) of "Tie Me Kangaroo Down" didn't come up. Ah well, there's always next week (and the week after, and the week after...).