Well, my account was supposed to have been shut off in May, so I'm not really sure exactly how any FNAL email is getting to me. Anyway, it's only the cms_uaf_users list, which isn't high volume.



Cool. I love learning about theory, but have never had the patience to do actual research in it.



You and your abundance of X chromosomes. Also, Norway? Really? That seems... extreme.



I actually made an Access database to help narrow mine down from ~40 to a more manageable 7. Talk to your professors for advice, but don't feel too obliged to listen to them if they say some criterion doesn't matter, since usually what that means is just that it doesn't matter to them.

Example: I heard again and again that the location of the school shouldn't really matter, because I'd just be spending all my time at CERN anyway. However, it turns out that the UMD CMS group is much more flexible than the usual "ship off all the grad students for 1-3 years after quals" model. Now, I'll get to spend a lot of time in a fun area and go to CERN when it's convenient and makes sense. (I love CERN itself, but Geneva... not so much. It's a very expensive city.)



They must, since the professors in the group weren't around during UMD's open house. They're pretty much going on my resume plus a few phone calls and emails.

A perk of the RA/TA time split (beyond the main fun part of actually getting to do research) is that I can slack off on the research during exam periods, and then I'll only have half the teaching workload. (That is how the professor actually described it to me.)



I worked on a project for ATLAS last semester, through University of Albany. I was working on some software to do fast estimations of trigger rates, which was an interesting intersection between physics and computing.

Some people diss the big collaborations (I'm sure you heard some of that going on between the different groups at Fermi), but one thing I like about them is that there are so many different areas to maintain and improve, but they all come together at the end. And then you get to make cool-looking plots.