Exam week (or fortnight actually, as they start on May 1 and end on May 12, but the former has a ring to it and so we’ll stick with it), arguably the only time I wish I wasn’t in college. I don’t know what it is about them, is it the pressure of performing well, or is it because I procastinated all this while and now I have to do a lot of work in a very short span of time. Obviously, I am able to do it. Just that, it isn’t the best way to go. It makes you want to hate life and the subject you are studying. So, I see exams as means to an end: I’ve got to do it because I’ve got to do it and once they are done I can get back to studying what I like and how I like to do it.

I have only two official physics elective this semester: mathematical methods in physics and theory of relativity. As much as I liked mathematical methods when it started, it became boring towards the end. Not the teacher’s fault though, he is probably the best our department has. The latter part of the course involved special functions and using them to solve some specific partial differential equations using boundary conditions. I didn’t like special functions at all. We were only taught Legendre polynomials and glanced over Bessel ones, and I instanlty knew that I am not going to enjoy this as much as I enjoyed contour integrals or linear algebra. The course, overall, was fun. I learned some new methods that our instructor made it very clear will be useful if we end up pursuing a career in physics, which I plan to.

The second course, theory of relativity, was much more fun. In the beginning I found it to be a bit boring as the former half of the course involved special theory of relativity, which I already knew and so studying it again just made me feel that I was wasting my time. But the latter half of the course was amazing. We leaner about special theory of relativity and its effects in re-deriving the electromagnetic theory in a covariant form, tensor anualysis followed by a basic course ingeneral relativity, which involved transforming vectors, tensors, covariant derivative, parallel transport, affine connections, calculating the metric, the Riemann tensor, the Ricci tensor, the Ricci scalar and the Einstein’s equation of general relativity. Why such an elaborate description? Because I loved it. It was something knew, something that I didn’t already know and found interesting, and I was just happy to be able to say that I know and understand it well now.

You might have noticed me mentioning that I have only two “official” physics electives. That is because the third one that I consider to be a physics elective is actually offered by the chemical department, chemical engineering being my first major. This elective is called transport phenomena, and it deals with fluid, heat and mass transfer; individually and together. It uses tensor manipulation extensively when deriving the fundamental equations and then simplifying them to solve real-world problems I found the course to be intriguing, because, for one, I didn’t expect it be more so detailed, which I guess I enjoy (and I should, given I want to be a theoretical physicist). It was rigorous, with every thing derived explicitly and not in a hand-wavy fashion, which, to be honest, was a breath of fresh air.

We even did a project as a part of the course, where we took a cubical box containing a fluid with a cylinder going through the middle of the box such that their axes coincide. Now, the box was rotated and we had to fidn the velocity profile of the fluid inside. This project, though it took a major chunk of our time just before the exams which was a bit frustating, was extremely rewarding. We non-dimensionalized the Navier-Stokes equations, took certain justified assumptions to bring the equations down to something we can solve numerically (we tried working on an analytical solution as well, but given the time constraint, we couldn’t figure out how to solve the equations using a rotating cylinder for a boundary condition), derive the boundary conditions using the cylinderical couette-flow problem and finally, solving the equations numerically for an unequally-spaced mesh. Why, again, such an eleborate description? You know the answer. I have my transport phenomena exam on May 12, yes, the last one, and I hope it goes well.

As a final thought, instead of telling me what I know and what I don’t, these exams help me by letting me know that I am capable of doing a lot more than I imagine. So, the next time I am in a difficult and stressful situation I’ll just tell myself, ‘Well, this is nothing. I gave 4 exmas in 2 consecutive days with only ‘one-day-before’ preparation and ended up doing well in all of them.