Coe College is in Cedar Rapids, IA. I drove here by myself on August 8th. Research started on the 9th. I am living in one of the campus dorms, although we are trying to manipulate a way to get moved into the campus apartments. Coe is a lot like Monmouth College, except that it is in a city. There are malls and Wal-Marts and everything. It is nice to have those things available, but I spend most of my time on campus anyways. I am rooming with another student in my REU program. We are both doing research on different compositions of glass. We mix a couple of chemicals together then heat them up in a little furnace, anywhere from 1000-1400 degrees C. Then we pour them out and let them cool basically. After that we run a small amount of it through some machines to get the melting point of the glass and density and such. There are 25 students in the Physics department here this summer, and 7 other REU students. There are people all over around campus. They don't have summer courses, but there is a College for Kids, tennis camp, and a bunch of other things going on. I have gotten to know a lot of the Coe students here and we have had a good time. It's nice to have a lot of people around to do things with on the weekends. We work from 8:30 to 5 or 5:30 so the days are pretty full, but we all like to go play sand volleyball in the evenings when it cools off a little bit.
My advisor for my research has not been here the last two days so he assigned us a research paper and power point on the projects we are doing. So we had to look up journals and such on our glass and the techniques we are using to analyze them. Not a ton of fun, but I've had worse papers to write. It's nice to learn why we are doing what we are doing. My project is kind of special because after we make all of our glass (by next week) we are shipping it to England to run in a billion dollar machine. It's a neutron scattering machine that is going to tell us the atomic structure of our glass. That's probably a lot of mumbo jumbo to most people reading it, at least I know it was when I first heard about it!
It surprised me that most of the people who are here are not going to be seniors. When I was applying for these REU's I got the impression that most people who were accepted were juniors, going to be seniors. But most of the Coe students and some of the REU students are all either freshmen going to be sophomores or sophomores going to be juniors!
So far so good though, the last three weeks have gone pretty quick, I am excited to get to go home for the 4th of July next weekend and see my family. I am here until August 8th so it is like a nine week program and I am 1/3 of the way done as of this weekend!
