Oh Washington, you elusive Devil…

Hey you crazy physics cats out there, this is Travis Grider typing to you from beautiful Washington, which is by far better than Missouri.  It took me awhile to get this setup, as I have for some reason been blacklisted from the physics email list ever since I’ve been going to Truman.  Even as we speak I’m pretty sure I’m still not on it, Joey forwarded me the info from Tom so thank you Joey.  At least once over there you need to drink enough German beer and Apfelwein to get a little tipsy in the pub!  But anyway, I’m doing a cool, laid back REU at Washington State University in Pullman WA, which until I looked on a map figured it would be raining here all washington-like every day, but no, it has actually not rained once in the ten or so days I’ve been here, and has had beautiful skies and a mid seventies temp with a perfect breeze every day.  So when I say it’s better than missouri summers I’m not kidding at all.  Oh and stuff like flowers and trees actually grows here in the summer in abundance too, without scorching heat killing it off at the beginning of July.  It’s in the bottom right hand corner of the state, so it’s very close to Idaho, and in fact I can be in Idaho in like a 8 minute drive.  However, this state is much different than Idaho.  It’s very hilly here and there’s farm land all around, so it looks pretty crazy because they use the hills and the awesome soil here to farm on, so they don’t plant fields in grid shapes, but in big giant circles that from a plane remind you of different colored crop circles or something.  And then crossing into Idaho, the world changes and it all seems kind of rocky and there’s big cliffs and it’s much more mountainous.  So even though they’re hugging where I’m at, there’s a distinct difference in landscape, so it makes sense why they drew the border there I guess.  So yeah, I’ve settled in nicely, and similar to Ian’s, they payed for travel and living and a bunch of money for doing some research stuff, I just need to feed myself, and without sedexo or a car is kind of a pain sometimes.  But Pullman is pretty similar to kirksville, in that it’s basically a college town, except the college is about 5 times bigger, so the town’s scaled up accordingly.  There’s not a ton of stuff to do in the town itself, apart from bars and stuff like that, and it’s pretty dead in the summer, but the Rec center here is awesome and there’s scheduled float trips and hiking and rockclimbing and those kind of things offered which I’m definitely going to do while I’m here.  I’ll make another post about the actual research kind of things I’m doing in a day or two.  Since my actual research is in the field of Materials Science Engineering, there was a lot of reading and catching up I had to do, because although it’s more or less physics-type stuff, the reading gives you an impression that engineers think of things a bit differently than physicists do, and while the physics knowledge helped me digest it easier, mainly because engineering is way easier than straight up physics, there’s a definite separation of thinking styles.  As one of the professors here told me, ‘A materials science engineer is just a physicist who wants to make money with his degree.’  I will leave you with that.  Reading all of the stuff you guys are doing for the actual physics REU’s sounds really interesting and cool, and I wish I would have signed up for the physics REU here at WSU because they get paid about $1500 more, and makes mine seem really easy, but all I can say to that is… Suckas!