The new term starts in the coming Monday. It's been amazing how much I can get done when I can work at my own leisure without classes and seminars to attend. Nevertheless the reason I came over to this side of the Atlantic was to take extra classes and learn material I otherwise would not learn, so I'd better not complain.

Since getting back from my winter break, the past month has mostly been about doing the take-home final for my stellar structure class, and after that working to try to get something done in my semester project from the last term.

The take-home final had an interesting problem on the larger-than-expected radii on extra-solar planets close to their host stars. It was obviously highly simplified for us to work on, but the probable answer is that the atmosphere of the planet has a high metal content which increases the opacity. Hence, like a bubble with a thicker skin, it puffs up more than it would otherwise.

The flip side was that this problem intrigued me so much that I didn't pay as much attention to some of the other problems on the exam, which pulled my final grade down to a B. It's the first B I've received since I started university education, but at least better than I initially feared when I was trying to settle into grad school.