University
I started my journey in education as a young pianist with a deep connection to classical music. After a few years of teaching private piano and playing restaurants I found myself thinking about the stars and how our world worked. From there I pursued an education in physics, not to just gain a career but to explore the beautiful history of science. I returned to education and got into all Universities I applied for. I chose UoE due to the inspiring stories of Edinburghs' James Clerk Maxwell and the late Peter Higgs.
My lab sessions began with basic hand written reports. As the years went on I developed a plethora of industry skills including developing code to read large raw data sets, effective critical planning for the data I would collect, utilising LaTeX sites such as overleaf for effective report writing and collaborating with peers to present a lengthy report to a scientific audience.
"Understand. Don't memorize. Learn principles, not formulas."
Richard Feynman
On the theory side, I was introduced to the physicist toolkit of tackling problems. Later I delved into vector calculus and electromagnetism where I finally met Maxwells equations. I studied various branches of quantum physics developing skills with Dirac notation. In my final year I took condensed matter modules with hands on experience in Electronic Structure Theory. I wrote my own python code together with Bash and access to the Universities’ Cirrus which in turn allowed me to explore concepts such as plane wave basis sets and pseudopotentials using the open-sourced software Quantum Espresso.
Coding
My coding experience is not confined to what I learned at University (although there was plenty to offer). As well as fluency with physics backed python, I have coded in; C# (gaming ventures), HTML, CSS, SQL and machine learning data science backed python such as the statistics of ML, supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms & ensemble methods.
Dissertation
My dissertation was two combined modules, one which consisted of working with peers to produce a 40 page report, of which we chose the direction of the history of synthetic elements, the other module being my independent dissertation component. With access to the royal observatory and the Universities' Cuillin, similar to my EST module, I wrote combined python and slurm scripts through software (this time using Enzo) to explore metal enrichment mechanisms in dark matter halos.
See below list of modules taken.
