Field Trip Program 2011: Fill & Download for Free

You A2A me.I have studied in UK, so I can't answer for USA.But I can help you with how exactly to determine if a course is good or bad and what to look for.What you must understand is that courses taught say in unies that rank from 100-1000 is almost exactly the same. Believe it or not. A good student in a uni ranked 1000th place is better than an average student in a 100th.Also there will be some random pack of good teachers and bad teachers and there is NOTHING you can really do about it.We had a structural guy who knew nothing about engineering, he made a steady 5-6 mistakes per lecture on the board. It is lucky that we had a very anal exchange student who noticed all his mistakes, but the lectures were a disaster. On the other hand we had a great soil mechanics lecturer (there wasn't a single question he couldn't answer) and we had an astonishing structures guy in the first year. And these 2 guys were as good at explaining as teachers in MIT or Imperial.What is the difference between a good university in UK and the top engineering university? - They require more from you. If it is a good uni, they will teach you and they will ask more or less the same - so if you do 4 years (say 20009, 2010, 2011, 2012) of exam papers and you understand them and you have been attending lectures and passed all your coursework - there is a 95-99% you will pass (if not even get a 2.1 of a 1st class) on the exam.In the top university this is not enough - they will require you TO THINK. They will give you tools, but it will be up to to you to come up with a solution. The problem you will face is a complete improvisation. If you are not prepared, smart and innovative - you will fail to solve the problem.The purpose of this university is not to teach you how to calculate deflections in a beam, any idiot can do that. They want YOU to be able to solve a "problem", and it doesn't matter what the problem is. They want to teach you how to SEARCH for a solution and have the knowledge and brains to make complex calculations.What to look for in a good course?You need to look for a lot of practice. There is NOTHING as valuable as practice in engineering. Yes, initial talent is required, but real experience really sorts out men from the boys and gives shit loads of confidence.So what do I mean by practice?Every engineering course will have field trips. We had 3 (to be honest most of my engineering knowledge was gathered in these field trips that were just 3 months total, as opposed to the Bachelor course that is more than 2 years long).So if your course doesn't have field trips - forget it, just walk away.But that's not enough. I had a solid course, but it wasn't good, and definitely not the best.What you need is CONSTANT practice, constant "field trips" so to speak. So you will feel that you learn AT THE SAME TIME to understand the difference between theory and practice and how to apply it in REAL life.The most basic question is this - at the end of the course ask yourself "can I design a simple building from ground up?" the answer should be "yes".I will tell you what the ideal course looks like: When I talked to some old engineers on site, one guy told me that he didn't have a degree, he was studying in the institute, at that time it wasn't as high level as university. But he said he had lectures for 4 months, then the next 4 months he worked, then had a break, then year 2.By the end of year 3 they were solid engineers who knew what to do from day 1, they didn't even require training.This is absolutely ideal - if you can find a course like that, grab it. Doesn't even matter if it's in the USA if it's not a top 100 university, believe me man - IT DOESN'T MATTER. India has shit tons of very good, solid engineers. And practice makes perfect.If you do really want to go to USA, you can do a masters there and applying after a course like that will be much easier, because you will ace all the interviews (guys who never worked on site know nothing, believe me).So look for a very strong emphasis on real life learning DURING the course, not after, not an "industry year", no - WHILE learning, and DURING the course.That's your best bet.P.S. also look at the lab facilities. There is a correlation between the quality of the degree and the quality of labs, strong labs attract many research students, and they are your "junior staff" on the course. So if there will be a lot of clever dudes teaching you tutorials, this will help a lot as well.Hope this helps,M

I worked as a physicist at the LHC between 2006 and 2011 (though I didn't live there continuously--- I travelled a lot). What I found remarkable is how few people living nearby even knew that something was going on. In conversations with people in town, like at the laundraumat, in cafés, or in a taxi, they often didn't know that there was a supercollider, though in one case, someone asked me if "that, that..." (spinning motion with his finger) is running yet, and in another case, someone told me that they refer to the cluster of buildings as the Loony Bin.I think the reason for this is because the LHC is entirely underground. There's no sign of it other than some street signs that say things like "LEP Point 5" (LEP was the previous collider; most of the signs haven't been updated), some industrial-looking physics buildings, and a big wooden globe. The globe is conspicuous, but it's not directly related to the work that happens there--- it's a kind of museum for presenting it to the public.By contrast, I now live near Fermilab, and a lot more local people seem to know what's going on there. But the differences are immediately visible: Fermilab is a big bubble of restored prairie land in the midst of suburbs with lots of weird-looking buildings and an above-ground accelerator (they heaped dirt over it for shielding, rather than digging underground). Also, Fermilab is open to the public and many people go running or biking there, whereas CERN requires an ID or someone with an ID to let you in. I'm not saying that one lab does a better job at outreach than the other--- they both work very hard at it--- but CERN is physically harder to notice because of its circumstances.That said, you can probably guess that there are no safety drills, and that's because there's nothing to be drilled about. Accelerators are not nuclear reactors--- there are no chain reactions to go critical, or any beams that could get out of the tunnel 100 meters underground, or anything else I can think of. The dangers associated with an accelerator only occur when a human is in the tunnel. For instance, if you're in there during a helium leak, you could run out of oxygen before you get back up to the ground level. If a big magnet quenches while you're down there, you could get hit by some very heavy equipment or a spark of high voltage. Strong magnets can turn nails into bullets. All of these dangers require you to be physically in the machine room to be harmful, which therefore has carefully controlled access--- not all physicists (myself included) have the safety clearance to be in there. Those that do have clearance have to take drills regularly.Also, the lights don't dim because the accelerator has its own electrical substation. The current needs to be very stable: if the current that goes into the magnets controlling the beam were on the same circuit as the current in people's lights at home, then you'd never be able to control the beam. Generally speaking, accelerators are affected by their environment (e.g. the TGV train passing by each day) because they are sensitive instruments, but they don't affect their environments much because they have to be so carefully isolated.Edit:I've decided to add some pictures to give a sense of what it's like at and around CERN. (These are pictures that I took on some of my trips.)This is what the outside looks like (Point 5):and this is what the inside looks like (same building, same time period--- 2006):Below is the building where the LHC was assembled. You can tell because it has a sign on it that says, "LHC":and because you can see the LHC magnets if you look in the window:On its own, it wasn't very conspicuous.The picture below is the Globe, which is an outreach center. Students on field trips go there, and for a while the French science program C'est Pas Sorcier was filming there.The Globe also made it into the Angels and Demons movie, though it was transplanted to Point 5 (the first picture, 5.4 miles away) by the film's special effects. Here's the inside below--- as you can see, it's a place to take school kids and show them a film strip:There are a few little oddities around the CERN campus to let you know that physicists work there:But most of the beam's 17 mile circumference is underground, under land that isn't clearly a part of CERN. Here's a typical scene above the beamline, taken from a moving car as we drove from the main CERN site to Point 5:It's not a very busy area. While I still worked there (2010), there was an exciting day when Geneva's city train system extended all the way out to Meyrin, where CERN is located. There was a big party over that, though it was also Escalade (a very fun holiday):

They made the choice to. It fits the Nordic model of their society better. Their society leans towards getting people back on their feet.US society, currently, has a punitive and authoritarian bent.It only takes one person with the desire and power to make changes. There actually are states making changes to their prison systems.North Dakota’s Norway Experiment“It was definitely one of those moments where you’re rethinking everything,” she recalls. “I had always thought that we run a good system. We’re decent. We don’t abuse people. We run safe facilities with good programs. It was just like, ‘How did we think it was okay to put human beings in cagelike settings?'”The Norway sojourn was the brainchild of Donald Specter, executive director of the Prison Law Office, a California public-interest law firm. In 2011, while visiting European prisons with a group of Maryland college students, Specter was struck by how profoundly the experience altered their views on incarceration. He decided to use some of the legal fees his office had won in its lawsuits against California prisons to bring state corrections chiefs, judges, and lawmakers on similar journeys.Scandinavian prisons tend to elicit eye rolls from law-and-order types weaned on the punitive American model. Yet a growing number of state corrections officials are coming to the realization that our approach is ineffective, costly, and cruel. Fred Patrick, director of the Center on Sentencing and Corrections at the Vera Institute of Justice, cites the nation’s staggering recidivism rate—77 percent of inmates released from state prisons are rearrested within five years. “Once you realize that this system isn’t working well,” he says, “it’s fairly easy to pivot to: ‘How do we do something different?'”That’s where Specter’s field trips come in. “To be so fricking optimistic that you think you can take some knuckle-dragging corrections guys like me over there and it’s going to change their perspective—you have to be a hippie to think that!” says Wetzel, who toured German prisons with Specter in 2013. But Specter’s ploy worked. “It really screws you up, because it changes you,” Wetzel adds. “I joke around with Don Specter. I’m like, ‘Fuck you, man! I can’t believe you did this shit to me!'”And so, when Bertsch and Jackson returned home, it was with a radical new goal: “to implement our humanity.”