Prof Schulz,

Good to hear from you, as always. Thanks for sending the newsletter. I love hearing how everyone's doing. With the first full year over, I can look forward to the qualifying exams this January (yikes!). My summer started slow and is now moving /way/ too fast! My sister crashed on my couch for most of the summer and my mom was also out here for a couple of days to visit.
Summer research began with a lot of paper reading and attempting to teach myself a little C++, ROOT, and Linux. I now have a project writing some code for sorting coincidence data from a segmented Ge detector in order to be able to make position-sensitive measurements of incident and Compton-scattered gammas. Tomorrow the group is leaving for a couple of workshops and an experiment at Argonne. I'm excited to be more involved in running experiments than I was when I was there as an intern.
I've kept up with the ballroom dancing and hope to be competing with the school's ballroom club in the fall. Classes in the upcoming semester will be Quantum, E&M, and Nuclear. I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep up with the research during this semester with classes, TAing, and qual exam studying-but we'll see how that goes.

Emily

8/6/2009