List of the Day

Or of the remainder of the weekend, rather. I spent today doing silly things like napping to make up for my sleep-deprivation during the weekdays, so...gotta compensate.

• Marking. Doing this right now, shouldn't take long assuming that I don't start tearing my hair out in frustration or something.
• Prelabs. Easy but "urgent", since students can't do labs without having completed prelabs.
• Organic lab report. Long. Tedious. But necessary. And not too difficult, from a cursory glance.
• Interview preparation. Number 2 of my two interviews - the job has a research component in it; I hope the interview goes well.
• Inorganic midterm review. Thus far, the material is incredibly straightforward; finding unit cells can be tricky but most of the rest is first/second-year review. Or perhaps I am just wildly overoptimistic.
• Inorganic lab report. I am actually really looking forward to writing this report, but it's not due until Wednesday so it will have to wait.
• QIP. Another tough assignment, it looks like, and I haven't started it yet. Not a good idea, I know.
• Computational chem lab report. A trivial report, it needs probably 1 - 2 hours from me.
• Group theory assignment. I am not sure what some of the notation meant, so I'll have to ask on Monday.
• Kinetics assignment. Haven't really looked very hard at it, but I don't think the lectures have covered all the material the assignment requires yet.
• Nanomaterials. Need to look for papers. And read them. And, y'know, actually figure out what the heck they are saying.
• Computational chemistry proposal. I have to re-evaluate my current idea a bit because right now, one molecule takes a bit too long to run*. This is not practical when one can't just submit a batch job to a server or something and get the results the next day. (Basically we have the software installed on a network, running on individual PCs. No supercomputers or clusters for us students!)
• Mundane things. Laundry. Cooking. Trivial but nevertheless necessary.

Oh, and I need to pick up my suit from dry cleaning on Monday. (It'd be a terrible item to forget, since my interview is on Tuesday...)

*I probably should re-evaluate my basis set for geometry optimizations. AM1 took 10 seconds, HF 3-21G took 10 minutes, HF 6-31G* took long enough for me to kill the job so I can go home (I kind of need the polarization though.). The smart thing to do would be to use a large basis set** for single-point energy calculations, but nobody ever accused me of being smart *cough*. The optimized molecules are pretty, though. I should get to campus early on Monday so I can run a few more calculations...
**Not sure whether I should use DFT. Being new to this sort of thing, "what's a good method/set to use" is really rather arbitrary.