I just saw on the USC news site that DJ Strouse, one of our excellent current physics majors, has been selected as one of 14 students in the USA to get a Churchill Scholarship this year! He is the first USC student to get one, actually. DJ is one of those students who reminds you why teaching is such a delight. He engages with the material in class and beyond, exploring it extensively on his own, and quickly tries to use new knowledge to learn and uncover even more. He’s full of ideas, and I’m happy to see that he has already learned to look broadly and savour not just his field of endeavour, but many others as well*. Check out his blog, where you’ll find his musings on physics, neuroscience, mathematics, and more. He’s going to have a great time at Cambridge’s DAMTP, I suspect! Read more here.
Oh, some of you interested in online collaboration tools might be interested in CoLab, a project that DJ and Casey Stark (another excellent recent student* from USC Physics, and with a great blog (with awesome title) too!) have been working on for a while now.
Congratulations DJ!
-cvj
*It’s ok… Neither of them are silly enough to get all self-important over a few nice words, and they’re probably out doing fun interesting things, not reading my weekend blog posts…
Congratulations! As a former Churchill Scholar 2009-2010, I can say with confidence that the program is fantastic, the scholarship director takes a serious personal interest in every one of the students, and spending a year at DAMTP getting one’s proverbial butt kicked by Stephen Hawking’s former students is an excellent way to spend a gap year 🙂
🙂
Awesome! I’m a big fan of secret projects! Get in touch when ready.
-cvj
“fun interesting things, not reading my weekend blog posts”
Nope. And maybe the blog is an interesting part of my weekend.
Thanks for the shoutout. I have another web project you might like coming up, but I can’t discuss it just yet.