School on Crack

So, I've successfully survived three weeks of "pre-school"...technically called Pre Nuclear Power School (PNPS), the academic boot camp of sorts that we "non-technical" majors go through to prepare for real power school (which starts this week).

My good friend Mike Ross (soon to be a Navy man himself) recently referred to Nuke School as "school on crack," a not-unrealistic description: We all get to school around 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning, and most people don't leave until at least 6:00 at night; we go through about a semester's worth of material in three different subjects every 3-4 weeks, you're expected to memorize everything that normal schools will let you look up (like equation sheets for physics), everything is marked as "CONFIDENTIAL" or "NOFORN" (i.e. no foreigners...sort of a "confidential lite").

Still, it's not too hard. The material itself is actually relatively easy: at least in pre-school (and I'm told that also in "real" nuke school), they give you a simplified, "cookie-cutter" version of many topics. While some of the material is supposedly at a graduate level, you're often not expected to know the theory behind what you're doing--only how to solve the problem. Thus, whenever an instructor makes a statement and it's beyond the scope of the class to discuss why that statement is true, we all press our imaginary "I Believe" buttons. For example, in physics, at nuke school we don't use calculus to figure out magnetic and electric fields (oh, the fond hours we spent freshman year in the Lag dining hall working out E&M problems!)...they basically just give you Faraday's law and tell you to "believe."

The hard part about Nuke School is the timing: first, the pace is really fast (many people quip that nuke school is the mental equivalent of "drinking from a firehose and not being allowed to spill a drop"), and second, the hours are really long (especially since we're required to do mandatory "study hours" in addition to the regular 7:00 am to 4:00 pm class schedule...the standard load of 25 study hours means that one has a minimum 70-hour work week. This ain't college, where you can sleep in, miss classes, etc.).

But, on the bright side, the people are really cool, and I actually like most of our instructors. For example, one explained forces of nature thus: "The gravitational force is actually very weak. Let me prove it to you: There! I did not fall to the center of the earth!"

Another silliness: the galley (i.e. cafeteria) has a big sign on it that reads, "REFUELING CENTER."

Yeah, we're all dorks, but we're cool dorks.

Posted 19:23 PST