You know you're a first year grad student when...

...you're still really kind of starstruck when the author of a whole ton of papers you read over the summer (whose name you searched on to find all the most useful and well-written articles for your thesis) calls you to ask a few questions about your research.

That sounds far more interesting than it is--the reason he was calling me was that he was processing my order from his start-up company that spun off from his research. He had just synthesized the particles I needed and wanted to know things like what solvent to put them in, and then we got to talking about what I was doing with them.

We had a somewhat awkward exchange when he asked me if I'd ever seen any of the IR spectra of the particles, and I told him yes, I'd seen them in some of the papers published about them. He said, "Oh, I hope you weren't reading my papers," in that sort of self-deprecatory way. While I didn't quite admit that I've read everything he's authored or coauthored in academic journals in the last ten years, I did tell him I'd definitely read some of his work. ("Good!" he said. "Well, I hope that's good, anyway.")

Also, he told me to call or email if I ever had any questions, and that he'd send me as much of the stuff I ordered as possible, since I wasn't authorized to spend any more money and he was concerned about my not having enough. (I'm concerned, too. I don't think I'm going to get usable results out of this stuff I've been setting all my hopes on for four months. But that's neither here nor there.)

He gave me some reassurances that life gets better than being a first-year grad student and generally left me feeling good about the world, which was nice after a long day of being irritated with it.