This is just a quick update from my graduate studies. In the middle of March, I was able to attend the 2017 APS March Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana; this is the first conference that I have attended in any capacity. I had a ton of fun being able to travel there and meet with old friends, collaborators whom I had not yet met in person, and other people that I didn't know but who have been working on similar things to me; it was great being able to discuss interesting potential project ideas with them. Going to many talks was also cool, giving me a good sense of the state of my field and the sort of work that other people are doing, though in many respects, I honestly feel like I learned more just from talking with people at length in more informal settings. Finally, the highlight for me was getting to present my own work and seeing the interest that many people took in it: I was presenting a semiclassical electromagnetics approach to van der Waals interactions between molecules and larger bodies in a session dominated by density functional and atomistic long-range many-body approaches to van der Waals interactions solely in [large] molecular systems, so I was truly gratified to see that members of the audience saw value and significance in what I've been doing, especially given how different my talk was from those that came before and after it in that session. Overall, I had an amazing time, and I hope to be able to attend other conferences, both similar to this as well as more specific to my research, during my remaining time in graduate school.
