Hi everyone and apologies for the worddump, I'm not very good at writing things succinctly!
I'm an electrical engineering student in my honours (4th) year at Auckland Uni, and was lucky enough to be working for John Futter on the 100kV N implanter for the last 3 months (there's actually already a pretty unflattering pic of me on the forums in this thread: New equipment). I also spent last summer's work experience helping build an extended arc atmospheric plasma spray set, so that gave me a pretty good intro to high-current engineering and plasma physics, and that's pretty much the entirety of my job history right there! (I only turned 20 last thursday, so that's perhaps not too surprising)
I am (so far) interested in pretty much anything in the HV and high-current electrical engineering areas, and anything that comes roughly under the plasma physics umbrella. That list is likely to expand alarmingly in the next few years, because pretty much everything I've been exposed to so far I've found interesting. I'm still very much a newbie in all of this and as such my formal education physics itself is a bit limited, but I'm picking it up pretty quickly - I skipped first year entirely, then took a couple third year physics papers last year (quantum mechanics and particle physics & condensed matter) without meeting any prerequisites and passed them without any real difficulty. I'm aiming to go into a (physics) PhD next year, so figure it's a good idea to keep working on getting my head around all the relevant physics in particular that I've not yet come across.
I'm very keen to start building some of my own kit as my budget allows, and not only because I'm not paying for power where I'm flatting this year! I'm hoping that these forums will be a good source of inspiration for this, and give me a lot more exposure to people with a metric ton more experience than I have.
Outside of all that fun stuff, I'm also into SCUBA and freediving, skiing, tramping, and fishing, which makes for an interesting combination on a student's budget. I'm just starting to get back into shooting and music as well, since I had some pretty bad sensory nerve damage down my trigger-finger arm for the last 3 years or so that has only just started to come right properly in the last few weeks. Ironically, the first thing I felt in the ring finger of my right hand after 3 years was a wee zap from a 6kV supply! Well, that's probably enough about me anyway, I'm looking forward to spending some time around here.
Cheers, Elliot