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.

Practical applications

From my class notes (given by the professor, not the ones I take):

"There are several fundamental limitations of [this approach] including accuracy of [the figures used for the entire set of calculations] and the length and time scale limitations that need to be considered in the context of specific simulations."

So basically, your underlying assumptions aren't accurate, and the calculations you do with them don't take into account practical reality. Way to go, method. You are truly a winner, and I hope we use you a lot in this class. Oh wait! We will.

From the same professor in class the other day, addressing the concerns of a chemist-turned-engineer (not me) about an approximation he made: "You're an engineer now. One percent error, this is okay. Ten percent is maybe a problem."

This is a rather different mindset for me. One of my other professors takes more points off for sign errors than for method errors, if your method error still got you to an answer similar to the right one. He told a story about a student a long time ago who got the whole process right but switched one sign and got the opposite of what he should have gotten. He marked the student almost completely off on the test question, and when the student complained, "But I understand the process! I just made this one careless error!" The professor's response was, "But you couldn't have made a bigger error!"

It's just a whole new world, this engineering thing.

A question of scale

I work in a nanotechnology center. One of the strange things about this is that sometimes I shake my fist at a paper I'm reading, declaring it useless because it only provides techniques for depositing micron-thick layers of a metal.

"Why is this useless?" my boyfriend asked, quite sensibly.

"Because a micron is gigantic," I said. (There are one million microns in a meter, for those of you not typically doing work on this length scale, which I bet is most of you.)

The best part is that it took me a while to figure out why this was funny. Because it's true! A micron is one hundred times bigger than what I want! It's like going to paint your nails and ending up with layers a few inches thick, or trying to wax the floor and ending up ankle-deep in floor wax. I work on the scale of 1-100 nanometers, by definition--so ten to one thousand times smaller than a micron. A micron is massive.

Well, back to the drawing board, I suppose. (I am, by the way, looking at techniques to do what I mentioned in my last entry, now with less palladium. It... might work.)

New research project, new considerations

It's always sad when you come up with the perfect solution to your lab problems, and then you realize that its implementation would involve widespread palladium poisoning among all consumers of convenience food (i.e., things that come in plastic wrap and can be heated in the microwave).

The technique is brilliant, though!