Some things I have noticed lately

A lot of the resources at TS are sort of unhelpful. I know I'm comparing them too much to my old school, but still:

At the stockroom, I can't go in and find the things I want--I have to ask. The full-time employee working there knows nothing about chemistry and the extent of his training seems to have been in how to look up account numbers. He's cheerfully helpful, but if you ask him for something you'd better be prepared to have him wander around looking for things, offering you 12 variations on what you want until you get it right, and debating what he can and cannot sell you. It also takes ten minutes to get rung up on a simple order... and that's after the fifteen minutes to find what you need. Sigh. I like the guy, and none of this is his fault--it just seems weird that this level of training and expertise is all we can manage. Having an efficient and knowledgable stockroom manager is extremely useful.

I need to get into and out of a lab I don't have a key to. This is the second time this has happened. Both times my advisor and labmates suggested a number of ways I could get access to it--borrowing someone's key, borrowing the master key, etc. I'm planning on doing what I did last time, which was to go to the department secretary and ask to be assigned a key for the room. She never asks questions, and I don't have to ask for access. I'm not sure why nobody else thinks to do this. I guess you could say I'm taking a key someone else might need eventually, but if it's there it's obviously not being used yet, and I feel okay making my life easier. (Now watch all my keys get stolen so I have to pay for them all.)

Lastly, I need to type less. Ow.

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!

Lab group culture

Over a month has passed, and I've slowly settled into my lab (slowly being the important word there). The adjustment to any new lab is sort of difficult--you have to learn how everything runs, what materials or equipment are for general use and what you should get for yourself, what space is "yours" and what is just space you're allowed to use when it's free, whom you should talk to in order to get what you need, etc. Then you add in the transition from a small liberal arts school to a larger tech school, then the transition from undergrad to grad, then the fact that the person whose work I'm taking over is gone, then the fact that it's summer and thus I didn't get a great introduction to the school to begin with, and it gets even more complicated.

It's an interesting change, going from my lab group there to my lab group here. My undergrad lab group did have one person who'd worked for the department the summer between his second and third years, but other than that, we were all essentially on the same footing and seniority level in the lab. We all settled into our workspace at the beginning of the schoolyear and all cleared out together in May. We asked each other questions, but we were generally all equally clueless.

Here, coming in clueless when everyone's got their own independent work, well, it's definitely different. Unsurprisingly, it's intimidating to be the new girl, and confusing. The fact that I arrived at a time when nobody was really expecting anyone new to show up sort of makes that worse, though I'm sure it'd be disorienting anyway. But at the same time, I think everyone remembers what it was like to start grad school, and when I get up the nerve to talk to them, they're usually quite helpful.

Something about everyone all having different expertises and different levels of experience helps in encouraging people to do favors for each other. Okay, I think I get the whole utility of a lab group, now.

Not that the department at TS is really terribly friendly outside of lab. A guy I knew from high school is in this research center, too; we share an advisor, though he's technically in a different academic department. He got here a year before me. I ran into him today and expressed my slight distress that I haven't made a single new friend here, other than being introduced to a few friends of an old friend of mine. He told me he hasn't made any friends since he moved here a year ago, either. That's encouraging in that I know it's not just me, and incredibly disheartening for my future prospects.

Oh, well. At least three people in my group know my name now! I have people I can ask my pesky questions about how TS and this department run.

-Jenn-

Achilles overtaking his future

I feel like I'm always planning ahead to the next step, never quite fixed in the moment. I'm an ambitious planner, so it fits me. Right now is no exception.

I'm planning on spending only one year at TS, to get my MS, and then moving down to one of those hot and humid states to study chemistry again, for my PhD this time. Weirdly enough, it works, although the environment will be very different--going from a small department at a 6000-person school to one of the biggest chemistry departments in the country. I'm excited about the research being done, and I'm excited about moving to said hot & humid state because, well, I'm moving in part to be closer to someone.

The program is good; it requires some teaching, which is good for me (I've been sort of bemoaning the fact that I probably wouldn't teach at TS), the research is nifty, the funding is pretty good, and it looks like it wouldn't take me forever to get my degree if my research goes well (such a big if).

So life is good. And I am constantly planning.

Anticipating the future is most of what I do with my head. My biggest fear, I think, is losing the sense of connectedness between moments but not the ability to anticipate. The idea of being stranded forever in a moment that's just before another one, locked there and unable to move forward or backward, knowing other moments exist but I am solidly here & now forever for the purposes of my own consciousness--that's just terrifying.

I experienced this, for a while, once when I'd been sleeping three hours a night and stressed out of my mind for a few months. It was just as scary as I'd always thought it would be, of course, and now that I've come in and out of that experience it's simply focused the fear.

I think about it most when walking to someplace I've never been before. Specifically, it always comes to me when I'm walking down the jetway to an airplane. What if I come loose now, and this version of my conscious mind never gets there? Because I fly alone, getting on a plane is usually sort of a lonely process, and one I don't like much, so the recurring idea of being stuck there is probably a product of that feeling, my strange fear, and having not much else to think about on the way down the jetway besides practicalities: Will there be someone in the seat next to me? Will a kid be kicking my seat the whole way? Will there be space for my bag above the seat?

Thinking all of these things and realizing simultaneously that they are totally mundane and that they are really the only real questions I have about the universe at the moment--I don't tend to think about planes crashing or why I'm taking this trip or anything big like that--underscores the strangeness of going somewhere or doing something with only anticipation on the brain. The fact that the thoughts aren't big, life-changing ones means there's room to worry about, say, becoming unstuck in continuity and spending the rest of my conscious life in this spot, then the rest of another life one inch closer to the plane, and so on, never actually having a sense of having gotten there.

So yeah. That's what I was thinking about a couple of days ago.

Does anyone else have fears or thoughts like this? Do you think about them often, just when you don't have anything better to worry about, or in response to specific parts of your life?

-Jenn-