Leveling Up

I've been slacking since the end of May. It was a real crunch point while I finished my Master's thesis and took PhD qualifying exams, and I don't think anybody can fault me for taking it easy for a while after I finished those things.

But life needs to move on now. It's been six weeks, and that is enough for me to completely unwind and recuperate. I've taken vacation to see my family, I've wandered around doing sightseeing I've always meant to do, I've read books for pleasure, I've done a bit of physical labor, and I've gotten in the habit of cooking delicious healthy meals. I'm ready to work again.

And I have the feeling I need to "level up" in my academic life.

As I listen to my labmates, and talk with my officemates, I'm realizing that there really is another level required of me for PhD work (as opposed to a Master's). I remember having this same realization as I moved through each point in my life - from highschool to community college, from community college to undergrad university, and then when I moved from a bachelor's to a Master's. At each point there is this feeling that the bar has shifted. Up. By a lot.

This bar-shifting used to really bother me - I would think, have I not done ENOUGH? Why is now MORE being required of me? Will I ever get to the point where I don't have to work so HARD anymore? Is what I do NEVER good enough?

But I think that line of thought just leads to bitterness with life. Perhaps I'm getting wiser (or just older), but I now realize this higher standard in each stage of life is not to point out my shortcomings, but allow me opportunities to grow as a person.

I don't know how to accomplish this, really. I can't just tell myself "Okay, GROW!" But I have to take a stab and start somewhere. So here are some of the things I need to start doing:

1. Start working again (not so much a part of "leveling up", but just because I can't slack off forever....)
2. Write down the long-term research goals I have, so I don't lose sight of those in day to day experiments.
3. Get myself current in reading literature (I haven't read any new papers in my field since last December when I did the lit review for my thesis)
4. Set up an RSS feed of new papers, so that I stay current from here on out.
5. Think about what I want to do for the PhD, and start a list of possible projects.
6. Gather initial research/literature on a few of my favorite possible PhD projects, to start narrowing down the list.
7. Network and get to know other people working in my field here at World's Best School. (This is actually a grave error on my part - since I've been here two years I should know the other labs working in my field, but I haven't ventured outside my own lab. Shameful, and needs to be remedied right away).
8. Work on getting out a journal paper or two. (I'm second author on one in progress, but I should be able to publish a first-author paper using the material in my thesis).
9. Start thinking on higher-level terms (see what I did there - ha!). Look for the bigger picture, and try to see how my work can contribute to the grand scheme of the whole field.
10. Stop checking email and Google Reader and Facebook and the news so flippin' often! Seriously. Such a time sink.

Ready? Set? Level UP!

Going Flying

Miss Outlier gets to fly tomorrow! In a Cessna 402 (I think?), which is a little propellor plane, a short hop over to Lake Placid in New York. We're staying the night and coming back on Saturday. I am thrilled. This was my view last fall, the last time I got to fly in this plane:



I didn't get to touch the controls last time, but my pilot is a sweetheart so maybe this time?

Yay flying!

Professors Pushing Papers

Different PIs can have different lab styles. I was fortunate to find an advisor that works in a way I really like - he keeps a small lab, lets his students be independent and creative, provides help only when asked, and focuses on the research rather than pushing out papers. He doesn't care when I work or when I take vacation, and focuses on long-term deadlines and progress. On the downside, I don't get much feedback on my work this way. He doesn't correct me unless I really screwed something up, and I don't get praise unless I've been exceptional. But I'm okay with that.

I have officemates who work for another professor who is completely different - their professor has twice as many students, likes to be involved with all the details of the research, regularly asks for things to be done ASAP, and doesn't hesitate to ask students to come in on weekends or stay into the night to finish last-minute projects. This professor does really cool stuff, so his students don't mind the extra pressure to turn out hot science.

This other professor recently sent out an email to his students (my officemates) which is now infamous in the office.

The email requests all students to prepare three papers to publish. By the end of the summer.

The rationale provided was that the lab has not been publishing papers over the last year. By focusing on only the research, says the professor, no papers were getting written. But by pushing the papers, the professor thinks, it sort of automatically pushes the research as well, because you need research to have results with which to write a paper.

Oh, yeah this is not going to work out well.

The professor seems to have forgotten the L-O-N-G time lag that goes between doing hot science and publishing the paper. Without experiments in the pipeline, what does he expect the three papers (EACH student, mind you) to be about?

But I think actually this is standard practice for most of the labs I know. It's quite common for the PI to require or expect a certain number of papers per year from his students, and then the students design experiements and structure their efforts to work towards that. If the students know about this structure up front, it can be very effective. It's a little tough to spring all of a sudden, as my officemates are discovering. :)

Any thoughts from the blogosphere on whether PIs should push for papers, or stress the research directly and let the papers fall out naturally? Perhaps it depends on the tenure status of the PI?

Keeping Alive That 'Network' Thingie

Hope you all had a lovely 4th! I ate good food and hung out with friends, watched fireworks and got sunburned. I mean really, what else do you want from a holiday?

When I got back to the office today, I had an email pop up from an unexpected email address - my boss from my last internship. He was just checking in, saying hello and wishing me the best in grad school. He said the guys in the office would be happy to get an update from me, and - AND - I quote: "In fact, if you ever have an interest in getting back into the [cool engineering type] industry, I am sure that we would all beat a path to your door!"

How cool is that? Not only do my coworkers remember me, they apparently have forgiven the explosion in my test setup and still want to keep in touch! :) (See below for a picture of the kind of thing I worked on that summer. I lit one with a mixture too rich in hydrogen. Fun times.)



Well, ego boost aside, I realized that this is classic networking.

So many engineers I know dismiss the concept of networking as something the business people focus on, as a waste of time. We engineers are not built for mingling - receptions with appetizers and chit chat and rubbing elbows just generally makes an engineer's toes curl.

But I've tried to avoid falling into that trap. All the internships I've gotten have come through people I know, my advisors in undergrad and grad school have been through personal connections, and I've had a couple really neat collaborations through people I've met through introductions.

Although I know they are sometimes necessary, I still don't really enjoy attending meet-and-greet type events. But I tolerate them.

And I can at the very least return emails from old coworkers, and keep that part of my network alive. Never know when it might come in handy. I may want to blow things up for a living one day, and it's good to know I have someone to call!

Mad Circular Saw Skilz

Today I completely blew the socks off a couple guys I know who underestimated me.

I love doing that. :)

Over the years I've come to learn about myself that if I don't do any physical labor for a while, I get antsy. Last week while I was away on vacation, I spent one morning working on my grandparent's farm. That felt good, but one morning doesn't really count, that's just a tease.

So I was itching to do some real work and get something tangible accomplished. A couple of my friends own a house nearby - they bought it as a fixer-upper and are now renovating it. I asked if they could use an extra hand with construction, and they said that more workers were always welcome. (I mean really, when would help not be welcome?)

Since today was a school holiday, I took the opportunity to work on the house with the guys. I showed up with nothing but my sunglasses and asked what I could do to help, and I could just see their brains working: "Okay, now what small task can we give her that she will be able to handle?" One of the guys was working on framing some walls, the other was working on air vents in the attic/roof area. They looked at each other, and I was afraid for a moment they were just going to have me hand them nails or something silly. Not that I'm a bad nail-and-tool-holder-and-hander-overer, I was just hoping for something more interesting....

As they looked around, scanning for a project for me, I saw a lightbulb go off for one of them. "Oh!" he said, "We need insulation done!" The other boy nodded vigorously, and I saw the thought processes whirr: "Okay, she should be able to handle this, the insulation just has to be stuffed inbetween the two by fours, and everything's already cut to the right size."

Well fine, I'll start with that.

I finished putting insulation in the walls of the back bedroom within a half hour, and I inquired about a staple gun or nail gun or something to attach the insulation to the joists. They let me have the stapler, but I saw the worried glances pass between them as I walked off with it.

I came back a half hour later with all fingers still intact, so there was a sigh of relief. But then an awkward pause: what shall we give her now?

Over the course of the afternoon as I proved myself I worked on more and more interesting jobs - I cut and trimmed pink foam insulation to fit in some tricky areas, I measured and cut two by fours for framing, I nailed in some dividers necessary to conform to the fire code.

By the end of the day, I had used such things as a tape measure, hammer, box knife, stapler, T-square, chop saw, circular saw, pneumatic nail gun. For each new tool I reached for, I was anxiously questioned: "Do you know how to do that? Have you used one of those before? Do you need me to show you how to run that?"

Answers being yes, yes, and no but thank you. Mostly I knew what I was doing. I needed a little help reloading the nail gun, but that was it. By the end of the day, they pretty much left me alone.

The guys bought me dinner to thank me for helping, and the day was pretty well summed up as we sat around the table in this comment:

"My god, woman, where did you come up with those circular saw skills?"

:) I'm an outlier, what can I say?

A New Skill - SEM Photos

I have recently added a new skill to my arsenal of hot science - the ability to take SEM (scanning electron microscope) pictures. For my non-science people, this is different from a microscope (uses light to see an object) or a profilometer (measures the surface profile of an object by actually touching it). An SEM provides an image of an object by measuring the backscatter of electrons beamed at the surface.

So for my M.S. I designed and built a machine that makes plastic parts, called microfluidic devices (the buzzword is lab-on-a-chip, because these microfluidic devices condense chemical and biological processes onto a tiny plastic chip). These little chips are about an inch by and inch and a half, and the pattern on the chip has dimensions about the size as a human hair.

I took one of the plastic parts that my machine produces and brought it over to the SEM machine, and had a friend show me how to use it. The part has the following pattern on it:



On the actual part, it looks like the following (I can't get a shot of the whole thing at once, unfortunately):







Since I work in a manufacturing lab, I am interested in quality and consistency over large runs of parts. So to test my machine, I make a bunch of parts and measure them all at the same spots on each part. Here are the spots I measure (I really measure eight spots, but these are the important three):



And so I figured I probably want to have pictures of those spots, not just data and x-y-z-coordinates. You need pretty pictures for papers and presentations, you know. :)

So here are pictures of measurement sites 1 and 2:





Although I tried to keep these parts clean, I didn't quite succeed. Note the big black spot on the above picture - whoops. Or here is a square with foreign material in it - possible skin cells, dust, what have you. Next time I will do better at keeping my part clean before I take pictures.



And just for fun, the Swiss flag:



Oh, okay, it's just a fiducial, not the Swiss flag...

Next time I'm putting "Miss Outlier" on the part somewhere so I get my name in teeny tiny letters. :)

Vacation!

In keeping with my last post, this past week I took vacation from being online to travel for my family's annual reunion and to see college friends. It was awesome! I will be back to regularly scheduled posting shortly.

I may also post some pictures and tell stories from vacation - I have to wait until I can get my hands on pictures from the trip!