How to Schedule A Committee Meeting

I have all three confirmed members on my committee - woohoo! Now I'm scheduling my first PhD committee meeting. I had always heard older grad students complaining about how hard it was to schedule a committee meeting, and I always kind of laughed it off. I mean, how hard can it be? It's three people, for a short time, once every six months. Get over it.

However.

Turns out it's difficult.

Now I only have three people on my committee, so I'm already starting off at an advantage. I've known people with up to five, and that just becomes a nightmare (or, "exponentially more difficult", if you're talking to a techie crowd...).

You start with available blocks of time from 9-5 Monday through Friday. The first order of business is to look up the professors' teaching schedules for the semester. Can't meet during class times, obviously. Then you put in your own class schedule. Then take out lunch hour. Now what are you left with? That's your first iteration of possible meeting times. Of course professors are all busy, but I can't predict what other commitments they have.

Now decision #1 - how much time do you leave for a committee meeting? Is it normally an hour? Two hours? I knew one student who spent three hours in a committee meeting - ack! I wasn't sure, so I polled some older students. I decided that I would try to schedule a one-hour block, and then expect it might go over to an hour and a half or so.

Next, decision #2 - do you email all three professors at once, or separately? I guess if you had different things to say to each one, you'd do it separately. Since I only had three professors, I did single emails, so that they wouldn't each have to be privy to an entire thread of back-and-forths between all of them.

Decision #3 - do you suggest meeting times? If so, how many options do you give? Or do you just ask, "when are you free?" Or, try the Doodle route? I absolutely love doodle as a scheduling tool, and a lot of people use it here for social scheduling or club meetings, and other informal stuff. But I know one student who asked his professors to fill out a doodle, and one of his (older) committee members got all bent out of shape about it. Felt that it was rude or unacceptable for him to display his entire schedule to the student and other professors. I suspect that is an outlier experience, but still... I suggested a block of time on four different days, and asked if the professors had any time free in the blocks I indicated. We shall see how that goes.

Decision #4 - how much lead time? It's rude to ask about next week. I want it to be soon, not in three months. I went with a three week lead time, for no good reason except that it seemed reasonable.

So I am quite sure that I WAY overthought a simple email for scheduling. I just didn't want to say anything wrong. I know my own advisor, but I'm kind of in awe of the other professors, and I want to make a good impression. The good news is, I don't think I can do anything to terribly mess anything up, so no matter what I choose, it's probably fine.

How did you schedule your meetings?

LaserCut Gingerbread, Or: "What If" is a Dangerous Question

Right before Christmas last year, I was baking gingerbread. I invited a friend over to help eat the cookies (otherwise I'd eat them all myself, and goodness knows with all the other holiday sweets around I didn't need THAT). Then he asked that tantalizing, juicy question: "Miss Outlier, I wonder if...."

He didn't know that "What if" is catnip to engineers, and curious individuals like me will jump on it. Or, you know, maybe he did. :)

He proceeded to explain that you can actually laser cut gingerbread, and, well, obviously. We should try it. Did I mention that I PARTICULARLY love it when I have the correct tools to pursue the "What if...." in question?

Figure: Enter the laser cutter. I swear I use this for research. Sometimes.

So as I was making cookies, I made some extra large sheets for lasercutting purposes. Had to make a few  sheets, of course, because I expected I'd ruin some with experimenting/prototyping. There aren't settings for "cookie" in my laser cutter manual...

Figure: Stock for the project.

I was still stuck on snowflakes, and I had a bunch of files for ornament shapes, so that's what I went with. After a few trials, I got the settings right.

Figure: Snowflake! Gingerbread!

I kept the fire extinguisher handy - because the danger with flammable materials in the laser cutter is, well, things can catch on fire. Would not look good on the safety rep's record. :)

But luckily, all was well!

Figure: Aw, how cute.

And because this was in my lab, it just seemed appropriate that when I finished making parts I stored them in a petri dish.

Figure: And of course, I labeled the dish with the date and experiment number.

I discovered that my stock was not really the optimum shape - see below, I accidentally cut off a corner. Whoops!

But I did end up with an assortment of finished gingerbread snowflakes, which I was pretty pleased with.

The whole lab smelled good after I was done - because the laser was essentially toasting the cookies, so it smelled like they just came out of the oven! Made me hungry, actually. So in the spirit of research, my friend and I tried munching on the leftover scraps.

Figure: He's smiling here, but that's because he hasn't take a bite yet.

The verdict: terrible. The fumes or something from the laser gets into the material. Not good for eating. Oh well, that's what the rest of the batch of cookies was for!

Figure: This is how you take the photo when you want it to look like cool research. Lots of shiny silver bits in the background.

The funniest part was when I was relaying this story to a non-engineering friend, expecting the response of "oh, how cool! awesome, Miss Outlier!" But instead, my friend wrinkled her nose, looked at my little snowflakes, and pronounced, "You know, I have a cookie cutter shaped like a snowflake. You could have just used that."

True, true, that's a viable option. Logical, even. But really? A cookie cutter? Missing the point. LASERS, girl, lasers!

On the Subject of Safety

One of the things I do as the senior member of the lab, in addition to my clean-up afternoon decrees, is deal with all safety issues. (Don't worry, there's only three of us in my lab, so that keeps me from getting too carried away with power...) I'm the official Safety Representative, so I have to make sure we have all chemicals in proper storage, all equipment maintained to code (hello fume hood inspections), and all members of the lab are current on their safety training. I try to keep things like this from happening. :)

I actually was required to go through some training to be the safety rep - it took an entire afternoon of sitting through presentations. Yech. Important stuff, I know, but BORING.

I also have to report the status of the lab's hazards every year to the central safety office, and turn in an annual chemical report so the government can keep track of what nasty things are where. Fortunately, I'm in a mechanical lab, so the chemical hazards are nearly nonexistent. Acetone, anyone? Isopropyl? Yeah, nobody cares.

Much more hazardous are the mechanical things we have. We own a plasma treater, which creates a plasma field for processing polymers. We have a laser cutter. We build a lot of our own equipment with high voltages (AC and DC) and large currents. For a while we had a undergrad investigating flame treatment, which involved a setup to test a nice assortment of flammable materials and gases. And we have a very powerful scara robot arm, which can take your head off if it goes wild.

Figure: Talk to the arm.

Most of the time I adhere to all rules, and try to be a good little safety officer. In fact, we had a random safety inspection one day (I wasn't even in the office at the time), and they found exactly zero issues to report.

But then sometimes, things aren't exactly on the straight and narrow.

That plasma treater? Yeah, we bought it off of eBay, and it looks to be about from the 80s. The "on" switch didn't work, so one student (before my time) just attached a 9V battery and an alligator clip that you connect when you want to fire it up.

And the robot? Well, we installed a fancy laser-triggered barrier to cordon off the area with the arm, so that the robot automatically shuts off if the laser is crossed. The problem is that the barrier is quite far from the robot, so you can't see very well from outside the barrier. So most of the time I will just stand inside the barrier and avoid triggering the laser while the robot is running. (Ah lovely, now the barrier is trapping me INSIDE... that can't be good...)

Because we use things like acetone, IPA, and ethanol so often, we have squeeze bottles of those chemicals left out on the counter (in appropriate secondary containment, of course). We also use methanol, and there's a squeeze bottle of that too. But just yesterday, someone pointed out that technically, methanol is only supposed to be used with gloves under a fume hood... whoops.

Fortunately, there's never been a serious accident in my lab since I've been here. A scrape or two in the machine shop is the worst that goes on. But just yesterday, I was working on a silicon wafer, and while I was prying it out of my setup, it broke and splashed the ethanol I was rinsing it with into my eyes. Ouch! Fortunately I'm fine, but it's a good reminder that bad things can indeed happen if you are lazy.

Figure: Safety goggles, Miss Outlier, it's not hard - just wear them...

Do you have someone designated in your lab to deal with safety stuff? If you had to grade your lab, would you give yourself an A for safety?

Your Brain On Science

One of the cool things about living in Boston (which is FULL of research universities already) and being surrounded by research at World's Best School, is that there are always opportunities to learn and participate in cool science. Sometimes it's a simple as attending seminars. But I also think it's fun to participate in research studies.

Figure: xkcd, as always, hits the nail on the head

There are ALWAYS flyers up in the halls asking for people to join experiments. It's actually not worth my time to volunteer, but if it pays at least $20 an hour, hey I'm game! In addition to flyers in the hall, the Behavioral Research Lab needs so many guinea pigs that they have their own website to handle all the studies.

I have participated in studies on gambling, teamwork, judging people and products, and negotiation. I got to user-test a system for controlling robotic arms on the space station. Those are all fairly little studies, that only take an hour, or maybe a handful of hours over several days. Of course I'm also in a big long-term medical study that tracks the effect of calories on your health over two years.

But I have to tell you about my absolute favorite study - a depth perception study.

The purpose of the study is to understand how the brain processes images to determine depth. Apparently, your brain uses all sorts of clues to estimate depth in your surroundings. The most obvious, and common, is that your brain compares the images from your two eyes, and interprets the difference between the images as depth. That's why when you close one eye, you can't tell depth as well. But that's not the only way your brain works - it also uses shadowing, for example, and vanishing-point perspective. 

The researchers want to figure out what the brain is doing, and then use that to help people who either a) only have one eye providing data to the brain (due to injury or very poor/lopsided eyesight), or b) have trouble with depth perception because their brain isn't processing normally.

I've gone to three sessions for this study. For the first one, I looked at images on a screen, and pressed buttons corresponding to what I saw. I also had to do things like thread needles and assemble parts with one eye closed.

On the second trip, I got to look at the same images, but inside an MRI machine! So the researchers can see what parts of the brain light up when looking at images with and without depth. And the coolest part? They printed me a picture of my brain.

Figure: Behold! Miss Outlier's brain. A lot of time, money, and schooling went into this...

And then six months later, I came back and did the same thing (to replicate the data - make sure my brain hadn't changed between then and now...). I told them that since it's Winter Break, it's entirely possible that my brain is on vacation, so if they see any discrepancies, they could attribute the change to that!

And I got another picture.

Figure: Miss Outlier's brain, round 2.

How many people get paid to take an MRI of their brain? How many people EVER get to see their brain? That is AWESOME!

The lady did worry me a bit when she gave me this latest printout, though. She looked at me worriedly and said, "Well I'm not supposed to tell subjects this...." Oh no, I thought, they found something terrible like a tumor up there. "But you have really defined folds in your brain." she continued, and then looked at me expectantly.

Huh? Is that bad? What is your brain SUPPOSED to look like? Doesn't that just mean I sat really still?

With a little more prodding, it turns out that apparently a lot of people's brains look more blurry or fuzzy than mine does. The researcher made it sound like mine was abnormally good.

I don't know how to read MRIs, of course, so I have no idea. But somehow I'm not surprised I'm abnormal. I'm an outlier, right? :)

Have you ever participated in a research study? (And P.S., if you have any idea what the brain is supposed to look like, do speak up in the comments. :))

Dinner Club, One Year Anniversary

There are some things that you are not supposed to do just by yourself. Things like watching a movie at the theater, going to Disneyland, going to Las Vegas, or eating out at restaurants.

Some things I do by myself anyway (um, do you realize how EASY it is to find just ONE seat at the movies? I get prime viewing every time!). For some things, like traveling, I will wait until plans with friends fall into place. And for some things, well, I try to make them happen.

Such was the case with Dinner Club. I wanted to eat, at cool places in Boston, with friends.

Well, why not? With a nod to my family's infamous motto, "How hard can it be?", the monthly dinner outing was born. The first outing was last January, to an Ethiopian restaurant.

I am pleased to note that tonight, we are heading out for the Jan 2011 outing, a full year later. We've gone eleven times so far (only one month did we have to cancel). We've been to places that serve French Cambodian, Italian, Indian French, Tapas, Shabu-Shabu, and Brazilian food. I think next month will be Turkish.

The original email list has grown from just my friends, to friends of friends, and significant others of friends, and new labmates, and new classmates, and whoever else was interested. Instead of me having to come up with new places each month, now I just pick from all the suggestions. Instead of being limited by getting enough people to come, now we are limited by how many the restaurant can take for reservations.

You know, I've been quite involved with student life at my time here at World's Best School. I've been the RA for a graduate dorm, the RA for an undergrad dorm, spent two years as an officer in the MechE student club, been in an entrepreneurship club for two years, and been to countless student life events. But this is the most diverse thing I do. Usually an event is marketed to a specific group of people - just MechE students, or just first year students, or just students who live in this dorm.

But because this dinner thing just grew by word of mouth, we have people who live all over, from all points along the PhD journey, from all sorts of different majors. Old, cynical grad students usually won't come to social stuff anymore (young bushy tailed grad students just discourage them, perhaps?), but they will come to eat. Brand new grad students sometimes feel awkward going to something where they don't know anybody, but what's more low-key than simple dinner? I invite new labmates when they arrive, and it's an easy way for them to meet people.

The other type of event that brings people together like this is events that involve drinking - a pub crawl, or karaoke, or trivia night at the bar. But not everybody drinks - especially my friends, who are not really the hardcore partying type. So, again, dinner works! And the fact that it's at a different place every month keeps it interesting.

The only thing better would be if it were cheaper.

But then someone gave me a suggestion - the guy who organizes the Scotch tastings, actually, when I was talking to him. If this event really is this well-liked, and well-attended, and diverse, and supports student life, why not apply for a grant? The concept has surely been proven, now that we're one year in.

So I did.

I put in an application to get some funding from World's Best School, to subsidize the cost of meals. I won't know for another month or two if the application is accepted, but fingers crossed. Worth a shot, anyway! In the meantime, I'm still enjoying the food and friends.

And maybe this can be an inspiration to you - why not invite a couple friends, take yourself out or eat in, and catch up on life? Surely there's a place in your area that you've been meaning to try, or a new food you've been wanting to cook. If it'll shift your mind from work to fun, what's not to like about that?

Cheers!

Handmade Ornaments, Or: How to Make An Engineer Happy

I was invited by a friend last Christmas to participate in an ornament swap. Basically, each person handmakes a Christmas tree ornament, and swaps it to for someone else's. I really like the idea - it's a thoughtful, cheap way to spread the holiday cheer with your friends.

Simple, right? Make an ornament, Miss Outlier.

But.

What my friend didn't realize is that he had just given Miss Outlier - a mechanical engineer who particularly LOVES to build things - an interesting, open-ended design problem. A girl with a nearly infinite list of cool possibilities for use of machinery and materials, given the chance to design an object that had NO functional requirements except to hold itself together enough to hang on a branch.

PERFECT. See you in three days.

So while Miss Outlier was supposed to be working on her PhD thesis, and her final class project, and taking care of her dorm residents during finals, and organizing a conference - what was she doing?

Very happily puttering around in lab, daydreaming about ornament design and playing with ideas.

Should it be milled, from aluminum? Or waterjetted from something fun, like a pretty piece of scrap tile? Or maybe crafted with cabinetry joints, from cherry or oak? So many possibilities!

And then I made the mistake of bringing up the idea at the lunch table with a bunch of other MechE students. Quickly the ideas flashed around the table - what if you 3D printed it, with a captured piece inside an outer sphere? What if you made it from acrylic, and installed LEDs? Oh, how cool would it be to have LASERS!?

Woah, okay. Pull it back a notch.

In the end I had to settle on something - so I pulled up this cool website, where you can download files for 2D shapes that can be laser cut and assembled into 3D sculptures. I chose to try making this star:

I have a stockpile of acrylic plastic (the same stuff fake nails are made of) that I keep for my own projects, and since acrylic is a dream to laser cut, I decided to stick with that. I actually do have blue and other colors, but I decided to try it first with the plain clear stuff (which I have a bunch of).

Figure: Enter the laser cutter.

In the picture below, what you are looking at is the shiny silver laser cutter table, with a clear sheet of acrylic on top. You may be able to see the curvy leaf shapes that I just finished cutting out.

When I took all the pieces out, I realized two things: there were a lot of them.

And they were pretty big.

Figure: Note how the pieces take up most of my desk.

Hmm. I began to get an inkling that perhaps this might be a little large scale for an ornament... But hey, might as well put it together.

Hmm.

Working...

Still working....

Drat it all!

Jamming, forcing....

This is not an easy sculpture. I'm calling bad design. (Can't possibly be user error, right...?) The slots were shallow, so there wasn't much material in contact to hold the parts together (deep slots means more secure connections). And when I DID get them aligned properly, the fit was jiggly, so the whole thing wasn't stable.

So I used super glue on intermediate connections, to try to hold it together in stages. And then I had to use rubber bands to hold the intermediate stages together while THEY dried.

And then because most of it was superglued, the last connection wouldn't line up, and I broke a corner.

Figure: Assembly via rubber bands. Note white clip due to broken corner. Classy.

Bugger. And it wasn't even that pretty. And my hunch was correct - it was very large. About a 9" sphere. My one requirement is that it has to hang on a tree, and this would probably bend the poor branch!

Figure: Ornament try #1 fail.

But, I have no shortage of ideas! I wasn't ready to give up the laser cutting manufacturing method - it's quick to prototype, free to use the machine, cheap material cost, and now it's a point of pride since the first design didn't work out. I decided to go with an interlocking design this time, to eliminate the superglue debacle. And a smaller shape. I stuck with the clear acrylic, for prototyping, again since I have the most of it. Instead of a star, let's just try a snowflake...

Figure: Seriously, only 20 minutes minutes later. Awesome.

 Oh! So much better. All it took was a few simple snaps together, and I had a pretty decent looking ornament. A little plain looking, perhaps. How about the size?

Figure: Ornament try #2. Better - but now too small?

Well now I feel that next to the other one, this ornament looks almost a bit pathetic. Too small. But fortunately that's an easy fix. This one is out of 1/16" acrylic, so I can easily scale the whole thing up to 1/8" sheets. And, as a bonus, I have a lot of fun colors in 1/8" - so I can solve the plain-looking problem at the same time.

Figure: Ornament try #3.

I chose blue fluorescent acrylic, clear acrylic, and a mirror-backed acrylic as my materials.

Figure: Ornament #3, view #2, from the non-mirrored angle.

 I am pleased with the aesthetics. But how about the size?

Figure: Size check, Goldilocks edition - just right!

Perfect! I added a couple drops of superglue (not structural, I'd like to note - just for security) and called it a day!

Figure: Now THAT is a proper ornament.

So in conclusion, Miss Outlier was very pleased with her contribution to the ornament swap. Sometimes I just have to sit back and think - man, I have access to some pretty cool equipment. I mean - of COURSE I made laser cut snowflakes from .dxf files in SolidWorks. I mean, what did YOU do?

Oh wait - yours has lasers?

There's always next year... :)

3rd Year, 306th Post

Well, dear readers, I've made it to my third year of blogging.

First post was Jan 6th, 2009.

200th post was Jan 24th, 2010 (about science fiction movie night).

As a side note, this past Saturday night/Sunday morning I attended my third Annual Science Fiction Movie Marathon. As with previous years, I couldn't quite last the whole marathon, but I LOVED it as always! The lineup this year was: i, Robot, 12 Monkeys, pizza break!, XMen, XMen II, and Independence Day. I was tired after XMen, and I'd already seen XMen II, so I wimped out and went home. But one of the girls from my dorm floor stayed for the whole thing! I've got awesome residents in my RA job. :)

And this post is my 306th post (I flew right through 300 without noticing).

Since July of 2010, my top posts were Underwater Hockey (2,006 page views, mostly from Google searches), Straight On (521 page views),  Tape Measure CAD (159 page views), and Logo Design (147 page views). I've had either over 12,000 total page views since last July (via Blogger Stats), or just over 10,000 (via Google Analytics). [I think the discrepancy is Blogger counting myself viewing my own blog.]

Blogger tells me I have 35 followers, and Google tells me there are 83 people subscribed to my feed. That's a very tiny corner of the Internet, but it's my corner all the same. :)

I was struck the other day by how much I enjoy the simple act of writing down what's going on in my life. I was trying to remember my thoughts on a particular event (and goodness knows my memory fails me often these days, even on what HAPPENED, much less how I FELT about it) that occurred in 2008. I thought, well that's easy - let me just see what I blogged about it. But alas! No blog in 2008!

And I am also taking some credit for still posting, after over two years. I've never posted less than 4 times a month. My best months were Feb 2009 (23 posts) and Jan 2010 (22 posts). Laugh! Can you tell that I'm a student, and not as busy over winter break? :)

Every so often on Facebook I see friends excitedly announcing a new blog. Sometimes WordPress, or LiveJournal, but usually Blogger. I always subscribe in my Google RSS Reader, and I enjoy getting the updates. But inevitably, they last a couple months and then I hear nothing. Or they delete them altogether.

So I'm proud of myself for lasting this long. I'm no dooce, for sure, but goodness, why would I strive for that? I'm trying to get a PhD here! I'm content to simply resolve to continue blogging. I've got a long list of post subjects in reserve, and if I can find time to write each day I plan to put up a mix of subjects - research, social events and adventures, cooking.

If you write a blog, why do you keep doing it? Has it gone the way you expected, or are you surprised at where you are now?