Diving!

I am super excited about tomorrow - I am going scuba diving for the Great Annual Fish Count! There's really no point in counting fish, it's just a silly reason to get a bunch of divers out along the Cape Ann area on the same day.

I was certified a couple years ago, but I've never been diving in the cold northeastern waters. So I bought myself a thicker wetsuit and boots. Apparently you can't use the same wetsuit for the Caribbean and northern US - it's a bit chilly up here... I was balking at the price of 7mm new suits, but it turns out one nearby dive shop had a used equipment selection. I went to see if I could find my size, and lo and behold I found a brand-new wetsuit in my size, discounted a ridiculous amount because it was an overstock they had too many of. Score!

I rented the rest of the gear today (I get an awesome rate from the dive shop that has an agreement with World's Best School). I could have rented the wetsuit and boots as well, but everybody pees in their wetsuit, and I don't know if I'm comfortable with that... :) Besides, the owner of the dive shop said that wetsuits are the most risky thing to try to rent, because they may run out of sizes on popular weekends.

So look out, fish! Prepare to be counted!



That's me at Turks and Caicos Islands. Maybe I'll get my dive buddy to take a photo tomorrow - but even if they did, you would just have to trust it's me. With a hood and full wetsuit and boots and gloves, it could be anyone!

Packing

I have begun packing. I am slapping tape on boxes left and right.



Yes, I look like that. My pink lingerie set is my favorite moving attire...

I applied and interviewed and have been hired for an RA position next year, so I am moving this summer into the undergrad dorm in preparation for all the new students to arrive in the fall.

My moving date is next Tuesday, and I plan to have everything packed by Monday so that the actual moving day is as painless as possible. My mother and sister are helping me move (thank you thank you!), and everything will fit in one small UHaul truck trip. I've never had anybody help me move before, and I am looking forward to having extra pairs of hands.

Also, this time I have an elevator in both old and new rooms, and that is a fantastic thing.

And while I am packing, I am tossing junk. The more I toss, the less I have to pack, right? My rule is that if I haven't used the thing in a year, I don't need to keep it (aside from a few keepsakes). I don't own any major furniture (just a couple nightstands and a set of shelves), so the majority of my belongings can be summed up in four words: clothes, shoes, tools, and books.

I'm not sure how it's all going to fit in the new place, but it's about the same size so I guess it won't be too hard. I'l have to figure out how to do laundry, how to set up my kitchen.

But we all know what the real first priority is going to be: setting up the TV and internet in the new place!

Gives New Meaning to Work/Life Balance

We have a homeless graduate student living in the building.

The top floor of my building has only one room - a conference room. Hardly anyone goes up there, they tend to use conference rooms on the second floor. But one professor is currently writing a grant, and he needs peace and quiet and PEOPLE PLEASE LEAVE HIM ALONE kind of space.

So he's taken to writing in the top floor.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that the conference room also has a kitchen attached to the back of it, and a bathroom with shower behind that. Don't ask me why, ask the inscrutable wisdom of the original designers who also designed the building to HAVE NO RAMPS into it. Which might be useful when MOVING EQUIPMENT.

Ahem. I digress.

The past few days, perhaps for the past week, the professor has arrived bright eyed and bushy tailed at 7am to write his grant. Laptop gripped to his side, he waits for the doors to the elevator to open (what, you think he walked six flights?). The doors slide apart, to reveal the immediate tripping hazard of a graduate student lying in front of the conference room door.

"Just catching a couple winks," the student blearily mumbles. (I kid you not, this actual quote comes straight from the professor).

Caught off guard, or perhaps just too far gone into the grant writing process to care about students anymore, the professor can't summon anything more than a brisk "hello." Then, a dismissive step over the prone body of the student into the conference room.

If I were the student, I might be miffed. I think this one was just a bit embarrassed.

To the student's credit, he is probably only between apartments or something for a short time. Nobody knows who he is, but he did pick the best spot to be homeless (given the kitchen and shower and all). He's always gone during the day, but must make it back at night, because the professor wakes him up in the morning.

So what is the proper protocol for this? How long should this go on before someone is notified? Who do you even notify for this? Should I care? Should I go out of my way to meet this student just for the novelty of it?

Consulting

I have recently added another new hat to the list of millinery I can wear. I have been fortunate to be called in to consult on an engineering project where my expertise can be used.

My first thought was - wait, I have expertise?

Well yes, it turns out after a lifetime of schooling I have learned a few things that can be useful to people actually working outside academia. Who knew? Miss Outlier, Consultant.

I have several points I'd like to make about this:

1) It is fascinating to work on a project in industry and observe the interactions between the engineers on the project, and the interactions between the engineers and management in charge of the project. The engineers on the project make decisions much quicker than I am used to in academia (where everything must be studied and analyzed before progressing). But in the real world, often it is quicker to go the "try it and see" method than to work out every detail from theory. And the management on the project (as opposed to my advisor who wants to hear the technical details) do not care about details except a few: progress made since the last meeting, expected completion timeline, and cost savings created by the project. Which is to be expected - managers have many projects in the pipeline, and shouldn't have to worry about the nitty gritty of each one. It's the engineer's job to get it done, I gather.

2) I am pondering: is this consulting something I should inform my advisor I am doing? I spoke with a labmate of mine, who works for my same advisor, and I found out that my labmate did some consulting last year. And apparently, my advisor was initially against it - he thought there wasn't enough time for my labmate to work on both research and consultation projects. Once my labmate proved that he wasn't neglecting research, my advisor was comfortable with the arrangement. But I haven't even broached the subject - perhaps I should? Any comments, internet?

3) In the real world, money is different. In the sense that I am worth some. :) And also in that people are not afraid to spend it to get things done. A lot more zeros get tossed around on the end of numbers than I am used to seeing. It's a little scary, but I have to remember that it's just a different scale. Because as a grad student, your time is not worth two turtles. But to even have a conference call on a consulting job, think about the salaries involved to have a handful of high level managers and a few engineers take an hour to work on something. The time value of money has just shifted drastically, and I'm learning to adjust to it.

When I see that first paycheck roll in I guarantee the adjustment won't be hard...

How to Make Friends and Influence People

Miss Outlier has been camping in New Hampshire, thus the lack of updates. But I am back now, successfully having avoided a sunburn (although not an entire mosquito squadron worth of bites).

I'd like to tell a story from the prior weekend. Every week I have dinner and bible study with friends from church. This particular dinner, there were a lot of new faces, so we went around and did introductions. I explained that I am Miss Outlier, I am a PhD student (yee-ha!) in Mechanical Engineering, and I build cool stuff. Someone was brave enough to ask me what my research is on, and I gave my best two minute elevator pitch about what I do in layman's terms.

Polite smiles greeted me around the table. If I get bewildered stares, it usually means I was too technical. Polite smiles means they understand, they just can't fathom why it's interesting. Why in the world, they think, would someone spend two or three years heating and squashing little bits of plastic?

So I tacked onto the end the sentences that people usually find more interesting. "My specialty is machine design. I build machines that make nano (*technical buzzword*) sized plastic chips that can be used to test for malaria (*third world application buzzword*) or to study cancer (*save the world buzzword*). Also, I use a robot arm in my lab (*random coolness*)."

But man, this was a tough crowd. Nobody was impressed around the table. Oh well, I thought, can't win them all over.

But later during dessert, the girl across from me was complaining about her bike - it was not working properly for some reason. My ears perked up, and I asked "Is it possibly problem X?" No, she said. "Perhaps problem Y?" Well, now she hadn't though about that possibility. The girl asked me if I could take a took.

So after the meal, I went outside and poked a bit at her bike. Turns out the problem was simple, and I was able to fix it with a bit of whacking (always whack whatever is stuck, it looks official and hardly ever hurts) and an adjustable wrench from a sad-looking IKEA tool set (seriously, why even have a tool set if it only has three things in it?).

You've never seen a girl more excited than that bike owner to see her bike working again. The host, (who had donated his sad IKEA tool set to the operation), suddenly remembered that his bike needed help as well. So he wheeled out his bike, and I fixed his simple problem as well.

Bingo!

Suddenly everybody was excited. You can fix BIKES? was the refrain. How COOL! One girl said wonderingly, can you even fix *gasp* OTHER stuff?

Well, yes. (See my post on vacuum cleaners). In my head I was thinking, I really didn't do very much to those bikes, it only looks cool because you didn't know how. Similar to how a magician feels, I imagine?

You can't imagine the transformation that came over everybody. Suddenly there were ideas flying around the room for inventions or things people had always wanted to build, and there was such great conversation about everybody's interesting ideas.

So the moral is - if you want to impress people, get on the host's good side, and jump start the conversation, better table the technical whizz-bang explanations and just say: You know what? I can FIX stuff. Is there anything broken around here?

Something's Wrong With the Mirror...

Yesterday I went sunglasses shopping. I have a rule that I never buy sunglasses for more than about $15, because I find the time it takes me to lose a pair of sunglasses is strongly correlated with how much I paid for them. A $5 pair from Wal-Mart I can manage to hang onto for three years. I splurged for a pair once, and dropped them in the river the next week.

My current pair I've had for about two years, and they've been through a lot with me. But have you ever seen old cars with terrible window tint jobs? You know how the tinting starts to crackle and peel off the windows? That's what my sunglass were doing. People, the sun was peeling off my glass.

So I need a new pair.

I was standing in the mall, in a store where they were having a sale on sunglasses (score!). I tried on pair after pair, and nothing was working for me. I was confused why none of my selections was looking right. So I peered closer...

And they were crooked!!

Well, SOMETHING was crooked.

I stared and stared, trying to figure out what was off... was the mirror warped? (Not an unlikely possibility, as every woman knows who has used the mirror as an excuse for an unflattering outfit in the dressing room...) But no, that wasn't it. Were the sunglasses twisted? No, because every pair had the same problem.

Then I considered that every face is not perfectly symmetric.

So maybe my ears are not parallel? Or my nose is crooked?

I narrowed my sunglass choices down to my favorite two (and do you KNOW how hard that is to do with no second opinion from a shopping buddy?), and as I was agonizing over my final selection it hit me -

My EYEBROWS aren't even.

Oh for crying out loud.

So this morning I whipped out my tweezers, and look out now - me and my new sunglasses are totally hot and stunningly even. :)

Soup and Salad

These are actually from two different days, but really, who cares?

Chinese egg drop soup:



This recipe used corn, which I wasn't expecting in egg drop soup, but turns out the recipe gods knew what they were doing, and it was great. The freshly grated ginger from the farmer's market didn't hurt either, I suspect... :)

Tomato salad:



Fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, juicy tomatoes, and balsamic vinaigrette. Delish!