Shirt Design

I am an officer in the Mechanical Engineering student club, and my job is to do the orientation for new mechanical engineering graduate students when they arrive in the fall (about 160 of them, I think). World's Best School has a very extensive and involved Orientation period, and it's a big deal with lots of events. It's a good job for me, because I've been hosting events as an RA for a couple years now.

The student club that I am in designed and sold club T-shirts back in 2006, but that was before I was here. I thought it would be a great idea to do T-shirts again this year.

I sent out a department e-mail to the students, offering a $50 prize for T-shirt design submissions. We got submissions from only three people, although one person submitted five options.

I didn't really like any of the designs. So I decided to come up with some of my own. But then the judging is biased, so I decided to call in more opinions. I showed my handful of designs (anonymized of course), plus all the submissions, to a bunch of friends and the club president.

One of my designs was the unanimous favorite! But I'm wondering what the internet at large thinks, as my friends are a small and perhaps skewed data set.

Artwork done in Adobe Illustrator, so it's infinitely adjustable and scalable.

This is the back of the shirt, the front has a pocket design with World's Best School MechE logo on it. Just imagine the front is awesome. Planning to make navy blue ones to sell, and green ones for club officers. Because we can. :)

What do you think? Comments, suggestions? Would you wear this shirt? Is it kinda funny, or just doesn't make sense?

Diving With Sharks!

Last year, I had planned to go diving with sharks. It didn't end up happening, but when the same trip was rescheduled for this summer - you bet I signed up!

Once again, I gathered up all the dive gear. I was carpooling with other people, and they wanted me to be at their house by 4:30. That's AM. The subway doesn't even run that early!

Fortunately, my friend took pity on me and let me sleep over the night before, to avoid having to take a cab at 4 in the morning.

Now, the dive master had sent out a sheet on how to avoid seasickness. I followed those instructions to the letter. One Dramamine the night before, an additional one the morning of (although I contend that 4am is still the night before). No coffee, no acidic juice, a small filling breakfast so as to have something in the stomach. No drinking the night before (easy, of course), and a good night's sleep. The recommendation was to go to bed at 9pm, but I can't sleep that early - but I at least was in bed by 11pm.

There were five of us driving down to Rhode Island for the trip. Nobody else took Dramamine, and everybody but me had coffee in the morning. Two of the girls didn't go to bed until 2:30am, and then got up at 4am. And then they had greasy Egg McMuffins along with their coffee in the morning.

Guess who wasn't sick? And guess which other people were heaving over the side for the whole trip? Yeppers, Miss Outlier was very glad she can follow instructions!

Thanks to Bill Buckley for the following pictures.

Here's me, with the shark cage just loaded into the boat. It's pretty small, no?

Figure: First we loaded the shark cage on the boar, in preparation for the 1.5 hr ride out to sea.

When we got out to a good spot, we tossed chum in the ocean (fish oil and fish guts and chopped up fish) to attract the sharks. The seasick people loved that, let me tell you. :)

And then we waited for the sharks to show up. And fished while we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And JUST as we were about to give up for the day, this guy showed up:

Well hello! We quickly got into out gear, and jumped onto the shark cage to take a look.

The shark came over to investigate.

At this point we thought we'd better get into the cage. Well, I got into the cage. The photographer didn't want to have the bars of the cage in the photos, so he stayed outside just swimming around.

The shark decided to investigate the camera.

I was watching from that platform. That's my face you can barely see up between the bars. I was plenty close.

But the photographer is even closer. Yikes!

Well actually, I was pretty close too. :) It was so thrilling to watch this shark swimming around me. I just wanted to reach out and touch it - bad idea, of course, but the feeling is there. That big 'ol shark eye staring at me reminded me that you don't mess with these creatures.

Well hello to you too, Mr. Shark! After a while, we tagged the shark with an encoded tag for data collection purposes. That made him irritated, so he swam away.

Here's the group of us, coming up for air after the shark was gone. I'm the back left person - it's hard to tell apart the wetsuits... Such an adventurous crew!

We loaded up the cage, and headed home for the day. I slept on the hour and a half ride home, because, well, I got up at 4am that morning. :)

Fantastic day all around, out between the sky and the waves and the depths below. Who knows, maybe someday I'll do it again!

Side Projects, and Also - Ouch!

A couple days ago I got a comment from a labmate that has stuck with me - and really bothered me. I asked to use his scanner to make .pdfs of some papers, and he of course didn't mind and agreed. As he was scanning the papers, he noticed that they weren't related to research. He laughed and said, "I won't even ask what you are working on now!" 

I said, "Oh don't worry - it's just a small side project I'm finishing up."

And he replied, "I figured. Everything you do is a side project. I don't think I've seen you do 10 hours of actual research in the year that I've been here. I mean, that's pretty impressive."

I think he was joking, and the other two people listening kind of chuckled, and so I smiled and just let it go.

But I'm not sure how to take that. I mean, ouch! I know I've done more than 10 hours in a year, obviously, but it's also true that he spends a lot more hours actually in lab than I have this summer. And yes, I work on a lot of side projects. (Sometimes I get stuck on them.) I have a lot of interests - I'm an RA, I'm an officer in a student club, I work on business ideas, I like to cook, I take exercise classes, I like going on random adventures. And, of course, I write this blog (although my labmates don't know that).

I've talked a little before about how I don't work weekends, and a lot of people do. I think all the things I do are part of a healthy, balanced life. I am happy with my life, I've tried really hard to position myself so I can advantage of a lot of opportunities.

And beside the point of how many hours I spend on actual research - if my advisor is happy with my progress, it really doesn't matter how long it takes me to do my work. The labmate who made the comment also will casually toss into conversation that "well last Saturday when I was in lab," or "on the holiday Monday when I was working on my project." In my experience, people like that who feel the need to brag about working long hours may not actually be getting any more done than I am.

That's why I love grad school, or working in a small company, and particularly dislike large structured workplaces. I like to be free to schedule my time how I see fit, not according to other people's expectations. When I've worked in large companies, people would judge you harshly on how many hours you were at your desk. People would talk about going in to work "just to show my face" even if they didn't have to do anything in particular. I think that's ridiculous. I like the entrepreneur model, where you work as many hours as it takes to get things done, whatever hours those may be, and then you stop.

That being said, I do want to graduate eventually. I do need to work on PhD related stuff. So perhaps I need to swing the pendulum back and focus a little bit.

How many hours do you spend on side projects or your own interests?

Roast Chicken, Parts IV and V

After I roasted a whole chicken, and made two recipes with the leftovers, I only had a chicken carcass and a few scraps remaining. But, the Cooking For One cookbook managed to squeeze another two recipes from that!

So Roast Chicken Part IV was to make homemade chicken stock. I always think of chicken stock as something that only pioneer women did. (That, or modern day people who have excess time on their hands.) But despite my reservations, I dug out my largest stock pot and resolved to give it a go.

Figure: Start with rough chopped onion, peppercorns, a bay leaf, fresh rosemary, and whatever spices you care to toss in.

I added the seasonings to a big pot of water, and tossed in vegetable scraps I had in the freezer, and the chicken carcass. I keep vegetable scraps ever since I read this article, pointing out how you can be frugal and use those wastes.

Figure: At this point, the kitchen begins to smell fantastic.

Then you let that simmer away - I let it go for a few hours in the afternoon while I busied myself with other things. When everything is tender and all those flavors have melded together, you put it through a strainer and get:

Figure: Extract-of-chicken - steaming nutritious goodness!

Then that goes in the fridge, and the fat congeals and rises to the top. In the magic Julia-Child style, I have fast-forwarded to show you:

Figure: Still nutritious, doesn't look delicious anymore. We'll just skim that off and move right along.

I then divided the broth into 1-cup, 2-cup, and ice cube trays. Just like I did when I made vegetable broth.

Figure: Useful for all manner of future cooking endeavors.

I stripped the chicken of the last few scraps, and proceeded to the finale - Roast Chicken Part V, Chicken Soup!

Figure: The remnants. The chicken has given its all.

I couldn't bear to NOT eat chicken soup, after my whole apartment was permeated with the delicious chicken stock aromas. So I put some of that stock, and fresh chopped up veggies, potatoes, and spices back in the pot:

Figure: Actually looks a lot like the stock. But there's no bones, which is key. And the veggies are fresh, not the random tops and scraps saved from the freezer.

Hey presto, dinner!

Figure: Do you see the garnish? I want credit for the garnish.

My big soup pot apparently makes enough for five meals, so for the next week I had soup. 

Figure: More than enough soup. Can we be done with this chicken already?

Fortunately, those pioneer women were on to something - homemade chicken stock is much more delicious than the canned variety. Fuller, deeper flavor, not as salty. I love it.

But I don't love it enough to make chicken again any time soon. Bring on the steak, or something else!

Vindication

Last week at a group meeting, one of the other students presented some figures. His work deals with huge data sets, with lots of manipulation and algorithms to make sense of the vast quantities of data. Most of the time, to be honest, his presentations go over my head and I struggle to understand. I'm a whack-on-it-with-a-hammer girl, not an invert-this-matrix type of girl.

Sometimes, I don't bother struggling. It's all Greek to me (and indeed, a lot of it is. Once you run out of English variable names, you have to go somewhere!). I just nod and smile and hope he's right.

Is that bad of me?

But last week, I was looking at his final figure and it just didn't look right to me. I inquired some more about the particulars, and it still didn't make sense. Usually I would have just let it go at that point, but he was preparing the talk for a conference, and I figured if I couldn't understand it, the conference-goers probably wouldn't either. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought he was just plain wrong.

So I kept pressing. I tried to explain where I thought he was off, and I could see a couple others at the group meeting nodding in agreement. So that helped me believe I had a valid point. Some others were just nodding and smiling, like I do when I don't get it... :) I figured even if I was wrong, he ought to be able to explain my mistake.

We spent 45 minutes discussing how he had gotten from his data to that figure, and the manipulations he had done. It involved 3-D matrices, transformations in space and time, corrections for image perspective, and I think there was a hypercube in there too.

My brain hurt.

And at the end of an hour, the whiteboard was full of drawings, opinions had flown back and forth, and all of us in the group meeting had gotten into the constructive debate. All of our brains hurt. We had attacked the problem and expressed the concept from as many angles as we could think of.

I still thought he was wrong, though I admitted I may be mistaken, and just wanted to thoroughly understand. He still thought he was right. I'm not sure what the rest of the group thought. Probably they were thinking of dinner. We had to let it rest, the meeting had dragged far too long.

But do you know what email I got today? Turns out that student went back and double checked, and I WAS RIGHT!

That makes me happy. I stood my ground, understood at both a conceptual and detailed level another student's work, and spotted an error.

Vindication!

Etiquette Question

In the spirit of pushing ahead with my PhD work, I have been contacting other labs and students I know on campus who are working in my same area. Or, at least working on some aspect of what I want to do. I figure since part of being state-of-the-art is knowing what state-of-the-art IS, I should learn as much as I can to make sure I'm not reinventing anything.

Most of the students are very quick to respond. But sometimes I don't know anybody personally in the lab (especially outside my department - I don't spend much time in Chemical Engineering or Materials). Then I contact the PI directly.

I try to follow all the good email etiquette - I state who I am, who I work for, what lab I'm in. I indicate what the lab does that seems relevant to me (showing that I at least did some background work and looked up some papers). Then I ask politely if the PI has time for a discussion on possible overlaps in research, and if I could possibly come look at the lab. I close by saying that if the PI can reccomend one of their students, I would be happy to discuss with them instead. And of course, thank you.

A couple PIs were very good about responding. But the other handful I never heard from. I waited a while, and sent a follow up, and usually by some way or other I can track them down.

There is only one professor I couldn't track down, after a month. So I went to the lab's website, and checked the publication list. I looked at the most relevant papers, and noted who the first author was. The website said that author was still working for the group. So, I sent the grad student an email.

Here, dear readers, is my dilemma. Today, I got an email from both the grad student AND the professor (who suddenly checked his email, I guess).

The professor said, "Sorry, we don't do what you are looking for. Please try these other labs."

And the student said, "Sure! I'll show you around the lab. But I don't actually work there any more, I'm a PostDoc."

So what do I do? I would still like to see the lab, I think it might be useful for me (even if not directly related - maybe I didn't explain myself very well in the email?).

Is it sketchy to have a former grad student show me around the lab, even though the PI said he didn't think it would be relevant? If anyone ever wanted to see my lab, I don't think my PI or I would ever turn them away. Maybe I shouldn't have sent separate emails - I feel like perhaps I went behind the PI's back, but I was just trying to not bother him in the case that he was too busy.

Ack! How should I respond to the two of them? What would Emily Post say?

Roast Chicken Part III

Well even after making Chicken Divan from my roast chicken, I still had leftovers. Next up was a recipe for Minced Chicken on Toast.

Now, mushrooms are one of the few ingredients I don't care for. That and tomatoes. But now that I'm watching my calories AND getting fresh farm ingredients every week, I've had to rethink my dislikes. Because mushrooms and tomatoes come in large quantities from a farm, are healthy, low calorie, and nutritious.

I am determined to make them delicious as well.

Ah, butter! That makes everything taste fantastic. And bacon. But I couldn't work that into this recipe (next time, my friends). Sautee green onions and mushrooms, and then chop up the leftovers:

I guess technically I was supposed to "mince," since it is Minced Chicken on Toast, but in actuality I don't know how mincing is any different than chopping. So I just make very small pieces, and call it a day. I also don't use toast, so just call me a rebel like that.

Add some of the white sauce I had on hand, to add creaminess and bind the elements together.

As a side note, I fondly remember cooking with my dad while I was growing up. There were a few dishes my family ate that were specifically my dad's. Those included double cruncher cookies, brownies, any sort of grilled item, and eggs a la goldenrod. The egg dish calls for white sauce, and I remember we had a falling-apart Betty Crocker cookbook with a recipe for white sauce. I learned to make it with my dad - and was always amazed at how the simple ingredients combined.

I was also amazed that mine always had lumps and Dad's didn't. Fortunately nobody cared.

This is toast. Doesn't look like it? Well it is. When I don't have toast on hand, I look at the package of rolls, and call it toast.

You know, I have to be honest. This was a simple, filling meal but it wasn't my favorite. Maybe it was the mushrooms? I just wasn't used to the taste. Also I think I needed a bit more white sauce to make a better filling - it was too dry, needed to be more like chicken salad consistency.

I say, next time, more butter.