End of the Year

Of the five semesters that I've been working for MechSE, I think this is the first time I've taken finals week off. Honestly, I should have done it all of my past semesters as well; I never work as many hours during finals week as I tell Bill I will. Things always get in the way, I sleep in, I realize I'm not as prepared for my exams as I thought I was. So this semester, as I had no pressing projects, I came in on the Friday before finals to work the last hours of the week and told Bill I would not be coming in during finals. He sounded surprised, if only because I had always worked during finals, and qualified his surprise by saying that the other two student workers would not be coming in next week, either. So I'm not alone.

(By the way, we hired another student worker! Her name is Taylor, and she's very nice. I've been asked to take her on an interview with me, but so far things haven't worked out. Maybe next semester. Like me, she's a science major; unlike me, she's actually majoring in Mechanical Engineering.)

My energy articles all got in on time! The magazine went to print. I was thinking of emailing Bill to come in and grab some, so I could take some copies home over winter break, and show them to family over Christmas and to Sally at Sunday River. The energy section took up a 12 page spread! Crazy. But since I wasn't the only contributor, this time I didn't get my name at the end. I didn't mind--the vast majority of the text was mine, as well as most of the subsections. I also was heavily involved in the editing process.

Not only do we have another student writer, but another full-time communciations specialist as well. Her name is Julia, and so far I like her. I still work directly for Bill, but she's also my superior and can give me assignments. She complimented me while we were editing the magazine on my writing and editing skills, particularly when I had no formal training in communications.

It's a relief to not be working this week. It's nice to just be able to focus on my studying. I also proctored one of the physics final exams, so I am at least making a little money this week. I have not been contacted by my tutoring student, though, and he said he would want my help for finals. I don't think he got the grade on the last midterm that he wanted. Maybe he doesn't think I'm worth it.

I was offered a position as a physics TA for next semester. I turned it down, despite it being something I've always wanted to be. Next semester will just be too difficult. I'll be taking 17 credit hours, and two of the hardest physics courses in the curriculum. I just don't have the time. I don't want to set myself up for failure. Next year, however, I will be taking fewer credit hours, and only one physics class a semester (not counting my research and senior thesis). Hopefully I will be a physics TA then. I really, really want to be.

I don't know when I'll stop this job. Probably at the end of next semester, if I don't start research before the summer. I'm dreading the moment when I have to say goodbye to Bill.

Professor Paparazzi

About three weeks ago I emailed seven professors whose research related to energy. As I had just started work, it seemed to be the most logical thing to do. Most of my time for the beginning of the semester will be taken up by pulling together articles for the Fall 2013 alumni magazine energy feature; and if you remember from last year, those deadlines come up fast. Luckily, I managed to write three articles related to energy research before the end of last year so I would already have a head start. And that's turning out to have been a wonderful idea.

Because for three weeks, including persistent emails reminding them that I would like to interview them and that this is for a magazine that has an impending deadline, only two of those professors have responded to me. The email conversations in my gmail account are four, five emails long, all from me. Hello, my name is Meredith Staub...Hello, If you were busy last week, my schedule for this week is...Hello, I would still very much like to sit down with you and talk about your research...Hello, I would appreciate a timely response as this article has a deadline...

But! I also wrote three articles on our three new faculty members! That was pretty fun. I emailed all three of them at once, and ALL THREE responded the same day. How satisfying! Then I interviewed them all within a week, and have gotten the articles back to them for editing less than a week after their interviews. Easiest faculty articles I have ever had to do.

Not only that, but they were all young and excited to talk to me. Many professors tend to be embittered about talking about their research to laymen--we always misrepresent it, we always ask stupid questions, we are always so pushy and misquote them and portray them in a bad light and make up facts...this is seriously the kind of reception I get from some faculty members! (I should say that it's a pretty small percentage, but a fair percentage of them have this bias to at least some degree.) So I guess it's no wonder they won't respond to my emails sometimes. Bill offered to email them next week if there were a few I really wanted to talk to who wouldn't respond. Hopefully they would respond to the MechSE Director of Communications.

The new professors were all excited about their research, and excited to be professors! Two of them, anyway--one was already an associate professor, having been an assistant professor at University of Michigan. But the most exciting part: TWO of them have research that directly relates to alternative energy, which I can put in my feature! And they respond to my emails!! Perrrfect. *rubs hands together*

So with the addition of those two, there's only two other professors that I really need a response from, one of whom has already arranged for a meeting with Bill (that I will be sitting in on, that will be relevant for the article). So despite stubborn and busy professors thwarting the projected timeline for my project, it looks like I can manage to get all my articles in a reasonable amount of time! I was seriously starting to get worried that I would have to corner them in the faculty lounge while they're getting their coffee. Like professor paparazzi.

Goodbye to Ithaca

As I write this, I'm sitting with my mother in a hotel room in Buffalo watching WALL-E. We spent the day sipping mimosas at an outdoor cafe in downtown Ithaca, doing some window shopping, and visiting a vineyard that was celebrating its donkey's birthday with cheap wine tastings and wine slushies. (WINE SLUSHIES.) The donkey, named Doobie, was adorable and very soft. 

I presented my research to my REU group yesterday morning. It went very well! It's so hard to believe it's all over. I introduced my mother to my professor, whom I had not really talked to in a week or so, and not for more than a month before that. He told me he was very happy with my project, and even more happy that I had fun doing it and learned so much. He told me that when he writes my recommendation letter for graduate school, the letter he sends to every other school will say that I'm horrible and the one he gives to Cornell will say that I'm wonderful. :) heehee. 

I had sad goodbyes to say to the wonderful friends I met in the program, and my wonderful graduate student Eva who helped me so much with my research. It was really hard, it was a lot of fun, and I learned so much about how I work best and how to stay adaptable and adjust to setbacks and all of that generic cliche stuff. But really. It taught me so much about what it's like to be in graduate school, devoting all your time to your research and having to be really resourceful in how you solve the problems that come up ('cause odds are, no one else is gonna know how to solve them either).

I'm also really glad that I'm now pretty certain I want to go into condensed matter physics. Whether or not I go into theoretical/computational is still a little bit of a tossup (I'd like to try experimental, I think...), but I really like the subject matter, and I find it more interesting than particle/high-energy/astro. So knowing that is reassuring, and gets me set up to start looking for grad schools. Currently the first and only school on my list is Cornell--and I suspect it will stay very high on my list even as I start looking at other schools.

Below you will find some extra pictures from my last few weeks.

Glass and Bigger Waterfalls

Today is a Sunday. I meant to go into work, make some progress on my report so that I can keep moving forward with my phonon calculations, but it is an absolutely BEAUTIFUL day and I just can't seem to make it to the windowless basement office to stare at numbers. I just, I can't.

So instead, I am sitting at a shaded table in front of the Human Ecology building (my new favorite spot to work, and eat lunch) writing a long-overdue blog post and enjoying the gorgeous weather and a bottled iced tea from Wegman's.

We took two trips this week for the REU program: a trip to Corning, NY which involved visiting the Corning Museum of Glass and the main research facility for Corning, Inc. (where they make--you guessed it--glass); and a day-long trip to Niagara Falls. The post that follows is full of pictures. :)

Aloooooone

This is my second day without my graduate student. So far, this week is going pretty poorly.

I spent all of Friday and some of Monday analyzing my CaTiO3 results. When I moved on to BaTiO3 and SrTiO3 on Monday, several structures failed much in the same way my CaTiO3 structures were failing before. But I fixed that problem in calcium titanate. Shouldn't the solution be transferable to other compounds? There was no reason I could see that it shouldn't. Titanium is still the dominant cation in each compound. The Ti-O potential parameters should work. (I did try the Ba-O and Sr-O parameters just for kicks. They predictably failed.) It took me an entire day to figure out what the problem might be with my BaTiO3 calculations. Hours of poring over papers I don't understand (and still don't).

Once I had a theory as to why they might be failing, I tried to figure out how I would fix it. The material became highly technical very quickly. I do not have the knowledge or expertise to understand how to derive these potentials--that's the stuff that PhD theses are made of. So I decided to email my professor this morning to ask to meet with him. His response: "Oh, crap I never mentioned to you .... I left for 3 weeks. I won't be back until July 19."

He asked me about the problem, in case there was a grad student or postdoc he could point me to, and I summed it up for him. He said no one in town would know enough about interatomic potentials to help, but gave me the email for one of his former postdocs who is now an assistant professor at University of Texas, Austin.

Here is that email, with the subject, "Hello! I'm Prof. Fennie's REU student." I hope she responds.

Hi! So I think Craig cc'd you on my last email to him, but I started running into some problems the day after he left for a trip, and while my graduate student (Eva Smith) is at a conference for the week. 

My project is that I'm using GULP to optimize structures using buckingham potentials (and spring potentials, for the core-shell model) and comparing the optimized structures from this method to those calculated using DFT methods.

I've been using potentials from Lewis and Catlow (http://iopscience.iop.org/0022-3719/18/6/010) and started with CaTiO3. I originally had some problems with an error message reading "Largest core-shell distance exceeds cutoff of cuts" on the structures P4mm, Amm2, R3m, and Pnma. Once I found out that the spring potential and shell charge of the oxygen ion depend on the cation (from the paper above), I changed the O parameters to those corresponding with Ti instead of Ca and I no longer got that error message. 

Now, I'm trying to apply the same method to BaTiO3 and SrTiO3. I'm still using the O parameters corresponding to Ti, but now P4mm is failing (with the same original "Largest core-shell distance" error message) in STO, and P4mm and R3m are both failing in BTO. (They also fail when I use the O parameters corresponding to Ba.) 

I thought the Ti-O potential parameters would be transferable between compounds, but this is apparently not the case. My hypothesis is that I'm using these potentials incorrectly. They were originally calculated for binary oxides, and I'm using them for ternary oxides. But I don't have enough technical knowledge of the material (I just finished my second year of undergrad) to know if my hypothesis is correct, and if it is, how to derive the ternary potentials from the binary potentials. The literature on this is extremely vague and unclear, especially for an amateur like me. 

If you have the time, and if you have any insight into this situation, I would be incredibly grateful. With Eva, Brian Abett (my other guiding graduate student), AND Craig all gone, and none of the other students in the group familiar with interatomic potentials, I'm feeling a little lost and adrift.

I did a lot of research into the error message itself, but I truly think that it's a symptom of something else being in error. With CaTiO3, it was the potential parameters, which is what makes me think I've been using them incorrectly, possibly by not accounting for the fact that they're ternary oxides. Does this seem likely to you? Do you know anything about potentials in ternary oxides?
Thank you so much. I've heard your name many times; they miss you back here. :)

Best wishes,
Meredith Staub

I want to solve this problem. I want Eva and Craig to come back, and I can show them how I fit all the pieces back together, how hard I worked to use concepts I barely understand to fix a problem I could barely diagnose. I just don't have the technical knowledge to do it by myself. 

NYC and Waterfalls

I had an incredibly busy weekend! I spent 18 hours on Saturday on a trip to New York City, a place I had never been to before. Then on Sunday, we took a trip to a local swimming area in one of the gorge creeks, featuring a gorgeous waterfall!

The weekend's story will be told in pictures.

Oh Deer!

If you think I'm unoriginal....well, you're right. Anyway, look how close the deer is!

I've been having some very frustrating days, and some very rewarding days. It's giving me a very good idea of what grad school is like. In fact, one of the graduate students in my group (a guy I had never talked to) walked into the office today. (He happened to be the same grad student who had let me into the office this morning after finding out I was key-less and the first one to arrive.) He sat down and asked how my research was going, and we talked a little bit about physics, research, physics research, graduate school, and Cape Cod (where he is going next week, and where I will not be going this summer, to my despair). I said that my research was tedious, but that I was learning a lot. He said all research was drudge work to a certain extent. It's just more laborious and repetitive when you're younger and becomes a little more creative when you're older: but you're always doing more work than your professor.

That sounded like an embittered-grad-student thing to say, but he said he loved graduate school, and that I was basically getting a taste for it now. Come in at 10am, leave whenever you like. He said he hoped I wasn't locking myself into 9-5. I said it was more like 10-5:30ish. He nodded in approval, admired Illinois as my choice for undergrad, and said that Cornell would be a good choice for graduate school.

I'm definitely considering it. The atmosphere seems really friendly, very supportive, and the research environment here is thriving. The town is gorgeous (aside from being a little middle-of-nowhere), there's so much natural beauty, and the campus isn't too small. I really like it here. My calves are getting used to the constant hills.

I Made A Thing

Instead of downloading Matlab for oodles of dollars, we decided to try Octave as a computational program. It's one of those free open-source alternatives. It operates right in my terminal (which is interesting), and the exciting part that I wanted to share was that I wrote a script for it and it works and I feel so cool. The script is simple. It's literally three lines. It formats a bunch of numbers I plug in into a matrix (so I don't have to worry about semicolons), puts the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of that matrix into two other matrices (by a built-in function), and returns just the diagonal matrix of eigenvalues.

It's way easier than that sounds. It's seriously extremely simple. But I did it and I'm so proud. I want another excuse to write a script. Just so I can feel cool and programmer-like. Especially since I'm limited in my problem-shooting with this other program by my programming abilities. I'm not sure how to make the program able to find this library of values. I'm sure it has something to do with paths, but I really don't know anything more than that and my ignorance is burning my brain.

Yesterday I saw a thesis defense by one of the students of my professor. I saw him in the kitchen earlier that day, and asked (by way of making conversation), "So are you going to the thesis defense later?"

He looked at me kinda funny and said with an awkward chuckle, "Yeah, yeah....they uh, they make me go to those."

I realized my stupidity later with an appropriate amount of painful embarrassment, but hopefully he thought I was joking. Are you going to your own student's thesis defense? Aha. Ahahaha. Ho ho. So funny.

And my grad student just left for the weekend, so I'm stuck doing a bunch of reading. Yay. I think I'll do it not in this basement office. The lack of windows is really, really bothering me. Even if it's raining every day, which it is. Ithaca is very rainy. I lamely imagine it to be like a greener, fresher London.

Low Key, No Key

So I don't get a key to the office. It took me an entire week and a half to find this out.

First of all, the process is absurd. It required signatures from three different people, AND online safety training. Tracking down three separate people is really hard when they all have work to do and none of it includes signing your silly little form, girl.

Really, the only problem was the last guy. From what I could tell, he was the go-to facilities manager. I visited his office twice a day. Sometimes the lights would be on, sometimes off, sometimes his door would even be open. Not once was he there. My graduate student sent him an email. Two emails. Emailed someone else, who replied with his cell phone number.

Today, on my way to the first floor to get signal to call the number, I decided to stop by his office one more time. Hallelujah!

I walked in with a meek knock on the door. He stared at me. "Are you Mr. Kenyon?" I asked. Without replying, he saw the form I was holding and held out his hand for it. I gave it to him.

In silence, he flipped through the form, opened a program on his computer and entered me into the system in silence (except to ask, "Is that a d?" in my name; it was very clearly a d). He then got up, unlocked a file cabinet full of key hooks, and started rummaging through it.

For twenty minutes. I kid you not. He did not speak to me for this entire time, just mumbled to himself. I couldn't discern any of it, but I think some of it was numbers.

So Much Prettiness!

Today the RAs of the dorms we live in arranged for a picnic down by the gorge. It was nothing fancy: make your own sandwiches, a jug of Arnold Palmer and some plastic cups, and chips. A good number of people showed up, most likely tempted by the prospect of free food.

The place we ate at was somewhere I had visited while I was exploring this week. I never went down by the water because I was alone, and there were plenty of warning signs telling me not to. Of course, people ignored these signs and went down to the water in large groups! So I went as well!

We sat on logs and watched the water rush by. I took my shoes off and walked barefoot through the water on several shelves of rock. Several people, also barefoot, trekked through ankle-deep water downstream. We went upstream, and ended up close enough to a waterfall to stick our hands in it! Everything was beautiful.

Afterwards, several of us decided to go to the Cornell Plantations. We took a rather circuitous route, but got lots of pictures along the way. We saw the botanical gardens of the plantations, took many many flower pictures, and then walked back to West Campus.

Pictures through the link below!

Big Notebooks and Big Textbooks

When I met with my professor yesterday, he mentioned that I should get a lab notebook. It made sense. Something to write things down in, so I would have all of my notes in one place. I'd already been scribbling some things in the margins of my planner. He said to use the account number we had (I apparently have funds!) and to go to the stockroom and "buy" a notebook or whatever else I needed.

So in the stockroom, there were some weird notebook choices. Most of them had graph paper on the inside, which I didn't know if I would like. I just wanted something normal. Several of them were hardcover, which I didn't really like either: felt too much like writing in a book.

But when I finally found the only normal notebooks they had, they were all wide-ruled! And if there's one thing I can't stand, it's wide-ruled paper. Call me crazy. But it makes you write bigger, which makes you write worse, and then you're writing less things in more space and it's ugly and it annoys me to no end.

Starting to feel overwhelmed, I grabbed one of the graph paper notebooks with a flexible cover, and a 30-cent folder for good measure (to store the papers I have to read). But now that I'm writing in this notebook, I realize how big and obnoxious it is. Especially since I don't need to put any diagrams in it or anything. It's SUPER fancy for what little I need to do in it. I guess I didn't realize it at the time because the hardcover notebooks were fancier and they distracted me.

This notebook makes me feel very pretentious. Like look at me I'm a scientist ho ho ho with my big notebook it even has graph paper do you write on graph paper I didn't think so that's for scientists like me

My professor also gave me two textbooks to read. One just says QUANTUM PHYSICS in big letters on the cover and looks very intimidating. The other is a solid state physics book which at least has a colorful cover. Most of work today will be getting through those and some scientific papers. I might even take notes in my notebook! That'll fill its pages and make it look like I actually need it to be large and heavy and expansive for my expansive scientist thoughts. I already copied over all of my margin-notes from my planner, which fill a whole page. I really did need a notebook of some sort.

I should add: I mapped the elevation change from where I live to where I work.

186 feet of elevation. That's approximately 18 stories. I climb 18 stories to get to work, in only four tenths of a mile! And almost half of that (84 feet) occurs in only a quarter of that distance! (That stupid slope. Most miserable part of my morning.) So now I feel justified in complaining.

First Day of Work

....was reading. A lot!

I worked mostly with the graduate student who will be supervising me during my project: Eva. She's extremely nice--very practical, very smart, very clear. I really like working with her so far; she's answered all of my questions and generally been very encouraging. She gave me lots of reading material to go through for this research, so I started going through it today. I actually spent about four and a half hours on it.

It's a little frightening, to be honest. There were a few times where I just had to stop reading, look at the wall, and take a deep breath while muttering in my head I'll be fine I'll be fine This is fine. It's complex stuff. This materials research--specifically looking at the electronic properties of materials--involves a healthy blend of quantum mechanics and chemistry, neither of which I am familiar with or good at. I'm trying to pick up what I can with this reading. It's not impossible, just extremely difficult, and I know I'm only retaining a surface-level layman's knowledge, which bothers me. I want to understand.

I'm probably being impatient, but. My professor is supposed to come in tomorrow and talk to me about the specifics of the project that he wants me to do. I'm hoping for a small mini-lecture on the physics of it, hoping he can clear things up at least a little bit. Enough for me to start getting it on my own.

I felt good about the fact that I figured out how to operate the simulation program I'm going to be using. Now, if I told you I was doing computational materials science, running a simulation program, the first thing that comes to mind I'm sure is some colorful program with a rainbow of molecules in complex, beautiful structures. It actually has a text file as input and a text file as output, in the ugly technical serif font of the terminal. Not very exciting at all. I had to brush up on my Unix commands (which I felt good about, because that was something I KNEW!).

Then we had a large dinner with all of the REU programs here at Cornell. There are a little less than 200 students, from what I gathered. 20 of them are in the CCMR program, like me. There's a bioinformatics program, a botany program, a veterinary program, the particle physics program, and a program for minorities which seemed to have a melange of majors and interests. Everyone I've met here has been extremely nice. There literally isn't a single one of them I don't like. No one is mean, shallow, or even obnoxious (usually the ones you notice right off). They're all friendly, and everyone wants to do fun things as a group. We're not loners and we try not to let anyone be alone if they don't want to be. It's really very cool, and very satisfying.

A little intimidating is the fact that I think I'm the only one here without research experience. Once again, I feel like I got something I wasn't qualified for. There are also people here with amazing experiences, like working for NASA or having their name on a published paper already....I just don't know how Cornell could have picked me with my boring application.

But I'm not despairing. Eva and Professor Fennie are very friendly and seemed very interested in my success. All of the people around me are so kind. I have a while to work this out.

To see pictures and a description of the campus, click the link below!

Sophomore Year Over

I finished the senior slideshow! Lots of pictures, very time-consuming. It seriously took the majority of my time. I barely managed to finish one and a half articles before I had to leave to go home, and had to finish the rest at home. I offered to do more work for Bill if he needed me (transcriptions and small articles and the like), but nothing ever came my way.

So I stayed at home, doing the senior band slideshow for my brother's graduating class in all of my oodles of spare time. It was a smash hit at the senior awards night. I ended it with a baby picture of me and my brother followed by an adult picture of me and my brother, with a text saying "Thanks to my sister for her help" etc, and it made my mom cry when she saw it. I basically did the whole thing myself, but Ben helped pick the music and helped me edit it a little at the end.

Side note: Windows Movie Maker is absolutely worthless for anything but slideshows. It's clunky, inaccurate, difficult to use for the more detail-oriented things. But for slideshows? It's a breeze. Meanwhile, my high-grade video editor at work made it harder for me to do the MechSE slideshow! So for doing slideshows, please stick to Windows Movie Maker. Very convenient and easy. Don't use it for much else.

I went out with Steven a lot, watched a lot of television to make up for all that I had missed (which was a lot), saw two movies in theaters, hung out with my grandmother, watched my brother graduate, and went out to dinner with my family--several times. (I swore it would make me gain 10 pounds, but as much as we always say that, it very rarely does.)

Now I'm at Cornell! It's very exciting. Ithaca is "gorges" as they say here, meaning there are lots of gorges and they're gorgeous (in case you are pun-challenged). I met my roommate (who is extremely nice!) as well as all of my other suitemates (also nice!) and the guys from the suite down the hall (nice nice nice everybody's nice). We all went out to dinner at Moosewood, which was really good food and a lot of fun. It looks like we'll all get along really well--seemed to be a hodgepodge collection of science-oriented pleasant people. :)

It's really refreshing to be around people who aren't JUST from the Chicago suburbs. It's actually really exciting. There's someone from Puerto Rico, someone from Montana, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania....it's just really exciting. Makes me happy.

Also, I'll be cooking! (Although I have leftovers from dinner tonight, so I will probably just eat those tomorrow haha.) I'll try to find original things to do, but I have a suspicion it'll just be the usual suspects. Grilled cheese, stir fry, pasta, and....eggs. But maybe once in a while I'll throw something special together.

Anyway! Orientation is tomorrow! So excited to finally meet my professor and find out what I'll be doing!

Finals Work

For work yesterday, I never actually went into the office. Instead, I attended the Senior Design Project presentations, which included a luncheon afterward, and breakfast beforehand. It was quite the affair, for sure. Luckily I happened to dress nice that day--everyone else was in suits. It would have been quite embarrassing to show up in my usual t-shirt and jeans.

I listened to five projects and recorded them on tape. They were all really neat. One was a cooling branch for lemurs in a conservatory in Florida to lay on. Another was a device that alerted nurses if an ICU patient's bed had been past a certain vertical angle for too long.

I'll be writing an article on all of them, but without any direct quotes, I think. It'll be too hard to separate speakers, and I didn't get any interviews. I wonder if I should have been more thorough. Perhaps I'll email Emad for a quote of what he thought about how the presentations went, and how the projects as a whole went this year. That'll help give it a little color.

I may work for three hours tomorrow instead of two. I haven't decided. I may run tomorrow. I haven't decided. Maybe I'll swim. Maybe I'll do none of that, and just tutor for two hours.

I feel like I have so much to do that I'm just avoiding it all and hoping it all goes away.

I can't wait for summer.

Almost Done!

I'm so close to being done with this semester, I'm almost to the point where I'm counting down hours. I've been so impossibly busy.

My exam went moderately well today. Ish. My grade is pretty high in that class, so I'm not incredibly concerned if I didn't get an A, and I'm pretty certain I didn't. But I had no homework yesterday! It was incredibly nice. I read a book instead.

I've been reading a lot lately. Having my kindle to carry around with me has been absolutely wonderful. I really love that thing. I don't think I appreciated my first kindle enough.

I keep running out of things to do at work. I finished a montage of EOH clips (which turned out pretty okay if I do say so myself), transcribed some things for Bill (because I actually like transcribing things--who knew?), interviewed four NSF graduate fellowship winners (and got them all together for a group picture; thank goodness for Doodle polls), and finished writing all of the bios for the award banquet program. I'll still be working through finals, it looks like, to finish a video for the banquet. Some of it will be new--a compilation of pictures that Bill is putting together for me--but it will also be a lot of our current videos sort of pasted together.

I really like video projects. They're tedious, but linear and defined. I always know the next step. And I feel like I have a good intuition for them.

Next semester I will have a lot of leadership roles. I'll be an intern for a freshman orientation class, possibly a physics TA, english show coordinator for the equestrian team, and president--that's right, president--of SWIP! Good thing my courses aren't too heavy! I actually really like the way my schedule is looking right now. Nice and spacious. Room to go riding and TA and tutor and stuff. Fun stuff!

I'm not sure if I should change the title of this blog once I go to Cornell. The "journalism" part won't really be relevant any more. But then I think I have to change the website URL too? Maybe I'll just keep this. If I decide to keep this blog after I'm done with this job for MechSE, I'll change the name. But I'm still working for Bill next semester and the semester after that! So it will definitely be a while. :)

I found a Cornellian!

I interviewed a graduate student today. Very nice. Won an NSF fellowship worth $30,000 a year towards his continuing education.

Yeah. I know. Took a while for my mouth to close.

Anyway, he went to Cornell! So I of course had to mention that I was going there (have I mentioned I’m going there? Have I mentioned how excited I am?), and he perked up quite a bit and talked to me about it for a little while. After that he was much more conversational (he had been a little bit shy before). I’m wondering if that’s a good interview technique or if that works with only a few people: sharing a little bit about yourself. It makes you seem more like a person and less like an online form (“Where did you get your undergraduate degree? _____ What field do you work in? _____ Do you plan on getting a PhD? Yes/No”).

AND Bill complimented me on the photos I took! I took kind of a funny angle pointing upward at the “MECHANICAL ENGINEERING BUILDING” title above the front door of the building, and it turned out really well. He wasn’t much of a smiler. I counted down and everything, but he kept the deadpan look. I guess that’s some people’s thing. He had a nice smile though! Why would people not smile in pictures? Seems silly to me.

I have to interview three more people—one of whom has not gotten back to me. Grr. Their blurb will have to be something short and stupid that I invent from the information on their LinkedIn page. Not my problem!

In all honesty, I’ll give them another email next week to make sure they’re not going to respond. After that, I’ll just post the article. Good to give second chances though. Especially since things can get lost in email so easily.

For example: one of the graduate students I have to interview emailed me back after I said I wanted to arrange a meeting, and added to the end: “By the way, your email notified me that I had won. The official email got labeled as spam. I'm glad you emailed or I may have not seen it for awhile.”

Ha! $30,000 a year, and he might not have seen it for a while! Ha!

Summer Work

For this summer, I applied to 10 research programs at various universities and other institutions across the country. So far, I have been rejected from two, waitlisted at one, and accepted to one: a materials research REU at Cornell University, through the Cornell Center for Materials Research.

And SO: I will be going to Cornell. :)

I'll be spending 10 weeks of my summer in Ithaca, doing materials research with a research group who named their private supercomputing cluster the TARDIS (which just makes me so happy). I'm exTREMEly excited. First of all, I've never done any kind of physics research! And I've been leaning towards materials science for a while. Second, I'll be going to another university, which is totally exciting. Third, I'll be getting paid! (But we'll see about that. Some of the money that they're using to pay me will be going towards my food.)

Anyway, I'll be updating this blog more when I'm at Cornell, and then maybe give the link to more people so they can see how I'm doing over there. Which might end up being really boring but we'll see.

Their bus website is not very user-friendly. Do not like. But maybe I'm just so used to the CU buses I'm resisting the change.

And! There's a bus that can take me to the equestrian center! I don't know if they'll stop there, but that would be nice. I would probably have lots of time on the weekends to spend there. It looks like a really fancy place. It's actually owned by the university, and the equestrian team is also a club team (like Illinois'). I thought riding over the summer might be too much to hope for, but it looks totally possible! And I'm living right next to the rec center (which I would only use for biking, probably). The pool is a little harder to get to, so we'll see.

Anyway. I'm excited, and I'll be using this blog to document my time there.

Until then: break is over. Back to the real world.

Silly journalists

The professor I interviewed on Thursday was...interesting.

From the start, he treated me patronizingly. He gave me two sentences per question, repeated things constantly (in a way that made me think he assumed I wouldn't understand it on the first go), and just made it really hard for me to interview him.

I got through it, and managed to get some good information. He's working on a project to find stronger and more heat-resistant materials to use in second-generation nuclear reactors. That's perfect for the energy feature I'll be doing for Fall 2013--yes, Fall. Bill decided that since that magazine will be larger anyway, and it will give me more time to track down professors which is SO HARD TO DO UGH.

Anyway, so after this interview he's like, "You're going to send me whatever you write before you publish it." And I responded yes, of course, we always do, and he kept going: "And when I give you corrections, you will actually do them."

I'm a little flustered. Why wouldn't I do them? Why is he telling me to do my job? I've never even spoken to this man before, I've never seen him, and he's almost angry at me all of the sudden. So I reassure him, tell him yes, of course (or some mumbled flustered version of it, I don't know) over and over, and then out of nowhere he asks me what my major is. I tell him I'm a physics major.

His eyes widen. "Oh, you're a scientist? So you understand! So you understand what we do!"

His demeanor changes like somebody flipped a switch. "These journalists," he continues, "they never get anything right. They just don't get it right, and then we give them the right way, and they don't take it and they just publish anyway--"

I thought it was both amusing and disconcerting. He did not treat me politely before he knew I was a physics major. And then he referred to "journalists" as if I wasn't one, as if scientists and journalists were completely mutually exclusive and opposite. It seemed rude, and close-minded. Maybe he had some bad experience with journalists? He is the director of a large international research collaboration, so I'm sure he's had to sit down and be interviewed by journalists of all types.

But still. He made that interview unnecessarily hard, and treated me like a fool because he thought I was just a stupid journalist who wouldn't understand. And that's not a civil way to treat a person, in my opinion.