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'm almost finished with the "setting up" part of my project, a task that took an entire three weeks to complete. I had to establish which set of potentials from literature could most accurately replicate the values calculated from DFT (density functional theory). Now that I've pretty much done that, I have to analyze exactly how well my best potentials are at modeling the structures. Then I move on to different compounds.

I was stuck last week on an error message that was cropping up in three of my structures, which just so happened to all be polar. (A clue? I didn't know.) Eva (my grad student mentor) was gone on Friday and Monday, and my only task was to solve the problem. I had no idea how to do it. I read the manual for the simulation program what seemed like hundreds of times. I posted on the help forum, Eva emailed an old professor and a former postdoc, I was googling every combination of relevant phrases I could. Nothing helped.

Frustrated and upset, I took Friday "off". I took my textbook, my scientific papers, and I left the office for the giant sunlit atrium of the Physical Sciences Building. There I stayed for the rest of the day, reading up on spacegroups and lattice constants and reciprocal lattices. Around 5 I left the building to go home, but ended up sitting on the Slope to try and get through some of the papers I had gathered about the subject.

The last paper I read was the paper that had originally published the potentials I had already decided were the best. After reading my textbook all day (and other textbooks the previous week), I found that I understood way more of the paper than I had a week earlier. I pored over it, analyzed every word, and what I found was the breakthrough I had been looking for: the polarisability of an anion in a metal oxide varies with the cation! The oxygen spring potential between the core and shell (based on Dick and Overhauser's shell model for electronic polarization) that I had been using was wrong.

The question still lingers whether or not it would also change with a ternary oxide as opposed to a binary oxide, but probing into that question hasn't brought me any answers so far. And the numbers ended up working, and working well. My three failed structures worked. The problem that had been plaguing me for a week was solved, and I had fixed it all by myself. When Eva came back on Tuesday I showed her the problem, the solution, and all of the analysis I'd done. She was incredibly impressed. She said she should go away for the weekend more often.

That was incredibly satisfying. It was a reward for all of the effort I've been putting into learning this subject, learning how to look at things from a materials perspective. Since then, I've had good days and bad days. I still feel like I know very little. If my professor had given this project to a graduate student, he or she could have finished it in no more than two weeks. I've been at it for three weeks--and I just finished the pre-lab. But I'm very visibly making progress, and I'm so proud of that. I'm sure I'll know even more by the time this is over, and I'm really looking forward to that.