Outreach: Why High School Teachers Matter

One of the materials science professional societies, ASM (which used to stand for the American Society of Metals, but now just stands for ASM), runs a series of camps for high school teachers to learn about materials science. It's a multi-year program, and for a week each year, they learn about some of the basics of MSE, and do experiments they can take back into their own classrooms. While the NSF Broader Impact criterion typically seem like they encourage K-12 outreach by working with students, I think working with the teachers can make more sense.

• Teachers are more enthusiastic and interested learners. If you have a group of 30 teachers, you have a group of 30 people who probably want to be there. If you have a group of 30 high schoolers, you probably have 2-3 who really want to be there, and at least one who would rather be *anywhere* else.

• One teacher reaches hundreds of students. Teaching 30 teachers about science, and what scientists do, potentially reaches thousands of kids over years. Working directly with students reaches those students, and  some of their peers. 

• Teachers can tie in new concepts into the curriculum much more effectively, because they know what else is actually covered.

This is not to say that I think we should stop running student-directed outreach in the slightest. Summer science camps are a fantastic thing, and many of my peers went into engineering because of similar experiences. It also gives kids a chance to explore an area that may not be feasible for their school to have a program in, due to demand/budget/classroom space. However, teaching teachers is a great way to reach a wider audience. For a field like MSE, which many students don't even know exists until partway through college (and some not  until they've graduated and gotten a job), having potentially interested kids know the field exists is a pretty good start.

Why I Majored in MSE

Ultimately, I probably ended up majoring in MSE because of noise induced hearing loss.

To back up a bit, my first instrument was the flute. As a fairly good flautist, I was occasionally asked to play piccolo. The problem with piccolos is that they are very high, very loud, and about four inches from your right ear. So when I started noticing that I only heard fire alarms in my left, I realized I should probably quit the piccolo, and took up french horn instead.

My parents were less than thrilled about buying me another instrument, so we compromised, and I got a budget that was the difference between my sisters violin and my flute. This was not a large number, so to eBay I went. The horn I ended up getting was a cheaper Chinese knock-off, but it had a lovely tone quality, even if the fingerings were all in the wrong key... However, after about a year, it started developing what is called "red rot", or dezincification, where the zinc leeches out of the brass alloy due to galvanic corrosion, leaving behind a porous copper matrix.  The galvanic corrosion was caused by poor manufacturing, where the insides of the tuning slides had been silver plated. When you added a conductive liquid (i.e., spit), a potential gradient forms, and the zinc preferentially oxides, leaving a white powdery substance on the slides (now... try explaining this one to airport security!)

In learning what the physical process of red rot was, I discovered the field of materials science, which encompassed most of the things I had already been interested in, but thought were called chemical engineering. I applied to colleges with the intent of studying metallurgy and acoustics, but soon discovered the incredible breadth of options under the MSE umbrella.

Materials science: because everything is made of something.