During the process of planning my wedding and reading things about other's people's wedding planning, I am regularly thankful for all the maternal figures involved. My mother and step-mother both said "here's your budget: go plan a wedding that makes you happy". My soon-to-be mother-in-law has also been very relaxed about all of our choices.
I also realize I'm incredibly lucky to have my very own #scimom. Well, #STEMmom. Her degree is in mathematics and computer engineering, so she's a little bit of a mix. But as one of the earlier women in computer science, she has very likely faced many challenges from men who doubted her abilities over the years, but she never seemed to let it phase her. She took seven years away from her career until my sister and I were both in school, and my father quit his job to write his own drawing software. When she went back to work, she was quickly promoted for being that rare species of engineers: someone technically capable would could communicate very effectively with administrative people. However, she still does significant technical work regularly.
My sister and I were raised with the mindset of "You can do anything you put your decide to do and put in the effort to accomplish". However, unlike many women of the generation between my mother and I, we never got the message "in spite of everyone else". I've honestly always been a bit oblivious to sexism directed towards me. I assume I get asked secretary-type questions because a) I dress nicer than the average grad student, b) I'm at a desk with an open door, c)I don't look like English is my second or third language, and d) my apparent default facial expression is "How may I help you?" I've never attributed it specifically to my gender.
Once in awhile, I will look up, and suddenly realize I'm the only woman in the room. Even in materials science, which is much closer to gender parity than most engineering fields, it happens. This doesn't really bother me. I've been told I can seem very intimidating (I don't try... usually) or authoritative. This results in me getting asked if I'm in charge of events while 10 feet away from the person with the fancy badge. Generally, though, I'm just confident that I know what I am capable of and I know what I'm hopeless at. I also try and be aware of what other people are good at, so that I can either ask them for help, or direct others to them when asked for help I can't give. I most definitely got this sense of confidence from my mother, though. And I'm very, very thankful for it.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
Spiffy Material of the Indeterminate Time Period: Dry Ice
Unlike my previous post on graphene, a material with theoretical promise and some practical applications, I'd like to talk to you about something more fun: dry ice.
Recently, the experimentalist portion of my group was looking to form supercritical liquid CO2 in an autoclave, and before purchasing expensive pre-pressurizing equipment, wanted to try dry ice. Logistically, the easiest thing was for me to stop by a grocery store and pick some up. Unfortunately, the experiment failed, and I took the extra home, where I discovered Mr. ME had never played with it.Thus, I am reminded of it's basic spiffiness.
Dry ice is spiffy for a number of reason, but mostly, because it sublimates at standard temperature and pressure conditions. Sublimation means it skips directly from the solid phase to the gaseous phase, hence the name "dry" ice. If you live in a dry climate with decent sunlight, you can also observe the sublimation of snow (sunlight is necessary to reflect off the vapor and make it visible). It only happens in dry conditions, though, when the vapor pressure of water in the atmosphere is sufficiently low.
Phase diagrams for materials like dry ice describe the state of the materials as a function of temperature and pressure, as shown below. These diagrams are created by simultaneously solving the Gibb's energy equations for different structures and looking for boundary conditions where two or more phases are stable.
Sadly, personal experimentation has demonstrated that while it will not dilute your martini or whiskey, dry ice won't make it terribly chilled either. I suspect this is due to the Leidenfrost effect. I will just have to cave and order these.
Recently, the experimentalist portion of my group was looking to form supercritical liquid CO2 in an autoclave, and before purchasing expensive pre-pressurizing equipment, wanted to try dry ice. Logistically, the easiest thing was for me to stop by a grocery store and pick some up. Unfortunately, the experiment failed, and I took the extra home, where I discovered Mr. ME had never played with it.Thus, I am reminded of it's basic spiffiness.
Dry ice is spiffy for a number of reason, but mostly, because it sublimates at standard temperature and pressure conditions. Sublimation means it skips directly from the solid phase to the gaseous phase, hence the name "dry" ice. If you live in a dry climate with decent sunlight, you can also observe the sublimation of snow (sunlight is necessary to reflect off the vapor and make it visible). It only happens in dry conditions, though, when the vapor pressure of water in the atmosphere is sufficiently low.
Phase diagrams for materials like dry ice describe the state of the materials as a function of temperature and pressure, as shown below. These diagrams are created by simultaneously solving the Gibb's energy equations for different structures and looking for boundary conditions where two or more phases are stable.
Sadly, personal experimentation has demonstrated that while it will not dilute your martini or whiskey, dry ice won't make it terribly chilled either. I suspect this is due to the Leidenfrost effect. I will just have to cave and order these.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
From Academia, Looking Out
Unlike a very large number of graduate student, I'm not in a relationship with a fellow graduate student or with someone in a completely unrelated field. I am, in fact, engaged to a fellow engineer who is working in industry. Unlike many of my straight-into-graduate school peers, I have a pretty solid impression of the daily life of an entry level engineer. It's very interesting to compare the disparities between our routines and responsibilities, and compare what we actually are doing to what we were told as undergraduates.
For clarity, Mr.ME is a component release engineer for a large manufacturing corporation. He's very much on the practical side of things. I, on the other hand, do computation, making me very unpractical.
Mr. ME has at least one meeting daily. I have 1-2 meetings weekly. However, his meetings often involve decision-making. My meetings often involve my advisor going of on odd tangents (recent example: the history of VW Beetle, the properties of polar bear hair, and bicycling trips in central Illinois).
Mr. ME is responsible for quality control decisions that can shut down entire plants. He has a specific list of widgets he is directly responsible for, and a boss who gives him specific things to work on. Most days, my responsibilities are very unclear. My real responsibility is to myself, to make progress that I am happy with, in the absence of clear advisories directives. This is one of this biggest areas in which we find discrepancies from what "everyone" says things will be like. Going into industry, you're told to expect very little real responsibility and lots of drudge work and spread sheets. Going into graduate school, I was told that I would be working long hours on research, and on whatever my advisor told me to do.
Graduate students are assumed to be poorly paid, with horrible benefits and worse hours. While the hours have held true, Mr. ME's first job here paid less than I made, required him to go into work at 5:30AM every other Saturday, and had no benefits. That being said, his new job is much better on both fronts.
Looking out at industry, I sometimes long for the coherent since of direction, and real deadlines and responsibilities. On bad days, I remember about being paid time-and-a-half for overtime hours... On the other hand, I'm learning vast amounts, and I have much more flexibility in my hours and work. It's often up to me to find things to do, which can be problematic when key equipment is broken (like the login server...). I can be more confident in my decision to do graduate school, because I have a clearer view of the most probable alternative. There's still days when I question it all, but most of the time, I'm glad I'm here.
For clarity, Mr.ME is a component release engineer for a large manufacturing corporation. He's very much on the practical side of things. I, on the other hand, do computation, making me very unpractical.
Mr. ME has at least one meeting daily. I have 1-2 meetings weekly. However, his meetings often involve decision-making. My meetings often involve my advisor going of on odd tangents (recent example: the history of VW Beetle, the properties of polar bear hair, and bicycling trips in central Illinois).
Mr. ME is responsible for quality control decisions that can shut down entire plants. He has a specific list of widgets he is directly responsible for, and a boss who gives him specific things to work on. Most days, my responsibilities are very unclear. My real responsibility is to myself, to make progress that I am happy with, in the absence of clear advisories directives. This is one of this biggest areas in which we find discrepancies from what "everyone" says things will be like. Going into industry, you're told to expect very little real responsibility and lots of drudge work and spread sheets. Going into graduate school, I was told that I would be working long hours on research, and on whatever my advisor told me to do.
Graduate students are assumed to be poorly paid, with horrible benefits and worse hours. While the hours have held true, Mr. ME's first job here paid less than I made, required him to go into work at 5:30AM every other Saturday, and had no benefits. That being said, his new job is much better on both fronts.
Looking out at industry, I sometimes long for the coherent since of direction, and real deadlines and responsibilities. On bad days, I remember about being paid time-and-a-half for overtime hours... On the other hand, I'm learning vast amounts, and I have much more flexibility in my hours and work. It's often up to me to find things to do, which can be problematic when key equipment is broken (like the login server...). I can be more confident in my decision to do graduate school, because I have a clearer view of the most probable alternative. There's still days when I question it all, but most of the time, I'm glad I'm here.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
IMMD: Validation!
Sometimes, you run across a single sentence that seems to justify the path you've taken in your analysis. In my case, it's this sentence from the 6th edition of Undergraduate Experimental Analysis:
"The amount of radiation absorbed is proportional to the square of the rate of change of the dipole during the vibration."
Yep. That sentence totally made my day, and validated ~6 months of debate with my co-authors.
"The amount of radiation absorbed is proportional to the square of the rate of change of the dipole during the vibration."
Yep. That sentence totally made my day, and validated ~6 months of debate with my co-authors.
How Advisors Are Not Like Bosses
In a number of very critical ways, being a grad student is not the same as having a job. One of these is the difference between your advisor and your boss.
Academia is a weird place sometimes, and part of that is due to the organizational structure. Superficially, it's not a terribly odd organizational chart, but many times, the actual nature of the relationships in academia is fundamentally different than the analogous relationship in industry.
Difference #1: Deadlines
Graduate school is sometimes a strange limbo of hazy requirements with no firm timeline. Other times, there are firm deadlines, but these are somewhat sporadic. Your advisor is not going to stop by your desk and say "I need the report for the widget on Tuesday for the division meeting." (most of the time).
Difference #2: Performance Reviews
In graduate school, it is unlikely that you will ever sit down for a formal performance review with your advisor until it's approaching time for your defense or unless your professor spent time in industry. More importantly (from the grad student side), you will also never review your advisor's performance. Some larger corporations have a system from underlings to review their managers. Grad students don't have this sort of mechanism, so we resort to whining on the internet.
Difference #3: Advice
Advisors, at least in theory, are there to help give you advice about how to advance your career and achieve your goals. While there are managers who do this, it's not strictly speaking part of their job. Of course, there are also advisors who aren't very good at this, but it's in the title...
Difference #4: Dependancy
If your manager quits, gets fired, or moves to a new position, this means you get a new manager, but may very well still be working on similar projects, and things are relatively stable (assuming everything goes smoothly). Having an advisor quit, move, or get fired can be much more difficult. You're typically required to have someone advising your research, and if you're very far into your project, switching advisors could very well entail losing years of work. If your advisor is moving, you might be able to follow them, but that's not an easy proposition in most cases.
You also very likely depend directly on your advisor for funding and access to resources. There's not someone above them you can go to (i.e., your boss's boss) when you need order forms signed and they're out of town. The independence of your position is much murkier: you don't work for Corporation or University, you work for Advisor at University. Different schools may also deal with this differently, adding to the confusion.
------------------------------------
I'm sure there are plenty more differences, and that there are special cases that disagree with every point I've made above, but in my humble experience and observation, these generally have been true.
Academia is a weird place sometimes, and part of that is due to the organizational structure. Superficially, it's not a terribly odd organizational chart, but many times, the actual nature of the relationships in academia is fundamentally different than the analogous relationship in industry.
Difference #1: Deadlines
Graduate school is sometimes a strange limbo of hazy requirements with no firm timeline. Other times, there are firm deadlines, but these are somewhat sporadic. Your advisor is not going to stop by your desk and say "I need the report for the widget on Tuesday for the division meeting." (most of the time).
Difference #2: Performance Reviews
In graduate school, it is unlikely that you will ever sit down for a formal performance review with your advisor until it's approaching time for your defense or unless your professor spent time in industry. More importantly (from the grad student side), you will also never review your advisor's performance. Some larger corporations have a system from underlings to review their managers. Grad students don't have this sort of mechanism, so we resort to whining on the internet.
Difference #3: Advice
Advisors, at least in theory, are there to help give you advice about how to advance your career and achieve your goals. While there are managers who do this, it's not strictly speaking part of their job. Of course, there are also advisors who aren't very good at this, but it's in the title...
Difference #4: Dependancy
If your manager quits, gets fired, or moves to a new position, this means you get a new manager, but may very well still be working on similar projects, and things are relatively stable (assuming everything goes smoothly). Having an advisor quit, move, or get fired can be much more difficult. You're typically required to have someone advising your research, and if you're very far into your project, switching advisors could very well entail losing years of work. If your advisor is moving, you might be able to follow them, but that's not an easy proposition in most cases.
You also very likely depend directly on your advisor for funding and access to resources. There's not someone above them you can go to (i.e., your boss's boss) when you need order forms signed and they're out of town. The independence of your position is much murkier: you don't work for Corporation or University, you work for Advisor at University. Different schools may also deal with this differently, adding to the confusion.
------------------------------------
I'm sure there are plenty more differences, and that there are special cases that disagree with every point I've made above, but in my humble experience and observation, these generally have been true.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Working Hours
As the semester has ended, and I no longer have an 8am class, I find my arrival time in the morning drifting later, even though I'm still waking up at the same time. Part of this is wedding preparations, since I spend some of my time in the morning taking care of details. The other part is related to advice I was given by my corporate internship supervisor: "If you can't control what time you leave in the evening, you can at least control what time you show up in the morning".
My internship was in the non-destructive evaluation group, which meant more often than not, around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, someone would show up and drop a problem on his desk. At this particular office, the typical working hours were 7:30 to 4, so this meant people would stop by on their way out the door, often with some sort of request for "can you have this done by ___?". Since no one ever seemed to have problems first thing in the morning, my supervisor had decided that rather than constantly working significant amounts of overtime, he would simply shift his schedule and show up late.
My current advisor is *not* a morning person. Consequently, I usually don't see him until 2 at earliest, and more often, not until 5... at which point he'll have a list of things he wants done by the "end of the day". So in an effort to have more control over how many hours I'm in the office, I will be experimenting with taking that advice.
Do your boss/advisor's hours affect when you work?
My internship was in the non-destructive evaluation group, which meant more often than not, around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, someone would show up and drop a problem on his desk. At this particular office, the typical working hours were 7:30 to 4, so this meant people would stop by on their way out the door, often with some sort of request for "can you have this done by ___?". Since no one ever seemed to have problems first thing in the morning, my supervisor had decided that rather than constantly working significant amounts of overtime, he would simply shift his schedule and show up late.
My current advisor is *not* a morning person. Consequently, I usually don't see him until 2 at earliest, and more often, not until 5... at which point he'll have a list of things he wants done by the "end of the day". So in an effort to have more control over how many hours I'm in the office, I will be experimenting with taking that advice.
Do your boss/advisor's hours affect when you work?
Friday, May 20, 2011
I'm now officially a Twit. Well, at least my blogging pseudonym now is. I refuse to get a personal Tiwtter at this point, because I'm already overwhelmed by the number of tweets Mr. ME reads me from mutual friends, let alone reading more of them...
On the other hand, all the cool kids are doing it?
@MissMSE
On the other hand, all the cool kids are doing it?
@MissMSE
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