Album cover art?

Okay, of course it is, or else you wouldn’t hear people saying that all the time.

But skeptics, take it from me: research isn’t as drawn-out and repetitive as some people make it out to be.

I say this having worked in a materials science lab, both on a mechanical design and a strictly materials project, for just about half a year. In this field, it’s commonplace to have samples sitting in a furnace cooling down for over a week – measurements are complex and require many trials per growth – purity of your sample is left largely to chance – etc. Basically blows your chem lab class out of the water.

Preparation of a few samples for EDX (energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy), which helps determine overall sample composition. They’re all about 1mm square.

It adds up, in weeks and months, to the slow completion of a project.

What may come as a surprise is this: that’s not at all a bad thing.

Quite the opposite. Maybe I just don’t get out enough during the school year (free time of any quantity becomes rare on a weekly basis), but this summer has been the time of my life. I sleep better. I socialize more. I’ve even started a fairly rigorous exercise routine (another thing that gets pushed to the wayside during the school year), and rock climb on the side, in addition to resuming the personal projects I find important.

Now, that’s the easy stuff to understand: that’s living; it’s objectively fun, most would agree. Perhaps it’s a surprise that research allows you that, or perhaps not.

Here’s the shocker (not to me): In this field, where many stress the doldrums and repetition, I find myself doing highly varied work on a day-to-day and even hourly basis, which keeps me both engaged and happy, and all the nuances of which I am far from mastering. Work in this lab has taken me everywhere from highly-automated x-ray diffraction measurements (beautiful machines, by the way) to ludicrously small-scale tweezer work (I’m talking 50-micron gold wire). Everything has its own challenge.

There are those 50-micron wires (made wider by a coating of the silver adhesive). The scale is in quarter-millimeters (4x zoom.)

But there are great rewards. I won’t even go into the whole contributing-to-science aspect; on a purely personal level, there are accomplishments and highs that take you by surprise.

I’m a bit of a programming enthusiast. For years, it’s been a hobby; something I knew would eventually become useful, but hadn’t found an application for yet.

This summer has brought that to fruition: first in determining the temperature-dependence of a magnetic transition in the compound I’m studying, and secondly in distinguishing on a 0.02 Angstrom scale (0.1% of the measured quantity) between unit cell lengths of differently-doped versions of that crystal.

Hopefully that doesn’t sound like gibberish, because it’s really cool. In both cases, the data analysis was done via MATLAB scripts I wrote (from scratch.) Nothing too complicated, true (just some elementary signal analysis, filtering, and numerical methods), but nevertheless instrumental to my research – and I implemented it myself.

That’s the most invigorating part – when you realize your mentor has stepped back, and you have at least an elementary skill-set to start doing things yourself in a professional lab environment, making your own hours and prioritizing your own approaches. It’s a great feeling! – and you should try it.