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Lauren’s Quotes #14

[366-370] The first part of the CAD and Manufacturing, which we finished, was manufacturing. We talked about all sorts of different modes of manufacturing. The main two modes that we talked about were plastics and metals and injection molding and stuff like that for plastics. It was mostly casting and again, more molding for the metals. Now, we’re into the CAD portion of the class.

[371-375] On that first project that I mentioned was where we were designing a very simple thing like the wrench in CAD. The second project was more complicated. We designed a bike in CAD. Next, we’re going to be using CAD for analysis of a thing, not sure exactly what we’re doing with that because we just started talking about it yesterday. But we’re going to be analyzing things with CAD.

[378-382] All of the projects in that class, I believe, are solo. But you’re allowed to work with someone, like hey, if your friend is also designing a bike, y’all can work together to be like, “Hey, this is how we would make handlebars.” You can’t submit the same project. But you can help each other out. He’s perfectly fine with that.

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Lauren’s Quotes #15

[455-461] As far as my research, none of my classes really line up with the research that I’m doing. I’d say that the closest one is my lab class because I have to write lab reports for that. Writing a paper for the lab is like the closest I am going to get to my classes this semester. But next semester I signed up for a magnetism class as an elective. I might have a step ahead in the magnetism portion. But as of right now, none of my classes really have anything to do with what I’m doing with my work.

[466-476] Since none of my courses align with the research, when I first started doing the simulations, I sat next to my boss and watched what he did for the simulations. Then took notes from what he was doing so that I would be able to run the simulation. But during my internship over the summer, I still had a really basic idea of what the OOMF software was. But one of the people at my internship is someone who programmed the OOMF software. I’d go down to his office and be like, “Please help me. I don’t understand what this his.” He would explain how to do the thing in OOMF. Occasionally I still email him and be like, “Hey, so this thing, how does it work?” He made the program, so he knows everything about it. It was a combination of watching other people and then having someone who knows a lot about the program being able to help me when I needed it.

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Lauren’s Quotes #16

[413-420] The paper that I’m on, I didn’t actually do any of the writing for it. I just did some simulation work for it. But my name got put on the paper. The project I did over the summer was the skyrmions and modeling them. I’m going to be helping one of my coworkers write that paper. He’s a grad student in the lab I’m in. But because I did all of the modeling work and then I’ll be helping write that because I’m that one that knows what I did. While he doesn’t know as much what I did. So, my name’s going to be on that paper, too.

[423-435] We have three graduate students in my lab. One of them started just recently, this semester. I haven’t really interacted with him much because it’s his first semester as a grad student, he’s mostly doing classes and stuff, I think. But the other two I have been working with since I got to the lab. One of them isn’t working on the same projects that I am, but if I have a question about some simple magnetism things, he can typically tell me an answer. Then the other one is the one I’m going to be working on the paper with. We’re working on the same project. I interact with him the most, even though our class schedules don’t line up all that well. We typically leave notes for each other. I’ll be like, “Hey, I re-ran the simulation and here are the changes. Here’s the data so that you can look at it.” And then he’ll leave me a note and be like, “Hey, can you change the exchange energy, make it higher so that we can see if that helps make it better?”

[597-603] Overall, it was fun doing something new for research. My skyrmions and my gadolinium iron sample. That was mine. It was new. No one else had looked at it yet. I’m sure people had looked at gadolinium iron before, but not the same that I had. Once I get the paper out, more people are going to build off of that. It’s different than, “Hey, I made a cool new bike pedal.” And then someone else being like, “I added ridges to the bike pedal. Isn’t it cooler?” It seems more awesome when it’s something completely new.

[701-709] However, before the summer, before I really started in the lab that I’m in, I was totally just believing I would finish my undergrad and then get a job and then work until I retired. But over the summer and doing research and being involved in that has definitely made me lean more towards going into research, which would mean going into more school. Because it was definitely something I enjoyed and found interesting and would be happy doing in life. My classes so much this year, they’re just sort of classes I need to continue on to next semester where I’ll have some more fun ones. They’re just a steppingstone to continuing.

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Lauren’s Quotes #17

[7-11] During the beginning of winter 2019, it was nothing really positive or negative that I can really remember about it until finals, because finals always suck. My sister got to visit me where I live. She’s 10, so she’s really small, and was super excited and it was fun to bring her around where I live now.

[11-13] Then, when I returned back to school for the Spring semester, nothing really happening for a while. And then we took this test in one of my classes, and it was super sucky and super hard, and I got a horrible grade, and I was really sad about it.

[31-37] The horrible grade I received on an exam was a take-home exam. It was supposed to take 20 to 30 hours, throughout an entire week. So, everyone worked on it for a bunch of time, and was doing a lot for it. And it was a lot of working out, deriving equations on a piece of paper, and then typing them out into Matlab. And so, I’ve looked back over the exam since then, and the whole reason I got a horrible grade on it was because when I was typing it in incorrectly. I put a negative where it was supposed to be a positive, and it made all of my equations wrong. And so, everything ended up being wrong, and it was really sucky that was such a small mistake, and then I got a really bad grade.

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Lauren’s Quotes #18

[53-57] Aside from the machine design course, I only have two other engineering classes, and musicology. Musicology is an Arts and Humanities class. It’s been just pretty easy. One of the engineering classes is Heat Transfer. I had Thermodynamics a year ago, and that class was pretty difficult, but it was the teacher I had picked. It was very difficult with his grading, but you learned a lot. And now in Heat Transfer, I’ve got an easier teacher who grades easier, but he’s still doing really well with teaching everything.

[78-83] The professor is good at teaching because he works a lot of examples out in class typically, and I find that useful. His PowerPoints are well laid out, so he doesn’t have to go backwards and forwards all the time. And for the homework problems that we have, he gives us hints for them. So, the homework problems are typically really challenging and more difficult than the exam problems are, but he’ll give us tips and tricks on how to work them in class, so that we can figure it out. And because it’s more difficult than the exam problems, if you know how to work the homework problems, then you’re going to do well on the exam.

[111-114] The class is comprised of mostly lectures, but we had one lab where we took apart a rice cooker to determine how it worked. And then we’re going to have a paper in the next couple weeks, but I don’t really have much information on that yet. So, it’s got a couple of cool hands-on… like, it had a really cool hands-on thing. But it’s mostly just lectures.

[118-123] The rice cooker project involved using two class periods, longer class periods that are an hour and a half each, and we took apart a rice cooker. I don’t know how much you know about the inside of a rice cooker, but they have magnets in them, because we were doing this during the magnetism chapter. So, I took the magnets out, and we used reflectometry and microscopy to try and determine what type of materials were in the magnet. And that’s what we’re going to be writing a report on is, what the magnet was like in there, and how that affects how the rice cooker is able to function.

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Lauren’s Quotes #19

[128-131] In addition to coursework, I’m still a research assistant. I’m actually going to be on a published research paper pretty soon for a project that I did some simulations for. That should be coming out in the next month or so. And then I’m also working on helping write another paper for some work I’ve been doing on high entropy alloys lately. So, it’s going pretty well. And I’m really excited about it.

[135-144] So for the paper that’s about to be published, all I did was run some simulations. So, the only person I personally worked with was my boss, who gave me the assignment. But there’s some other people on it that I don’t really know. I’m just sort of a footnote in it. For the high entropy alloy paper, I’ve mostly been working with my boss, one of my co-workers, and then there’s another lab on my campus that’s been trying to do some machine learning on our high entropy alloy sample that we have, to try and have a computer guess […] well I guess not guess, but like learn, where different properties of the material will happen in different parts of the film that we had built. So, I’ve been doing that, and I haven’t really had a part in the machine learning thing, because I don’t know much about machine learning myself. I’ve mostly been taking samples from our thin film, measuring magnetic properties, and plotting it out and pulling data from the graphs that we have.

[173-176] In addition to data collection, I will be helping to write the paper, and then I’m also making the majority of the figures that we have for the paper. So, I’m the one that made most of the graphs already. So, I’m the one that’s able to quickly […] and be like, “Oh, I know exactly where that is in all of the files,” and pull it out and put it into a picture. And I’ll be helping with writing a little bit.

[193-196] As far as my research, I would say it’s mostly learning from the professor I work with, but I have read a couple of papers here and there, to learn some stuff on my own. But most times when I’m told to do something, like if I don’t know what it is, the professor will go through and be like, “Hey, yep. Here’s what it is. There you go. You’re all good.”

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Lauren’s Quotes #20

[228-237] Yeah, so my principal investigator was the one who offered me the research position. I didn’t go and ask for it. He offered it to me after I had been in one of his classes. I asked a bunch of questions in class and stuff that, and so he thought I would do well in research, and so he offered the research position to me. Not December 2019, but December 2018, so I started there January 2019. And since then, he’s been the one to like […] he’s a new professor at my school. I had him for his first semester there. So, he’s been working on getting the lab set up. So, I’ve heard from other people that new professors work more closely with their students than older professors who have been around for longer. So that might be part of why he helps out so much. But yeah, he’s the one that offered me the job, and then got me set up. And then he’s the one that’s helped out a bunch on figuring out everything, because I don’t have a background in magnetism, and I barely knew anything about it before I started.

[251-260] Here’s one that really introduced me to magnetism, because I didn’t, again, I didn’t really have a background to it. So he started off with giving me a textbook on introductory magnetism to read, to get a background on a bunch of different things. And then once I had read that and had asked all of my questions about everything, I started helping out with the lab. And as we came across topics, I would ask a question, and he would be okay with […] like, he would answer it almost immediately. So, say I didn’t know […] I’m going back to Curie temperature again, because it’s the thing on top of my mind. So say I didn’t know what that was, and he was talking about it, and being like, “Hey, you’re going to pull the Curie temperature off these graphs,” I could go and I could ask like, “What’s the Curie temperature?” And he would give a really good explanation right away, to be able to answer the questions that I had. It’s just been that way with everything.

[262-265] Then before going to the lab last summer, he was the one that was like, “Hey, here’s the project you’re going to be working on, and here’s the background info you need to know.” So, I didn’t really […] I wasn’t the one who started that conversation. He was the one that started it, so that I wouldn’t be confused when I got there.

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Lauren’s Quotes #21

[14-19] Then after spring break, that’s when everything went down. My classes, they all got canceled and moved online because of the pandemic. My apartment got hit by a tree recently, so now I’m staying with my boyfriend’s family right now. And then my family has been exposed to the virus, and that’s kind of sucky, because my father’s immunocompromised.

[300-301] I mean, it’s also kind of sucky not being able to go and see my friends on campus anymore, because of everything happening.

[362-364] So, this semester, I’ve only really interacted with my teachers. I had a meeting with my advisor. You have to do one once a year. Teachers and my advisor are all I’ve really interacted with this semester.

[370-377; 383-385; 395-397] As far as my peers, I definitely had been interacting with other students a lot more. Three of us were in a little group together. So, I had the most knowledge about magnetism out of the three of us, but when the teacher started talking about chemistry terms or something, all three of us were sitting there like, “What’s chemistry?” However, since we transitioned online, I haven’t really worked with my peers online all that much. Or at all.

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Lauren’s Quotes #22

[292-298] Since we transitioned to online course, I absolutely hate it. I concentrate so much better when they’re actually there in front of me. So, I’ve had to really work hard at not being distracted by a video game, or a good book on my desk that’s sitting there. And I’m ready to go back to normal classes when it hopefully, you know, that I’ll be back for the fall. On my phone, I had to set up a productivity app that would stop me from my going onto social media during class, because it so much easier when the teacher wasn’t there in front of me. So, I kept on going, being like, “Oh, it won’t matter if I just scroll a little bit,” and then it’ll be like, “Oh no, I missed like half the class.”

[306-312] In addition to coursework, I have to conduct research remotely as well. During spring break, I had to help him set the lab up to be totally remote work. I had already tested all of my samples. I was just working on pulling data from everything and helping write the paper. So, all of my work was already on a computer. It was just making it so that I could access it from anywhere and help the other people in the lab access it from anywhere. So, I mean, for me, it’s going on as it does normally, just like I’m not in the lab working on the computer. Which again, productivity issues, it’s so much easier to get distracted when you’re in the comfort of your own home.

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Lauren’s Quotes #23

[444-447] Once classes end, I plan to continue doing research. Hopefully I can go to the lab this summer, you know, depending it’s not canceled. If it is canceled, I’ve already worked it out with my boss. I can still work in the lab over the summer. So, I can continue doing research, just, it won’t be at a really cool lab.

[452-458] The more I do research, the more I want to do it for a living, because it is really fun figuring something out, and like, in the works I’m trusting. And typically, there’s more than one project going on, so if I get annoyed and not making any progress with the thing I’m working on, I can go and help someone else with their thing. Or sit there and be the rubber duck as they explain how it works to me. So, if they can figure something out themselves. You know, there’s just always something going on, so it’s less likely to be bored. And I enjoy it, and I think I would want to do it for the future.

[462-464] It’s not set in stone yet, but I do think I would like to go to grad school so that I could do research for a living. Maybe not in magnetism forever. Maybe I’ll find something else that I really like to do, but I am enjoying the research, and I think I want to continue doing that during my career.

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