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Lauren’s Quotes #4

[9-18; 20-23] Two days after our anniversary, I got a really bad test score back, an 83.41, in fluid dynamics. And I thought I had done really well on that exam, so ah, because that sucks.

[188-199; 202-207] I think it’s an off semester for fluid dynamics, but it was still pretty big. We took over, not like one of the larger lecture halls in class, but it was a big lecture hall. I’ve talked with the teacher a couple of times. On my second test, I had two points marked off that I just had the equation re-arranged than how the teacher had it, like instead of plus X on the left hand side, I had minus X on the right hand side. When I went to go get points back, he was like, we can talk the rest of this over and see if there are any other mistakes. So, I ended up getting four points back instead of just the two I went in there expecting, which was pretty nice. He’s a really good teacher. And he really likes what he teaches, but his test have curve balls that come out of nowhere. But the class is really good. Well, he knows what he’s talking about. He’s not one of those teachers that’s like, uh. I don’t know, read the textbook. Because that’s always frustrating. Part of it is just he’s a really nice dude, and he gets really excited. I don’t know about you, but my favorite thing in the world is not how fast does water flow through the pipe in the sewer system, but he made it sound really interesting, and something that was worth learning

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Lauren’s Quotes #5

[237-242] Thermodynamics was the hardest class I have ever taken. The teacher is great. He’s like my favorite teacher this semester. However, he makes everything so hard and I swear, I spend more time doing homework and stuff for that class, than I do for all four of my other classes combined. I started studying for the exams three weeks before they happened, and I still did horrible on one. But I’m enjoying the class a bunch and I really like the teacher.

[244-246; 249-253; 259-262] Also, he announced today in the last day of classes, that he was switching from being an ME teacher to chemical engineering teacher. So, I’m sort of disappointed I’m not going to have more classes with him. I mean, his class is super hard, but I can say that everyone who hasn’t quit has learned a whole bunch. I definitely know a whole bunch more now that I’ve been through that class than I ever thought I would ever know about anything thermo dynamics. And he covers a whole bunch in such a little period of time which is probably why everything is so hard on the test and stuff. We do a bunch of example problems in the class. He does a lot of proofs for the equations and stuff that we use. And just in general, the homework may have something that we didn’t explicitly talk about in class, but it helps us understand how that thing is because we have to work through it.

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Lauren’s Quotes #7

[88-89; 128-134] In addition to coursework, I am an undergraduate researcher working with a professor who studies Nano-materials. The Professor is like my boss, I guess. He’s a dude who runs the whole lab, and he tells us like, hey, we’re going to work on this project, or we’re going to work on that project. But he was one of the people who went up to the national lab to do the measurements. In general, he’s the one that knows most of what he’s doing at the lab, because he’s actually a doctor. He’s actually got a doctorate. So yeah, he knows a bunch of stuff about magnetism and Nano-materials.

[96-103; 112-125] When I first started on the project, I read textbooks to try and understand what magnetism is and stuff, but since then, I’ve been working in the lab more, because the professor let me know that I understood the material good enough. Most of my role as a research assistant involves running simulations on my computer, just part of why getting a new computer was really great. Lately, I’ve been using a program called Riffle 1D that takes reflectometry data. We’re doing neutron scattering, so we’re bouncing a neutron off of a sample, and then seeing what it looks like on the other side. And that’ll get measurements from the depth of it and how far apart the things are on the sample. So, once we get the data from the reflectometry, we put it into Riffle 1D, and then we have a code that says which things will have a layer of silicon and then a layer of gadolinium and a layer of other elements. And eventually we’ll it with air at the very end. Riffle 1D does is it changes the parameters for the thing, so we’ll be like, hey, we think the silicon is an instrum tall. And then Riffle 1D will be like, hey, to make it match the reflectometry data, the silicon got to be like two instrums tall. But if what we put in originally doesn’t work with the data at all, I go through and I change it to try and see if I can get it to work at all. Yeah.

[431-433; 435-439] This research opportunity led to me receiving an internship offer to work at the national lab. The professor I work with in the lab mentioned how there was an internship at the national lab we collaborate with, the place he did the measurements, for experiments. He encouraged me to apply for the internship. I said, okay, I’ll do that. And so, I applied for it. And I got the job, the internship, the job, I’m going to be working on the same project that I’m doing here. So, I’m going to be doing it at the National lab, so I’ll be able to do some actual measurements, and not just do stuff on the computer.

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Lauren’s Quotes #8

[82-87; 112-118] This summer I spent a lot of time in a state in the mid-Atlantic during my internship. The internship was at a national research laboratory. It was a 12-week program where you go and you mentor underneath one of the researchers there. You work on one project over the summer. Because of my placement, I got to shoot neutron rays at these samples and see what happened to them. I got to analyze that, and it was really awesome and really cool. The people I worked were also amazing.

[163-169] Originally when I went in, I was scared of everyone including my mentor over the summer, even though I had previously talked with him. But I had never seen him face-to-face. I was like, “Oh, my god. These people are so smart and I’m going to say something dumb and they’re going to kick me out.” I mean they wouldn’t kick me out, but you get sort of terrified of that when you go into a situation like that in my opinion. But even if I asked the same question three times, they always explained it to me, which was really comforting.

[170-175] But just watching them be able to do their work, it was amazing. Even if I was helping out, it was crazy seeing how much more they could do. Originally I thought I wanted to go into industry, but just seeing how cool all of the research is, even not just this project I was on, but the projects my friends were working on, and the other projects my mentor was working on, it was amazing hearing everything about it. Just like they were all so smart and it was amazing.

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Lauren’s Quotes #10

[96-99] Then at the end of the internship, we had a really huge presentation. Getting ready for the presentation was absolutely terrifying, but I was still having a lot of fun working on it.

[211-217] For the presentation, we first had to write up I think a 300-word abstract. I remember everyone, at least in the room I was in, we all wrote up our abstracts and sent it to each other on Google Docs. We went through and we edited each other’s abstract. Someone would realize that you had a grammar error, and someone would be like, “This isn’t what the definition of this word is.” We all went through and we tried to make each other’s abstracts as good as they could be.

[218-224] Then the presentations, they were PowerPoint presentations. We, at least in the room I was in, we practiced our presentations with each other. While we were making the presentations, I could lean over to the person next to me and be like, “Hey, how does this look?” And they’d be like, “Hey, you need to move the picture. It’s too big.” Or something like that. We were just trying to make sure that everyone’s looked as good as it could, so we would all look good because we would all have amazing presentations.

[225-228] Then, when we were practicing our presentations, they would help with being like, “Hey, I don’t understand what this is. You need to explain this more.” Or, “Hey, you’re going way too fast. Breathe. Slow down. You have 15 minutes and you need to fill it.” We just supported each other.

[153-157] It was only that project that I did my presentation over. There were a bunch of scientists and people there watching and that’s what was so stressful because they were all really smart people with doctorates, or they were post-docs and stuff like that.

[514-521; 99] During my presentation, I was terrified that they would ask me a simple question and I would completely blank out. They may ask what’s a cell? And I’ll be like, “Oh, my god. What is a cell?” I was just sort of terrified of forgetting something simple and fundamental and looking like an idiot in front of all of these professional people. I wasn’t so scared that they would ask me a really complicated, in-depth question that I would forget. I felt like you would be more excused if you’re like, “Yeah, sorry. I’m an undergrad. I don’t know.” But I was just scared I would forget something simple. There was relief after the presentation. Ah, it’s done.

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Lauren’s Quotes #13

[296-304] The mechanisms professor doesn’t really do examples. He’ll go through it and prove it and then he’ll stop and say, “All right, find the equation in the textbook. I’m not going to do anything else.” He’ll just stop and tell us to look in the textbook. It’s like we constantly have to be pulling out our phones to pull up the textbook so that we can get that equation that we need to be able to solve problems. Because he just decides that he doesn’t want to give it to us. Even though a lot of times we have time at the end of class for him to write it down or tell it to us. So, he’ll release us early, like five or 10 minutes early a lot of times. But he just doesn’t consider that it’s worth his time to tell us the equations we need apparently.

[307-310] He’ll get right up to the step before you write down the equation, maybe say you’re trying to prove that C equals the square root of A squared plus B squared for a triangle. He’ll write down C squared equals A squared plus B squared. But he won’t give you that last step that you need.

[314-319] I typically already have the textbook pages that we need pulled up on my phone. As he’s going through his proofs, I’m scrolling through the pages so that I can make sure I’m getting everything written down as he tells us that we need it. And then besides that, I make sure I go through example problems that have stepped worked out, all of the steps worked out, so that I can know how to apply it if he skips over that stuff.

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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 #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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