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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 #9

[522-530] My internship was also mostly scary because one, I had never been to the state before. Two, I didn’t have my car, so I walked to work and eventually got a ride from one of my coworkers. I was scared that they would look down on me, too. Sometimes, I don’t often have a country accent, but sometimes I have a Southern accent. At one point someone pointed out that I say “iron” weird. I-R-O-N. I was also sort of scared that they would see me as dumb just because sometimes I have a Southern accent because I grew up in the South. I didn’t want to look stupid is basically the whole point. But I was scared. I just didn’t want to be stupid.

[183-192] I’m not a biology person, but half of my peers studied biology or stuff like that. And half of us were assigned to physics-based projects, which is what I was on. Even with talking with the biology-ish people about their projects, we were able to help them out like, “Hey, did you think to do this?” They would put forth good input when we were talking about problems with our projects. I still talk with them even though they’re all over the US now. We’re not together, but we still talk to each other. We have a group chat. Someone the other day posted a picture and was like, “Hey, we did this.” Because they had learned about something we had done in their class.

[197-207] At the laboratory, we all did experiments with neutrons. We all had either reflectometry or SANS, which is Small Angle Neutron Scattering data. There are certain ways that you can look at the data. I was looking at data for magnetism stuff mostly. I had learned some tips or tricks with maybe the small square to get it to show the magnetism data. One of my friends would be like, “Hi, I don’t understand what this is.” And I would be like, “Hey, that looks like the [inaudible 00:16:11] from my data. Let’s click here and see what happens.” Or sometimes it was just like, “Hey, did you think to rotate the sample?” If you hadn’t rotated it and you were wondering why you couldn’t see anything, sometimes it would just be there was a commonsense thing. Just you didn’t think of that approach.

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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 #11

[590-594] Overall, my experience at the research laboratory and experiencing the research made me want to do research more in life before I went there. I definitely have been considering doing research for a job. Designing something… designing it, researching it, testing it, writing a paper on it. That’s more of what I want to do now. It was so enjoyable.

[584-587] It was less engineering at the research laboratory than more research. Yeah, sure people had engineering degrees, but they were doing science and research. I don’t feel like I earned an engineering star and a pat on the back. It’s more like a research star and a pat on the back.

[232-237] However, transitioning back to school was miserable because I had three days between when I finished my internship to move into my apartment. Then school started. It was just stressful trying to get all of my furniture moved in, and then unpacked and everything cleaned. And making sure I had paper and pencils and stuff for school. There just wasn’t enough time. If I had had a couple more days, it wouldn’t have been as miserable.

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Lauren’s Quotes #12

[242-249] This semester I am taking 15 hours. I have four classes Monday, Wednesday, Friday. One class on Tuesday. A lecture and a lab on Thursdays. Both of those two really bad weeks, the four classes I have Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, they all have a big thing happening. My classes are Mechanisms, Numerical Analysis, System Dynamics, and Manufacturing CAD class.

[256-264] The first one, it was three tests and one project. My Mechanisms, System Dynamics, and Manufacturing and Auto Disc classes, they all had a test. Then also my Manufacturing and CAD class had also had a project due on that same week. The teacher had planned it so that the one class that had both the test and a project. The test was on Monday and the project was on Friday. There was plenty of time between the two, because it wasn’t a huge project. But it was still a lot in one week. But the other classes, one of the tests was on Wednesday and one of them was on Monday. I mean it wasn’t all due in one day, but it was still really sucky that you had four things due in one week.

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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 #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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