year one.

I forgot that this was still in my drafts folder....so here are some year 1 reflections, just a couple weeks late!
---------------
Give or take a few days, it has been one year since I began graduate school - wow.

Though I've shared most of what has occurred over the past year, I've learned some valuable lessons, many, unfortunately, the hard way. Between TAing, research, classes, homework, and commuting more than a few blocks, I'm so happy just to make it to this day. The transition between undergrad and graduate school was tougher than I envisioned, but I'm not sure exactly why.

Maybe it was the expectations of those who I respect and needed to work well with?  I just realized recently that I always get nervous before meetings with my professor because I always feel like I'm headed into an oral test. and I never feel like I do well when I leave. (Though, about two weeks ago, I finally finished the first meeting with my advisor without feeling like I failed my test!)

Maybe it was trying to get a new project off the ground with the weight of it being my entire thesis hanging over my head. New projects at NASA always had an end date - I couldn't work on it past my 10 wk internship and typically nobody continued my projects into the fall, so if it didn't work, oh well! Now, if something doesn't work, it means I may not graduate in the time I have remaining on my funding.

Maybe it was because my head knew that public school undergrads were different from my private school undergrads, but my heart didn't get the message - it was difficult to see the students not care and remain disengaged with the material of the courses I TAed for the whole quarter. This one aspect that turns me off of teaching for a career - how do you work with students who just don't want to be there? (yes, I know it happens at schools like SPU, but it wasn't as obvious to me. They at least knew they were paying lots of money, so some effort was required.) I respect great teachers all the more, as I know they work hard to keep their courses interesting and engaging for all levels of students.

Maybe it was the giant qualifying exam I faced right before the new school year started - memorizing has never been my strong suit and I literally memorized a textbook. This one, in fact:

(I think I actually realized at that moment that my sound was on in the super quiet reading room in the library - whoops! It still expresses the overwhelming task memorizing 700+ pages of information!) It was not small task - the test itself lasted ~4.5 hours :/ (However, I just found out that I squeezed by and passed the exam! Yay for not having to re-take it!) Since I've checked off all my core coursework, the next step is will be to give an presentation (followed by an oral examination via questions) and then I will actually be an official PhD candidate. Fingers crossed that goes well, it will hopefully happen in the next few months!

So, yeah, overall - it was a rough transition. But at the same time, I do really like my project, I like what I'm learning, MSE is definitely where I'm supposed to be, and I'm super super excited that I'm now fully funded through one of NASA's graduate research programs! (the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship, to be precise). I love the flexibility of graduate school and I'm finally starting to get trained on a bunch of instruments, so my research is becoming increasingly more interesting. I'm trying to capitalize on my current enthusiasm and work a bit longer hours to get more things completed :) Only taking one class is also totally awesome. I'm not looking forward to home-work laden classes again, though I know there are a few more to come.

I'm still not sure where I want to work for a career, though I feel like I'm asked that quite consistently - industry, academia, and a government lab are all still options :) Finally, this year has started off much, much better and I can only express my sincerest thanks to all of my friends and family members, close-by and far off for putting up with me and helping to keep me sane last year!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Hej!

Hej! Tack! Hej dä!
Hello! Thanks! Goodbye!


This past Monday, I began taking Swedish language classes. The above is about all I learned - and I even had to look up goodbye in my text... Why take Swedish? Because I'm hopefully traveling there next summer (or maybe the summer after that) to work with a collaborator! There is a professor at KTH, the technical university in Stockholm, who is developing a system that I want to use and/or replicate. Well, and going to Sweden is cool and my advisor believes that each student should spend some time abroad, learning to work with scientists on a global level :)

KTH in the summer sunshine

Anyways, I'm sure that the students and professors at KTH will speak English with me, however I firmly believe that I'll get more out of my experience in a foreign country if I can understand some of the language. I didn't really want to take a course at my university, partially because it meets every day at 9:30am for an hour, but also because I don't need to take it at the university level to achieve my goals. Fortunately for me, Seattle has a large scandinavian population and we have a great Swedish Cultural Center! I found out that they offer inexpensive, low-key classes that meet one evening a week. Perfect for me and I'll be able to continue to take courses throughout the school year, hopefully gaining some basic conversational skills. So far the pronunciation hasn't been too tricky, but I've never tried a germanic language before (I've tried learning Spanish and French previously) so I know things will come up that I'll find difficult. The most interesting thing I learned in day one was that there are no verb endings! All verbs stay the same, regardless of case, and are differentiated by the pronouns that precede them. Which is only a bummer because when learning other languages, verb conjugations are my strongest point in the whole course, thanks to my Latin background - where all we basically did for 1.5 years was conjugate verbs! 

Isn't Stockholm colorful?! 

I'm also excited that Stockholm is a port city with many ferries to outlying islands. That's one thing I love about living in Seattle - the easy access to water and islands in the sound, San Juans, and Canada. I'm keeping my fingers tightly crossed that it all works out for me to travel to Sweden for the whole summer, goodness knows I will also check out as much of the rest of Europe as I can!

Fellowships! Yes - that's plural!

Long story short - last Friday I was awarded a second fellowship, this time from NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist. It's a newer fellowship, as the first class of fellows was selected last year. Now I had a choice between NASA and NSF for my PhD funding - which is a position I was thankful to be in - not many people get offered one fellowship, let alone two! Here are the fellowship stats:

NSF:
30k/yr stipend
All my tuition covered
Health Insurance
3 year duration

NASA
36k/yr stipend
$10,000 towards tuition
$1,000 towards health insurance
$9,000 for research supplies
$10,000 for relocation and housing while at a NASA center or other government lab during the summers
4 year duration

What to choose?! After some long email chains and lots of short-term stress, I think the university will cover the remainder of my NASA tuition, like they would if I had taken NSF. Monetary issues aside, the NASA Fellowship is doubly great because it has the summer opportunities built in - basically I have extra funding to go to each place I already wanted to go: NREL, Sweden and a NASA center. With NSF, I would have had to find more funding to get to NREL or Sweden and probably would not have gotten back to a NASA Center. While it was a surprisingly nerve-wracking choice in the end and I didn't tell NSF 'no' until the very last minute, I'm excited to say that I'm staying in the NASA Education Pipeline and am now one of the NASA Space Technology Research Fellows!

{side note: I love all of these prints from the who-knows-what-they-actually-are website Wander}

blessings abounding

really I should be asleep at this point in the evening. but if I had gone to sleep 10 minutes ago, I wouldn't have seen one of the most exciting emails come in:

I was awarded an NSF Fellowship!!!!!!!!!

After waiting for over 4 months, finally got word that my proposal was reviewed favorably and that I have funding for at least the next three years. I'm still waiting on the other 7-ish fellowship programs to get back to me, but it is incredibly relieving to have a secure funding option. And it might solve my summer funding issues - apparently I can start receiving the grant money as early as June 1st. Need to discuss this with my advisor, of course :)

Getting this is so affirming in many aspects - that I can write a decent proposal, that my science is innovative, and that people other than me,  my advisor and my friends believe that investing in me as a scientist is a positive thing. (I'll be honest though, no scholarship/fellowship notification has yet to top my NASA MUST email. That was seriously one of the best moments ever. Could be that I'm just tired now and all my excitement chemicals are suppressed....)

I'm still waiting expectantly to hear back from some solar/tech companies I applied to for the summer (the one Seattle company turned me down), but this NSF news is just so wonderful.

because it's 1am and I don't have any 'excited face' pictures on my computer (though this might suffice), please enjoy this adorable kitty:

{usually my eyes get all squinty when I have a large smile....}

MORE exiting news from the past week - I was accepted into the UW Nanotechnology PhD program! Which, yes, means that I'll kind of have two doctorates at the end of the day :) I'll be honest - the program seems more like a 'certification' or 'specialization' than a whole second PhD - but who am I to complain?). My full degree will be a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering and Nanotechnology. Isn't that a mouthful?!

oh yes, and I passed my solar cells class with a way higher-than-expected grade! 

and my lab is basically now set up! (yay for lab work!)

and I get to go to a climbing comp saturday! 

wow wow wow. so blessed. 

fine. and other words.

lately, I've noticed a pattern in my response to the questions "how are you doing today?" or "how was your day?" Mainly, that I just respond with "fine," regardless of who asks the question. I'm tired of only saying 'fine', but I also don't even know how to articulate my emotions and perspective to myself, let alone to others. So, I guess until I find new words, 'fine' will have to suffice.

on a lighter note, I recently found a site called Futility Closet, which is just full of funny/random things, and they had great section called 'language,' where I found the following words:

cunctator - n. a procrastinator.

perpilocutionist - n. one who expounds on a subject of which he has little knowledge.

charrette - n. a final, intensive effort.

apricity - n. the warmth of the sun in winter.

though they are not adjectives, I feel like all four words describe me/my life in recent times.

yes, sometimes I even feel like a perpilocutionist when I talk about solar cells. I know (most of) the words, but am still nailing down true understanding. (also - anyone know how to pronounce that word? or any of those words??)

-------

Unrelated to the words theme, but I always find it funny when sites like xkcd or phdcomics have cartoons that so elegantly illustrate situations I am currently experiencing. This one for example, published this past Monday, has been my life for the past half a week with my mathematica solar cells homework:

what actually happend on my 'winter' break

I fall into the red slice of the pie chart

(just found this today, so appropriate)

read one book

got ~1/3 of my sweater knitted

slept

everything else is still on my to-do-eventually list.

{art + friends = balance}

it's been four really really long days. and it's the first four days of the quarter.

mostly, I've been dealing with my new TA assignment all week. Due to poorly written lab handouts, I've spent time going physically through the labs myself, trying to decipher what the instructor intended. Fortunately, my chemistry background has made this a bit easier, as my MSE lab is basically a chem lab. It's been really interesting seeing how much the students don't remember about chemistry. I've been giving them a bit of grace, remembering that they only have had two quarters of gen chem, two years ago, but I'm going to have them watch this video before coming into lab next....

It even has fun music!

But, today is Saturday - woke up to my alarm at 8:40am, freaked out for a moment, said "kali - it's 8:40!" thinking she was late to work, and then remembered it was saturday (sorry for waking you up...)

Today was SAM day with Sarah! She's off to Indonesia with the Peace Core soon and I'm trying to keep good balance in my life by taking time for non-school related activities, so we bussed downtown to the SAM to see the 'Art of Asia' exhibit.

I really enjoyed the art on display, as I love asian art. There was an interesting mix of cultures represented, though ironically, no Indonesian art. As I am both a font and textile geek, I loved all the tapestries and scrolls. Apparently the following is the most important important scroll in the SAM collection:

Most interesting was the description that the characters can show excitement, exuberance, and even be a small surprise as you're reading - that is definitely more emotion than can come across in this very straight and proper Arial font....even modern calligraphy doesn't convey much emotion.

The textiles were fascinating, including the summer robe above. The blue was rich in color, and the embroidery was all golden. Incredibly, the robe was in the pristine condition, including the mesh sections along the arms. I just love textiles. 

In other news, I finally broke down and bought a paper weekly planner. I tried so hard to be paperless and take advantage of all my various electronics, but it was surprisingly difficult to track everything. Still on the hunt for a good planner app that interfaces with both my computer and my phone in a simple manner. In the meantime, I'm going to use this Moleskine planner with some great cover art: 

I've also spent copious amount of hours installing linux on my baby tablet pc. windows XP was just too cumbersome. 2 re-installs later and many minutes on the internet, I finally got the screen resolution fixed. it's the small victories in life.

My wonderful day ended with a lovely gathering of friends around a crockpot of soup, some TJ's cornbread, and homemade pazooki :) 

Thanks for filing our home with love, warmth, and laughter.

Q2

Today marks the first day of my second quarter in grad school. wow.

I met all the students I'll be TA-ing for over the course of the quarter: 38 boys and 8 girls. I guess that is engineering for you. Interestingly, all the TAs are women. Hopefully I didn't scare/annoy them too much with my page-long email and extra work I just assigned....it's going to be a fun quarter.

I think, however, that the most interesting part of my quarter is going to be this intro/get-everyone-up-to-speed photovoltaics course I'm taking from the Chem E department. I realized as my prof was giving his intro lecture that I had already read and cited a paper he wrote in my quarter report and some of my fellowship applications. Pretty sure I wasn't aware that the author of that paper was at the UW. Mainly, I'm just more excited than ever to work in the renewable/alternative energy sector. Solar is a very viable technology for energy independence, good stewardship of our natural resources, etc, etc, etc. While sitting through this class, I was almost overwhelmed (that sounds more dramatic than reality) with excitement that I possibly get to spend my career researching solar energy conversion. Kind of nerdy, I know, but I'm slowly realizing that I'd be very okay with staying in the solar sector. There are just so many interesting aspects - from the materials, to the processing, the device design; even energy policy is something I've been looking into .

favorite picture from the intro lecture:

notice the color over seattle? yeah. I just laughed when this popped up.

probably going to have to move to do this solar energy career. 

*sigh*

I made it through the first quarter of grad school. I'm still in good standing GPA-wise - the only reason I care about my GPA is for fellowships and getting into the dual-degree Nanotech PhD program the UW offers. Otherwise, all I care about is learning. And learn I did, this past quarter. Nothing like trying to also learn everything possible about basic EE things/photovoltaics on top of learning all sorts of new topics because I switched from Chemistry to Materials. Interestingly, I found that my chemistry background was more helpful than I anticipated (I guess that's why it's called 'the central science'! :) ), serving as an intro to topics that we delved into more deeply/mathematically into throughout my courses.

I will say, however, that even though the quarter was full of stress, I love Materials Science and Engineering and definitely believe it is the right field for me. What I still don't know is what I want to do after graduation - work in industry, for a government lab, or in academia, but I'm willing to sit on that decision for a while, discerning the Lord's will for my career.

everyone says this quarter is the worst in our department (mainly thanks to the class my advisor teaches....) - so here's hoping that next quarter goes swimmingly!  

 {currently, I'm de-stressing in southern CA with my family, where there is plenty of sun and no alarm clocks}

Mainly, I want to thank the fantastic girls in my house for supporting me day-to-day as I figure out this grad school thing. I know that I'm frequently absent from the house community and you girls saw a bunch of low moments in the quarter, but I so so so appreciate you all and I wanted to let you know!

 {also. thank you for the frosting and cookies. you know how to fuel my sleepless and stressful nights.}

 

I should also thank my fellow SPU alums, Natalie Closner and Marissa Maharaj for releasing music this year - your albums were on perpetual repeat when I was scrambling to finish all my reports!

{marissa maharaj}

{natalie closner}

{you all should take a listen, if you haven't already!}

"break" goals

First quarter of grad school done! I turned in my last assignments today and found out that I passed my most stressful class! Since I'm not totally finished with fellowship apps at the start my Christmas break, I'm not sure how much of a 'break' the next three weeks will be. I want to get them all done early, like next week, but I am always better with hard deadlines than softer self-imposed deadlines.....

regardless, I do have a few non-school-related goals for the break, we'll see if any of them actually get done.

• get at least halfway through my newest sweater project. The stress halfway through last quarter got to me and I ran to JoAnn's, buying some inexpensive wool to make this fun sweater: 

I love cabling and knitting is more portable than sewing, so I can work on this sweater in the car, watching TV, at Bible study, or just while chatting with my family. Or, even, while attempting to sit by the pool in Palm Springs, as that is where my family has decided to travel for a few days this break. I'm not a huge fan of going warm places during the Christmas season (not sure I could ever live in the southern hemisphere...) but I am a fan the sun! Strange side note - knitting is about the only thing I can do while riding in a car without getting motion sick. I can't read, watch movies, or even type emails :(

other things to do:

• start reading Right Stuff, Wrong Sex. (dealing with women in science/first female astronaut cannidates)
• start reading The Design of Everyday Things
• start reading Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (it just came in the mail! so exciting!)
• watch Objectified
• watch When we Left Earth
• starting learning to code again. probably in python, but I'm open to suggestions!

MatLab may be more useful, but I can't get a free copy and am not currently willing to fork over $100 for it... I'm not going to work in DOS again (like I did in 8th grade), but let me tell you - if you need something password protected, want to play a game of hangman, or see 8-bit style cat drawings, let me know :) (if this kid can program in three languages by the age of 12 and speak so well in front of lots of people, I figure I can (re)learn to program)

I also want to knit some new mittens for myself that my friend Hannah designed, but I've got to either find appropriate weight yarn or convince my dear sister that she should spin me some for Christmas. But I also want her to spin me some conductive fiber yarn (I know - so cool!) so I'm debating what I should persuade her to spin first :) conductive yarn = iPhone compatible gloves!

• finish a long winter coat I started 4 years ago. Yes, it still fits. I was just too lazy to get the snaps for the closure from the store....
• paint a large piece (or two!) of art for the MSE grad student 'lounge'. 

best part about this art - it's subtly MSE-geeky! The pattern is from the pattern used to define quasi-crystals in x-ray crystallography. The man who first discovered and published his discovery of quasi-crystals just won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry! Click the link to read his story, it was a long uphill battle convincing people that he was correct. (my advisor is/was a crystallographer, so he was very excited...)

Right now, the area inspires no creativity and is just one blah rose beige color. (the furniture is also atrocious, but I'm not going to deal with that yet. well, I may take the couch covers home to wash them, not sure when they were last washed...) I also need to bring some color/life into my personal half cubicle, but I'm kind of stuck with what to do with my space. Suggestions?

In reality, I'm pretty sure the next week is going to be filled with lingering paperwork I need to finish for research, so I'm not too hopeful about getting too many things done...but at least I'll be in a place with sun!

diodes

first, thank you to all my EE inclined friends who have been teaching me the basics of everything I probably should have learned at some point before starting a solar cell project....I'm slowly learning and absorbing all this new material.


this thursday, if someone questions my understanding of diodes when I try to explain how solar cells (p-n junctions) work, I'm just going to quote my favorite EE:

so it's like a door really

if you push it the wrong way, it won't open

and if you push it the right way, but not hard enough, it won't open

otherwise it opens and the electrons can walk right through

if you put a ton of current going the wrong way, it'll burn up

basically it's like throwing flaming bowling balls at a door going the wrong way

eventually they get through

and burn up the door in the process

then it just works as a wire

but smells bad

kind of charred

best moment during my night of panicked studying. 

is this real life?

I just looked at my calendar - I'm flying on 7 planes between now and Christmas day. 

I'm going to be in Seattle for a grand total of 4 more days before December 25th. 

Tonight, I'm thankful that I'm getting paid to go to graduate school and that my profs don't believe in in-class finals :)

Tomorrow, I head to Albuquerque, Monday I'm giving my 'how to apply for graduate school' presentation to the students at NMSU and speaking on a panel about my NASA internship experiences. Apparently it is going to be cold in Albuquerque....hopefully no snow though!

Tues-Thursday are going to be crazy days. don't expect to hear from me. don't worry, I didn't fall off the face of the earth, I'm just going to be hiding in different spaces cramming everything in for my advisor (final + paper + presentation). 

But then Friday I'm going to NYC! and Boston! To visit these fantastic people:

Yay!

And since my sol-gel class is finishing with a take-home final, a paper, and 'presentation' (but we just send our prof our slides, we don't actually present.....) I'm going to stay in NYC until Thursday!

Everything gets turned in Friday morning and then I'm DONE for the quarter! Hopefully I'm alive enough to go ice skating with my roommates and friends that evening......

And finally, Saturday I'm getting on another plane to Palm Springs with my family + family friends for a whole week of SUN. I am so excited to see the sun. So. Excited. I think I've forgotten what it looks like.....

(solar flares are cool)

{diversity in science}

This Sunday, I'm flying out to Albuquerque, NM (good thing I don't actually live there, I would never ever spell that town correctly without spell checker....) to give a 'how to apply to graduate school' presentation to underrepresented STEM students at New Mexico Sate University. I gave a similar talk to the NASA MUST program students at our symposium this past summer and was asked by my program coordinators to give a similar talk at NMSU. (If you or someone you know is applying for grad school, you can check out my handout here - any feedback is greatly appreciated :) )

Preparing for this presentation has made me notice the diversity present in my department and in my group. Compared to what I saw at my undergraduate university, the UW is seems much more diverse. SPU felt much less diverse, though apparently we're up to ~25 % minority students in the newest incoming class. My little group of 3 BS Chem students were all Caucasian and all our profs were Caucasian (and only one was female).

Now, in my MSE department, I'm surrounded by people of all backgrounds, nationalities, cultures, etc. In my windowless office, there are five of us - me, one kind of really awkward caucasian guy, two asian females and one asian male (I'm not sure where exactly they are from). In my group, where my PI is from India, there are three Chinese guys, one Iranian guy, one Indian guy, and one caucasian guy (well, two if you could the senior undergrad who just joined our group this week). Though, I must say, there is still a large number of caucasian males.

In a strange way, the diversity present in my department at the UW is divisive. I don't see much reconciliation between people of different backgrounds, even with the commonality of science. (But, maybe I shouldn't expect much reconciliation at all apart from Christ?)

though it wasn't consciously intentional, the other grad students I have begun to become better friends with are all caucasian. the large number of chinese students (I think - could be another asian nationality, I'm really bad at being able to tell them apart.) typically tend to group together, speak their native language, and not mix with the other grad students. Even in our lab group I've noticed this, even though it could be partially due to the fact that all the Chinese students are working on closely related projects.

I've tried to imagine how I would interact with other students if I was the visiting student and didn't speak the national language. I'm sure that I would probably feel most comfortable with other American students, but I should hope that I would not exclusively interact with them. I suspect that going to Sweden one of these summers will be a bit different experience than if I were to go to an Asian country - even though their national language is not english, Swedes are pretty white :)

Should we be satisfied with the current drive for 'just' increasing the number of diverse students in our schools and communities? how do we interact with each other well, learning from our differences, celebrating our respective cultures and build collaborations? I want to become a more global scientist, and right now, to me that means learning work with people of all backgrounds and cultures. So far, I'm afraid I've not been too successful, and I'm not sure how to change that.

but for now, I should go back to studying for my one in-class final next week. it's all about symmetry. I can break down the pretty Hungarian needlework below to a variety of symmetry elements....

10000 Hours

Recently, I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Since I don't have the most fantastic memory in the world, I don't actually remember it in too detail (and let's be honest, I've shoved a whole boatload of new grad school related information into my brain since I finished it....) but it was an interesting read. If you haven't read it, it revolved around analyzing the context of successful people in a variety of arenas, debunking our favorite American myth of the self-made man. I'm not sure I agree with everything he generalized, but it was fascinating to learn that Jan-March are the best months for a hockey player to born in and that June - Aug are the best for people who want to play baseball. Of course, your cultural context can also indicate how successful you can become, but it was interesting to see that idea applied in the case of Korean airline crashes. Before not-too-long-ago, your chances of crashing were drastically higher if your pilots were Korean, due to the hierarchical culture and communication issues it created.

{If you want a taste of what the book covers, you should head over to RadioLab and listen to their podcast interview with Gladwell covering some of this book (but it could also be this podcast, I can't remember exactly). It's the reason I picked it up. Plus, RadioLab is just plain awesome!}

Long story short, he also subscribes to the 10000 hour theory - that the greatest people are only great at what they do because they put in the physical work hours, inferring that anyone can be good at anything, as long as the put in the time (the benchmark being ~10,000 hours). I'm not sure that's entirely true, but lots of good/correct practice always seems to pay off in the long run.

(I also have related thoughts about the kind of less positive side of this idea, that it's really difficult to get out of the conditions you were born into, but they aren't formulated enough at this point in time to merit more words than this side note.)

Why bring this up at 1:30 in the morning? Because I needed a brain break. And because, right now, I'm hoping this time I'm putting into learning about photovoltaics, nanomaterials, and writing this report for my advisor counts towards my 10,000 hours.

Outliers  is one of the few books I actually have with me in Seattle, so let me know if anyone wants to borrow it for some fun reading!

And I always think a good blog post needs a picture, so here's one of my favorite Hubble pictures :)

{art + science}

Probably most of the people who read this blog know that I love when art, design, and science come together - the results are both both beautiful and technically interesting. While I was aware of national SEM image competitions, recently I came across the 'Art of Science' competition from Princeton.

Would you believe this image represents the reversals of the Earth's magnetic field?

Or that this image models population dynamics?

This image captures some of the dynamics of a surfactant (soap) at a thin-film/silicon wafer interface: 

my new grad school goal: find out if the UW does anything like this and if not, make it happen. We even have an art museum on campus!

{I linked some of them above, but I've posted a bunch about art/fashion + science/tech on my other blog}