"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!

suits required.

“Here’s the thing about being a girlie girl. I think there was a generation before us that felt like they needed to act like men to be taken seriously, like they had to use their sexuality to take control of people. I don’t judge people for that. But I don’t want to take all my clothes off and use myself as an object. It’s part of the machine and I don’t think that necessarily pushes us forward as women. I think you can still be girlie and maintain your power. The fact that you associate being girlie with being non-threatening, that is … I mean, I can’t think of more blatant example of playing into exactly the thing that we’re trying to fight against. I can’t be girlie? Why do I need to be defined aesthetically by someone else’s perceptions of what makes me seem like someone who should be taken seriously? I’m going to wear whatever I want to wear, because I’m expressing myself, and I deserve that right. And I like the way that looks. You’re not demeaning yourself by acting girlie. I think the fact that people are associating being girlie with weakness, that needs to be examined. Not me dressing girlie. I don’t think that undermines my power at all.

“I’m not doing it to pander to people. I just always knew what I liked versus what I don’t like. I never liked things with too many zippers or spikes and stuff. That weirds me out. I like things that are pretty. And I think it’s great to be pretty. I like being feminine. I think it’s good to be feminine. We don’t need to look like men or dress like men or talk like men to be powerful. We can be powerful in our own way, our own feminine way.”  - Zooey Deschanel (source)

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I like this; I like it a bunch. I don't however, necessarily agree with the implication that our generation of women doesn't still feel pressured to dress and act like men to be taken seriously. After watching the film Miss Representation, the one thing I left with was how all the non-artists featured were wearing menswear-esque suits. 

Nancy Pelosi, Condoleezza Rice, Katie Couric and the other women who names I can't remember, but who worked in the law or politics fields, were all wearing suits. Women in the art and film industries were not in suits. They were still dressed well, but they were not in a tailored suit with square lapels and shoulder pads. Artists have always been able to get away with wearing non 'standard' clothing. Zooey Deschanel is an artist. 

In which of the following outfits would you take me more seriously as a scientist? (ignoring the setting of the pictures) 

I think, in my case, dressing girly probably undermines how seriously people consider my science and how much respect I command in my male-dominated field, regardless of how much we say we don't judge people based on their appearance and seek gender equality. Which is just too bad, because I love to wear dresses and skirts.

{city girl}

Apparently I'm more of a city girl than I thought.

Wandering through the deserted Cambridge, MA on the MIT campus Saturday morning was weird. (apparently MIT students don't get moving on a Saturday until ~11 am....) 

It was a city, but there was nobody outside. And the streets were so clean! There were joggers - lots and lots and lots of runners - but no one just out for a stroll with their family, enjoying the sunshine and fresh air. Maybe they're all just too used to the sun and fair weather? It really threw me off all day! I guess I expect Ellensburg to be quiet because it's a small college town, and I envisioned Boston as place thriving with people. Maybe it was the area we saw, maybe it was the time of day, I'm not sure. 

{we did find plenty of east-coast hipsters (not a flannel in sight!) in Flour, a delicious lunch spot!}

{not that hannah and adwoa are hipsters, but this picture was taken in Flour :) }

all I do know is that I felt incredibly more at ease with the lights, cars, and people wandering around when we got back to New York that I did the whole day in Boston. 

{view from the 13th floor in Columbia's engineering building - look at all that city!}

4 fantastic years

Kali, I can't believe that only four years ago, I barely knew you. 

I knew that you had sweet hair, lived on my floor, were way more outgoing than me, were also a UScholar, and wanted to have 6 kids by the time you were ~30. 

Oh, and you loved English.

here's first halfway decent picture of ourselves freshman year. I look so awkward....

I found out you liked to dress up as much as I did

we made lots of Traditions:

and look! still friends four years later:

(with those red stoles - yay!)

Even in the midst of my hectic week, I wanted to take a moment and say thank you for being such an amazing friend. love you so so much!

(even when you make me wear ridiculous glasses.....)

Here's to many more years!

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also, this was our facebook friend picture :)

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....