my roommates are going to laugh as soon as they start reading this.
but today was the first day I felt like I stepped into a fuller utilization of the internet.
or got really lazy, depending on how you look at it.
How? By buying my shampoo on Amazon.
yep.
Typically, I use Amazon for books, shoes, or other kind-of specialized items (i.e. a bike light for my helmet, gloves with conductive fingers) But, thanks to fantastically free prime shipping, I can skip getting in my car, driving to a local store, spending time finding shampoo, getting distracted by all the other items in the store, and don't have to pay for the gas that it took to get to store. Now, in two days, by the time I run out of shampoo, a new bottle will be waiting on my porch. or my bed, if my roommate is nice enough to bring it inside before I get home. also, I'm pretty sure it would have taken more than two days for me to find time to drive to the store (thanks grad school).
Next step - Amazon Fresh? :)
roommate looking at me with a somewhat disapproving expression regarding my use of Amazon...
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.
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.
has been harder than I expected. I keep wanting to ride my bike, but then I remember there is ice on the roads in my hometown. And that my bike is still in Seattle. I refuse to ride a stationary bike and I'm so tempted right now to get a trainer for my lovely road bike, but I think my roommates wouldn't be too happy with a bike in our living room :)
Anyways, here are some funny bike (and pedestrian) related haikus I stumbled upon while procrastinating on finishing my DOE fellowship application:
also. watch this video. it's strangely fascinating. and scary.
I would also like to point out that in NYC, people stand in the street while waiting to cross. You could clearly pick me out as a non-new yorker when I was in the city a few week ago because I stood on the sidewalk. In seattle, our streets are too narrow to stand in the road! alas, I found myself the day after I returned to seattle waiting in the street more than once.....
tonight, I stumbled upon a TED talk entitled The power of vulnerability by Brene Brown from the University of Houston. this women is right up my alley - a researcher who likes to measure and quantify everything. This might not all sound coherent, but the talk resonated with me and I wanted to share it.
What really struck me was how she defined part of vulnerability as doing 'something where there is no guarantee.' This isn't a huge revelation, I just have never considered it in those terms. I can do that with with my research because I have always understood that there are no 'right' answers in chemistry; there is no guarantee of a successful reaction. After writing that, I'm not entirely sure why I still love my work and why I continually show up to lab each day, but it may be partly because the chemicals can't talk back. I can't hurt them or be hurt by them.
Recently, I finished reading Right Stuff, Wrong Sex by Margaret Weitekamp. With the subtitle of
‘America’s First Women in Space Program,’ I initially thought that the text
would center around the women who were tested as potential astronauts. However,
this book proved to discuss the background and development of Dr. William Randolph "Randy" Lovelace’s
Women in Space testing program, the political backlash against the program, and
the general cultural beliefs that stopped women from being a part of the
Mercury and Apollo programs. *Lovelace’s facility in Albuquerque became NASA’s
medical center, mainly because he was a leader in aviation medicine and working
on developing a space medicine research program.
Remember that the early space program began before the
women’s lib movement, so any consideration of a female for an astronaut could
be assumed to be tricky. What was surprising to learn was how under-the-table
Lovelace’s program had to operate because of the hostility he faced in the
political sphere. I was shocked to find out that President Johnson (Johnson
Space Center in Houston, TX is named after him) was very much against female
astronauts. A scribbled note from him in response to an inquiry about female candidates
from NASA’s Administrator is one of the only bits of a paper trail recording
the hostility of those in Washington against the women. Instead of his name, he signed 'Let's end this now!' in the space at the end of his note.
Overall, 25 female pilots were tested by Lovelace and 13
passed the week-long physical examination. Only three women were able to go on
to further testing, the not-so-official program was ‘officially’ cancelled only
5 days before the rest of the women were scheduled to fly to Pensacola, FL for
psychological testing. This was actually a most interesting test of how potential
astronauts handled total isolation: they floated in a pool, in a darkened room
for as long as the possibly could. Both the air and the water temperature were
matched exactly to the women’s body temperature, so apparently they didn’t even
feel the water when they splashed it!
I found myself frequently frustrated with the lack of
support for the women. The cultural standards and expectations for women could
be used against them – one women was in a congressional hearing testifying for
female astronaut candidates, was photographed with her heels off under the
table and that breech in expected etiquette was used to discredit her whole
testimony. The women found themselves with unsupportive employers, as many lost
their jobs when they left to be tested. Even the man running the physical
testing, Lovelace, did not envision these women as astronauts in the same sense
as male candidates. He expected that once space had been initially ‘colonized,’
women would be needed as lab technicians, secretaries, and space ‘homemakers.’ Ugh.
Even the most forward-thinking men of the time couldn’t get past the
traditional gender roles that permeated the American culture.
The tested women were all incredible pilots, most with
numerous flying records to their name and countless hours of flying time.
However, one of NASA’s requirements kept women out of the pilot’s seat on any
space-based aircraft for years to come: they had to have hours flying a jet aircraft. At that point in time,
only the military flew jets and the military did not allow women to fly
anything after the short-lived WASP program. So, regardless of how much they
fought to become candidates, the women could always be pushed out because there
was absolutely no way they could get the time they needed in a jet. Some women
even considered trying to privately fund the purchase and flying of a jet, but
that didn’t go anywhere in the end.
I was just slightly overwhelmed with the walls and roadblocks that these women faced in their campaign to fly to space. It
made me more than thankful to live in 2011, when even though I still feel the
cultural constraints of being a women in science, I have supporters. NASA so
destroyed the hopes of accomplished women for becoming astronauts that they had
to hire Nichelle Nichols, Uhura from Star
Trek, to recruit females and other minorities to the shuttle astronaut
core. Even then, as Weitekamp points out in the epilogue, there existed a
two-track system for the astronaut core: one for PhDs and MDs, called ‘mission
specialists,’ and one for pilots. There were a number of women who flew on the
shuttles before a female was actually selected to command and pilot a shuttle
mission.
FLATs (First Lady Astronaut Trainees) at one of Eileen Collins' launches on the space shuttle. Collins was the first woman to pilot the shuttle.
Really, this was a most interesting book and fascinating
read. I’m returning it to the library soon, so you should pick it up and read
it. While I was initially interested in because it was about early female
astronaut candidates, it really is a book anyone interested in gender equality
or even history of aviation medicine should read. It spun out of the author’s
thesis and is a well written book. Not too long either, I finished it in just 3
days by the pool :)
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!
