Everyone's a little dumb sometimes

I felt pretty bad the other day for wasting most of someone's day calibrating my equipment, when it would have only taken half an hour or so if I had been more prepared. There was a "magic" step in my process, between "put equipment in test apparatus" and "calibration curves!". Turns out it needed a lot more elaboration than that.

Today, some other students asked me to help them calibrate their equipment, which is similar to mine. They asked a lot of hard questions, but I was prepared, since I had botched that stuff up before, and I was glad that I wasn't the only person having the same problems. I also got to share my fantastic spreadsheets that check to see if the calibration data agrees with theory or the manufacturer's specs. It's pretty cool when they ask for my opinion on things, I feel....special?

What I really like about my research stuff is that people listen to and appreciate what I say and treat me like an equal. That means scathing criticisms along with the nice things. At first I was afraid that people would be dismissive or dumb things down for me because I'm still an undergrad, but that hasn't been the case at all. Seems like a huge change from my 'real world' jobs.

Oh, you didn't.

I left the Ph.D student "alone" in the shop today to prepare a sample. Normally I would stick around to make sure things went smoothly, just in case, but my deadlines are looming and I can't simultaneously get my work done while supervising his.




Result: My solid steel sample box got deformed today because soooooomeone loaded it to 50,000 lbs instead of 1,000. Incredulous, I asked him why he would do that, and he said, "Well, I was just going to load it all the way (500,000 lbs) but it started bending so I had to stop when the pieces wouldn't fit together anymore."

I guess getting him to help draft the procedure wasn't any insurance that he'd actually understand it or follow it.

This week's lesson: Orders of magnitude?

The pursuit of hopelessness

So glad my supervisor is getting back soon! He's been gone for the past 3 weeks and I've been forced to babysit one of his Ph.D students. I've been so frustrated with this student lately though that I can't even begin to write about it without launching into an angry rant.

Although I know he has good intentions and he tries hard, he is absolutely incapable of working on his own. If you asked him to pick a random number, he wouldn't be able to. He doesn't seem able to follow basic instructions (in English, which is his first language), never mind get in to the design of the experiment or future test plans.

This leaves us in quite a strange spot. I'm here for half the year as a research assistant before I head back to class and get my undergraduate degree. So far, I've designed, built, and ordered all the parts for his experiment, looked through literature to predict things so I could get instrumentation that will measure things in the proper range, decided which variables need to be controlled/measured/varied, wrote a program to display and record the data... It's at the point where everyone refers to this as my experiment, and I delegate work to him only if it's trivial, simple, and not an immediate priority.

Basically, it's Freaky Friday, but all year long. What will happen when I go to grad school?

The saga continues...

I ran out of clean socks today. This is a disaster.

When I was little, my mom told me that if I didn't change my socks and my underwear every single day, Santa wouldn't bring me any presents. Fast forward several months later, in the middle of July, I realize that I didn't change my socks that day and start bawling. I was inconsolable for days and didn't want to tell my mom that I had forgotten to change my socks, lest she call him and rattle on me. I thought maybe if I behaved well enough Santa would forget about the whole thing and bring me presents anyway.

I am still scarred. Cannot wear dirty socks. So, I wore fishnets under my steel-toed boots and hoped like hell that nobody would notice.

A film crew showed up at my lab today to film stuff for our department's 50th anniversary. Hopefully I might find this funny by the time the time capsule gets unearthed.

In which we make a professor giggle

We had important professors visiting a while ago from some big-name university in the U.S., touring our building. Usually I don't get those kind of visitors in my lab because we're somewhat empty right now, waiting for an influx of summer students and a bunch of large equipment. Luckily I was busy typing up a storm, trying to sort out piles of spaghetti code (mine, oops) on my seemingly complicated screen.

If we do have important visitors I usually try to look as busy as possible while they tour the lab. I was almost surprised that they stopped on the tour to ask me if I could give a "quick, 60 second explanation" of what I was doing. Feeling somewhat impish, I asked if they'd like to see a demonstration of the super precise pricey positioning system that was part of our collaboration with medical researchers that I had been programming. I did this with my best serious face and my best making-things-seem-more-important-than-they-are tone of voice. Then I made the camera mount play a song while it moved to position.

I didn't expect the group of old men in suits to start giggling, but they did. Now the guy who ran that tour asks if he can see the musical lab equipment every time he stops by with a tour group. Maybe undergraduates/grad students that aren't bitter and miserable are a good selling point for the department?

Hole-y Leaking

What is the appropriate course of action when faced with the following scenario?:

You get up in the morning to make some eggs, and realize that your kitchen window is dripping on to the stove. Pouring, even. The spring melt must be getting in through the walls somehow. You:

A. Call your landlord and have him send out a contractor to fix the problem immediately.
B. Take action yourself, rip out the panelling, dry it out, and patch up the holes.
C. Draw a picture of the Virgin Mary above the leak so that it looks like she's crying on to the stove, then interpret that to mean that the Virgin Mary doesn't want anyone in the house to cook today. Order pizza.
The answer, of course, when you live in one of my landlord's houses, C. Last time we had a similar problem (except it was the basement, and it was flooded), he chastised us for calling and told us to throw some towels on the floor then point a fan or a hair dryer at the (sopping) walls. So glad to be renting from a house owner, not a property manager next year!

Corrupting young minds

We thought it would be a good idea to bring the kids through my lab, take a bit of mystery out of the whole research process and everything. Naturally I had to spend last week stealing, err, borrowing cool toys from everywhere I could find so that there would be no shortage of things with blinking lights, buttons, dials, and shiny chrome. I knew that the disappearing glassware would be a hit (and wow did it ever confuse the hell out of the volunteers, never mind the kids!), and the robot, but I wasn't sure about the musical lab equipment (my new pride and joy, haha).

Turns out that the musical lab equipment stole the show! It is a very large, somewhat contraptiony looking... contraption that looks like it should be doing something veryimportant, not playing "Baa baa black sheep". One girl saw it and said she wanted to be a mechanical engineer! Hah! Yes!

The sad side of my nerdy life is that lots of things I think are really exciting (analog pinball machines, shiny things, function generators) aren't necessarily interesting to anyone else. It made my day that the girls thought musical lab equipment was awesome. Sometimes I just need a bit of reassurance that I have some sort of contact with reality.