Graduation (but not mine)

While I wish I were graduating, it is coming soon enough.  (Although maybe this whole arrangement of not defending until this summer and walking next May may work out better anyways for my family travel arrangements).

I went to my department's graduation again to see students that I've TAed as juniors (now graduating seniors obviously), PhD candidates who officially received their Master's degree, and my graduate classmates who are now officially Doctors (of Philosophy). While I'm envious of the gigantic diploma they receive (it's twice the size of my undergraduate one), I think I'm more envious of the next stages of their life that are moving onto. Not everyone knows what path they're going on or yet, but that too is part of life. The more important thing is moving forward with time.

If we stagnate, we become dull. I took a year off (voluntarily or involuntarily, I don't really know) between graduating from UIUC and starting graduate school. I didn't have an amazing reason too, like traveling the world, working (in fact the job market in 2010 was very tough and hence why I was unemployed), or conducting some breakthrough research.

I spent a summer more or less jobless. Although I would swing by the lab once in a while to synthesize some material, I had lost a lot of interest as well after working in the same lab for 2 years. We even had a new project to transfer the materials embedded fiber-glass system to a carbon system for higher loading and perhaps more promising applications. But I just found myself burnt from work.

So I found myself with the least research-relevant year. While working on my graduate school applications, I worked in a Frozen Yogurt store first as a cashier but eventually as a night-manager to handle closing and training of new employees. I worked as a teaching assistant in a biomaterials laboratory handling cell cultures and preparing materials for the students, alternating teaching the lab class with the instructor, and grading lab notebooks. I volunteered to work for my friend in sales in his new t-shirt company. I was constantly forced out of my comfort zone to interact with others. I learned a very different skillset from when I was in the college classroom.

I wasn't always sure if taking that year off was the right decision. I had the option to go to UCSD for graduate school, or I could've always worked a little bit harder to find a job. But we play with the cards that are dealt to us and move on. When my year was up, I didn't want to leave Champaign-Urbana for all the experiences I had, but it was time for me to move forward again, to have new experiences, and to not stagnate.

As I'm finishing up my thesis now, I might not have made it to graduating this May, but I'm also ready to move forward past my PhD career.

TMS 2015 Re-cap

I attended my last TMS conference (as a graduate student) last week in Orlando, Florida.

Aside from my qualms on Disney World as the location of the conference, I had a great time overall. Partially this was because of the great weather in Florida, but also just the breadth of talks and discussion at the conference and "out of the conference."

What do I mean by "out of the conference"? For everything else that wasn't officially on the conference schedule. This included stopping by the TMS socializer in the Presidential Suite, where along with my culprits, we were clearly not appropriately dressed and (jokingly) not important enough. But I did get a great view from being up on the 20th floor...

I can't network like my friend, although I had the opportunity to reconnect with a wide variety of people whom I had met when I first started graduate school and attended the first 3DMS conference and workshop back in 2012.

The conference itself was excellent with a wide assortment of topics and great speakers. Although this also presented an issue of questioning what I wanted to do in the future? There is a lot of development in synchrotron techniques to obtain better 3D information, providing the answers to some long-time questions (such as where do critical events like crack and voids nucleate). Although at the same time this open up many questions as well. Along that line, there is increasing focus on the microstructural aspect and role of material failure, i.e. what pair of grains lead to failure or enable provide slip transmission? Then there is still the field of recrystallization and grain growth, which has been gaining momentum again now that the 3D techniques allow us to confirm behaviors that were proposed in the past. While the development of Olmsted et al. 388 grain boundaries by molecular dnyamics in cubic materials have opened up a number of new findings regarding the grain boundary property (i.e. energy, mobility, etc.) landscape. Then there's still the issue of grain boundary networks...

But aside from all of this, I attended a great talk given by Dr. Michelle Dickinson, or alternatively nano-girl, (see her TED talk!). The symposium was organized by a group of Purdue graduate students, called, "Messaging Research to a Broad Audience." Her talk was titled, The Power of Small Words for Big Impacts." The focus is entirely on how to get the message across correctly to a layman and not another scientist, and how this is important in the scheme of public outreach as a scientist. She openly admits that she has taken a set-back in her career to do public outreach, but it has also opened up a very different career path compared to her fellow co-workers. In doing so, she has had the opportunity to go on TV and discuss science topics, meet the prime minister of NZ, and even Sir Richard Bronson. As a result, her funding hasn't always came from the government, but from private individuals instead. This, in my opinion, is quite an accomplishment.

I also had the chance to talk to her on what a graduate student can do to improve his or her public outreach. Her response: "Keep blogging."

The Right Track

I had my weekly meeting with my advisers yesterday, where I provide them a 30 minute update on what I've been working on.

Recently I've been finding my advisers less. Partially because I know what still needs to be completed before I can defend, and slowly I'm learning they don't necessarily have the answers I want for the things I'm investigating. Also I fear that by talking to them more would generate new scientific ideas, that would delay the experiments I already am behind / still need to perform. (Although I secretly think they've been finding me less as well to be rid of me...)

Our EBSD microscope has actually been down the last two months, so I've avoided doing any of the experiments that I need / actually should be doing for my defense. Instead, I've been revisiting some old data from the abnormal grain growth in nanocrystalline nickel, as well as generating synthetic microstructures with annealing twins to match real FCC microstructures. Neither of which, at the end of the day, will end up in my thesis.

So I gave my update yesterday on these two topics and the corrections that were made such that everything is "right" now. As the three of us were leaving the room, Tony made the remark that I looked like I was on the "right track".

I was on the right track for doing research that wasn't related to my thesis, especially when I'm expected to graduate in the next four or so months?

This led me to think, what is the right track for a PhD study (and for the purposes of this discussion focusing on US institutions). Should one focus on publishing three papers and get out? I know this is quite popular. Or should one just do whatever their adviser tells them to do, without question, and eventually follow the path given to their defense (with whatever publications along the way). Or should one do what I've been doing, which is investigating three or four things all at once, such that one almost never makes strong progress on their work (or the other things either), but gain exposure to lots of other things for a more well-rounded scientist upon leaving?

I hope to update and write more frequently on this topic over the next few weeks.

The "Ideal" Thesis

I attended my collaborator's defense this past Wednesday, which was an incredible piece of work performed over the short course of three years. While the thesis itself, 200-pages, was indicative of the considerable work done by him over the last few years, I think more impressive was still the nature of the work.

Two of the experiments were performed in collaboration when I visited France and another when he visited Pittsburgh. While some of the other experiments were not performed by him at all, but by former students but all the analysis was new and performed by him solely still in relation to his project. Certainly  the experimental design, execution of the experiment, and data collection takes a large amount of time, but analyzing the data afterwards is just as much of a feat afterwards as well.  In particular, for the nature of our data, orientation maps obtained through electron backscatter diffraction, primarily contain grain size, grain orientation, and grain boundary misorientation information immediately. However many other things can still be analyzed on a local level (especially in our in-situ experiments), such as observing grains nucleating from the areas of highest kernal average misorientation, indicative of concentrated dislocations in an area, or the roughness of the migrating grain boundaries.

But in addition to the experiments, he still managed to perform simulation experiments as well by introducing anisotropy (in particular large variations in anisotropy for a twin boundary) in level-set and phase field methods. After achieving this, this was furthermore implemented into a microstructure featuring twins under grain growth, and observe the evolution of the microstructure and compared to observations made from the experiments performed. Anyone who has worked with computational materials science understands these developments are quite time consuming.

So finally one impressive achievement from his work is that he did a balanced amount of simulation and experimental work that complimented one another. It is often more likely to see thesis that are completely focused on experimental work, with a touch of computational work to support the experimental work performed, or vice versa a computational thesis with some experimental work to back up the results of the simulation.

To achieve both in such a short amount of time (3 years), is an absolutely amazing feat.

Conclusions

This is an old thought, but I had a discussion with one of my advisors a while back on what a conclusion entails. While it's true that the goal of the conclusion is to summarize the findings at the end, what makes an effective conclusion from a poor one?

In particular, for something on the scale of an thesis document, where many experiments have been performed and many new findings have been made, what are the key points that the author wants to hit upon? What I learned from my advisor is summarized here.

Conclusions can be divided into three categories:

1. New knowledge
2. New wisdom
3. New technique

Developing, testing, and reporting a new technique should be straight-foward. (Most) papers will not have this conclusion depending on the nature of the work performed, as such I won't discuss it anymore. New knowledge and wisdom on the other hand, is more challenging.

First, what is the difference between the two? New knowledge refers to new information that has been obtained from the findings of the experiment. For example, one variable showing a positive correlation by modifying another variable that was previously not known, is new knowledge. This constitutes a large part of scientific conclusions.

New wisdom refers to a new understanding based on the analysis of the knowledge. Following the example above, the two variables of interest show a positive correlation that is explained by how the system is responding to the input variable to generate the output variable. New wisdom is more challenging and involves the creation of models, theory, or etc. to find that understanding. 

The two are not always distinct from one another either though. New knowledge and new wisdom can be coupled together based on how the experiment is performed. In particular, this will be the case if we have already hypothesized how two variables are related, but no experiment has been performed to confirm this relationship.

Knowing these three types of conclusions have overall allowed me to streamline my writing and presentations, and more effectively bring closure to an experimental finding (despite the fact that there is always more to be done).  

Taken from another source, but a more general sense, knowledge is awareness of the right facts while wisdom is understanding those facts and coupling it with good judgement and common sense. Or alternatively:  

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit while wisdom is knowing not to put the tomato in a fruit salad. 

Story Collider

Story collider is an event that allows scientist to share when they fell in love with science. The key is that it must be a story, it must contain a beginning, middle, and an end. It will typically involve a change. It is not a lecture. It is not an oral presentation. It is a story.

I submitted something that probably didn't conform to the rules. Although I don't even know if I submitted it correctly anyways as I never received a rejection either. Ultimately I'm posting it here though:

The other morning, delirious from waking up at 4:30 to catch a bus to the Dresden airport after attending a wonderful conference, I sat in the terminal waiting for my plane to start boarding. As I sat there, the sun started to slowly rise beyond the horizon lighting the sky into a golden hue. And like a movie moment, I watched the Boeing (or maybe it was Airbus) 767 illuminate from those golden rays.

In that movie moment, I thought to myself, "wow."

I sat there dumbstruck and amazed by what we, humankind, have created. Commercial jetliners capable of carrying people across countries, continents, and oceans. The years of trial and error by the Wright  Brothers just to develop the first flying machine. The years of research and development to be where we are at now. It's taken physicists and aerospace engineers who study flight and aerodynamics. Mechanical engineers who understanding loading and cabin pressure. And then my favorite, because I am one myself, the materials scientist and engineers who have developed the right turbine alloys, landing gears, and a wide assortment of other materials to send essentially these gigantic pieces of metal into the air.

How far have we come along in technology?

A little later I was in the Frankfurt airport for my layover. Still delirious of course as I hadn't found a source of coffee yet. But I saw a little girl with her mother. The mother stepped onto the moving walkway completely fine, like the rest of us would. But the little girl looked in terror at the moving platform, as if the wrong step would end her life. One second passed, then two, and three as she kept watching the floor move beneath her feet. She was waiting for the perfect moment, a pause maybe, to get on, but it never seem to came. Then she bravely put one foot forward and panicked as she became stretched out by her moving foot to her planted foot. She grabbed on the arm-rail, which of course was also moving. And finally in the last moments of desperation, she lifted off the planted foot onto the moving walkway and everything was alright again.

Newtonian mechanics, general relatively, whatever you want to call it.

Of course when I was a child, I didn't know that was what it was called. I was simply confused, scared, curious as to what was happening. That curiosity drove me to look for answers, sometimes in the classroom and sometimes at home (I was very fortunate to have an encyclopedia set). For me, and probably many of us, it was enthralling to learn how and why things worked they way the did. I believe this is a natural trait given the curiosity we have as children with developing minds. But for me personally, I don't think there was ever a turning point where I said, "Wow, now I love science." For some inexplicable reason at the time, I have always loved it, that somehow there existed answers for the questions I had.

As an adult now, I've become so hardwired to either accept the certain laws, like gravity, or certain technologies, like transistors, have always been around. I've become dull, numb, and fail to appreciate the efforts of scientists, researchers, and engineers before us. And unfortunately once I was finally awake, I failed to notice anymore more spectacular events during my trip departing Germany.

Every once in a while we have our own "Eureka" or "Aha" moments in our own research that continues to satisfy that curiosity. But the fruits of our work have only come about by those before us. This is often far too overlooked on my part, but when I make these realizations, there's something really special about these moments. Science is the progress of a collective, community, process that represents one of the epitomes of humankind. Of course that was something I could not see as a child, but inherently I was doing what I just mentioned.

The two stories I just told you earlier are just one of the many moments that remind me of that. The knowledge I have, the technologies I enjoy, are only because others have taken the same path I am taking now. That is why I love science.

"I don't know"

Like everyone else, I look up to my advisors a lot. They are my role-models as a scientists, mentors to my research career, and advisors to my PhD track. While they are not the biggest names in the field of material science and engineering, they certainly have an untouchable aura around them. (Tony being the father of texture is often our joke, while I assume that Greg came up with the entire idea of grain boundary character distributions). They've produced tens (probably hundreds) of publications, and have given even more talks. Written review papers and chapters as premier leaders of the field they specialize in. And the two further impress me by continuing to do their own research all while advising me and several other students, traveling for conferences, teaching classes, and applying for grants. When I ask a question, I will most certainly always get an answer (usually the response is, "Oh it's already been done," or, "I doubt there will be an significant influence from [x]", and lastly, "Well I think this is the next direction we should go to solve this.") Every time, they are right.

Greg, as an expert, giving an keynote talk.

So very rarely, when the words, "I don't know," come out, I suddenly become very confused and lost. Have I somehow broken research? Asked something that I shouldn't have? What do you mean you don't know the answer when you're the expert in the field?

Then the silence begins.

Arms crossed. Eyes closed. Fingers tapping on the desk.

And the silence continues.


"Well, if we really want to figure this out, we should probably try [y]." Pause, "Yeah, let's definitely try that first. I'm not entirely sure, but if it gives something, it should help explain [z]."

They've fallen from the pedestal I've placed them upon.

They're human, like the rest of us.

When this occurs, I realized how many years it's taken for them to become the experts of the field. How many experiments they must've performed. And how many hypotheses must've failed before getting to where they are.

It makes me feel infinitely better that I don't have the answers to everything, that I don't know everything, and that I won't do everything right. It takes time, and even then, like them, I still might not know.

I did my very best to find the most "normal" looking picture of my advisor to emphasis this point