Emotions are NOT Science

I love Lincoln, the weather is finally reasonable. It is still very humid but the temperature is fine. I am adjusting to driving even though I rarely do. Church is great here. They have me teaching Gospel Doctrine.

I miss Michelle and the kids very much. When I go home at night I’m just sad and lonely so I tend to stay at the office 18 hours a day I go home eat a dismal dinner and sleep for 6 hours. Wake up eat a bagel with poached egg and hurry off to work.

My orientation and training this past week have not left me time to dig into my research reading as much as I would have liked. There was very little of use in any of the meetings but I know the school has to cover themselves from liability.

Monday the 25^th I start classes. I’m terrified. I know I can do it, I also know that I am expected to perform at a much higher level of competency than ever before. I know that course work is not what is important in graduate school; however it can get you into trouble. There is so much to learn, so many questions to answer, a mere lifetime isn’t enough to get through it all. I have to budget my 18 hours each day wisely. I am going to take Sundays off from school and I am also going to prepare a lesson on Saturday so I will have that to look forward to.

Well dear reader I leave you to ponder the truth of the universe. May you find answers to all of your dreams, and an easing of your heavy burden.

Love to all

The Devil is in the Details

The Devil truly is in the details. Sadly, the light we were getting from our experiment was faint and lasted only a second or two. Therefore, my advisor sat down and went through every little detail of what we were doing and of course WHY we were doing it. It turns out that I had ordered a slightly different version of the chemical rather than having a BF₄^- ion attached to it I had ordered the analog that had the Cl^- ion attached to it. Well in all honesty they should have been essentially the same because, I thought, we were only working with the positive very large organometallic ion. Well you see Cl^- ions like water, in fact they really really like water. In fact they like water so much that it was essentially pulling it out of the air. BF₄^- ions on the other hand really don’t like water. The thing that turns our light off in the end is once the organometallic ion becomes surrounded by water. Silly rabbit chemicals are not all the same.

Anyway I did feel good later that night when I was converting the bad chemical into the good chemical. My advisor came in and started grilling me on the metathesis reaction I was doing. Why I was doing each step no matter how small. I was starting to feel as though he just didn’t trust me to do this simple synthesis when all of a sudden he said “Well good it sounds like you know what you are doing.” I was amazed and overjoyed. I had received high praise at the graduate level.

and there was light

We we were able to reproduce to a limited extent the results of the other groups. so now it is time for us to start to progress and take our research to the next level.

Another thought and technician to scientist

I believe that I am beginning to understand both the time and the intellectual price that must be paid to move from being a technician to a scientist. I believe that within a few days I could learn to return very nice images from the AFM and data from the XRD.

However to truly understand what I want, which tradeoffs I am willing to accept, that will take time. To comprehend the why of each setting, and to start to appreciate that every turn could lead to a new scientific principle is a journey that I am just beginning.

I thought I understood the scientific method, but now see that I have barely scratched the surface (AFM pun intended) of learning to reason my way through. I am starting to feel a spark in my brain that will cause me to question the things I know and read and make me look deeper into the reason of each detail.

Technician vs. Scientist

Well I am beginning to get a handle on the difference between my old life and my new one.

Today I ran into some problems with the AFM. Nothing really big but my adviser was there and so I simply asked him for the solution. Not so fast. He is a big advocate of the Socratic method of teaching. He turned the question back on me and complicated it even more. Not only did he want me to answer my own question but also to justify all of the other settings on the instrument.

Through careful questioning and helpful pointers he managed to get me to give him the right answers.

It's a tough way to learn but the goal in grad school is to make me an independent thinker. Even as a good technician I didn't have to consider all of the settings nor justify every little step in a process.

The difficult part is learning how to do research in the correct manner that would lead to progress and new discoveries.

Tough but worth it.

love to all

My little brothers

I am including a link to one of my younger brother's blogs. Getting to know them will help you to get to know me.

Here is another one and his Wife.

Of course one more as I find them

Great Weekend

Well sorry it's been a couple of days since the last post. Friday I found out that I did well enough on my placement exams that I am in the courses that I need to be in.

My advisor is awesome! He has given me a lot to think about and set me to the task of taking a concept that he was toying with and working out a proof of concept for it. It relates what we already do in the lab to some practical applications. I should be able to do it in the 6 weeks that I have left in the rotation with him.

Much of what I have been doing for the past couple of days is to spend time reading other related work and determining what we need to run the necessary tests.

One of the materials I will be using is a Gallium Indium alloy. Its fun stuff. It is a lot like Mercury, a metal that is a liquid at room temperature. Great Stuff.

Materials chemistry is great stuff. It is going to allow me to learn many varied aspects of chemistry and still stay inside my field of concentration.

The other day we were able to see some of the "nanowires" we built. They looked like the Washington monument.

Fun Stuff!

AFM

Well today I got to use an Atomic Force Microscope.

I'm working on some really ground breaking stuff. It's really cool.

Of course for the moment it's being directed by the senior grad student and our advisor; but I'm actually doing it and discussing it like I actually know what we're talking about.

Other than the placement exams everything is going well. I have a fridge that works (the people who brought it chipped the paint on the walls) and I have hot water what a great thing it was this morning to take a hot shower for the first time in nearly a week.

I like it here, if it weren't so humid I'd think I was in heaven... love to all and good night

Neat Stuff

Well rather than bore you with the details let me say that it was a rough day on the pchem test and a wonderful day in the lab.

I just didn't feel prepared for the test and so I feel that I bombed it. There wasn't much on it besides concepts but for some reason the neuron weren't firing. I woke up late so that started my day off poorly, and then found out that I couldn't use my TI 89 calculator on the test and so I had to use the one on my cell phone. In reality there were only a very few questions that required a calculator but it was the thought of working without a net that was terrifying.

But once we got going in the lab I felt back in my element. I was ready to prepare my own samples for some relatively easy experiments in thin films. I tweaked a few parameters (under the senior grad students direction) and got results that were at least somewhat unexpected. It was what we hoped for and what was predicted. In fact it was nearly 100% exactly what was predicted. That is unusual. It's so good that we are going to run some mroe tests and pursue a publication on the results. Woo Hooo!

Thanks for Reading! Have a great night and keep smiling!

First full day in the lab

Well it was my first full day in the lab. I was able to help a little, but I was also able to hinder a little. I was able to assist in making Pd nanoparticles.
The hardest part of this has been that I am no longer the person with the answers. I am the guy who is an idiot and knows nothing. The reason I had to make the Pd nanoparticles today was that I opened the fridge too fast and broke the bottle they were using for research. it sucked! oh well such is life.