The SMOC Project: A Series of Events Which Some May Dub as Laborious, Others as Amazing, and Others Still as Rather Insane – Part II

The email came – that herald of doom that told us a whole semester of work would be thrown away in an instant with no hope for redemption… ok, maybe not that bad in retrospect, but man, we were pretty worried.

So we threw together a game plan – we listed out the experiments we would need, when we could be in the lab, and who was going to do what.

Experiment 1 – dvdt: this experiment had been planned since March, but due to its complexity and continual material failure, it had never occurred. First, one material was too weak. Second, the material was strong enough, but had bad thermal qualities. So, we decided upon a hybrid material that would combine both by fusing the two together. What could go wrong? Well, turns out we needed more material, and wouldn’t you know it, it wouldn’t get here in time (it is now sitting upstairs in my room). 

Experiment 2 – frictionless confirmation:  This experiment should have been pretty cut and dried. Basic equations of kinematics that we learned last year… blah blah blah… we start calculations, and our numbers are off in la-la-land. After banging our head against a table (and a bench, and the wall, and each other), our professor said he would take the data and look at it.

Experiment 3 – T vs. P: We’d already done this experiment… probably gathered over 300 data points. Unfortunately, our data was qualitative instead of quantitative. It wouldn’t be hard to collect quantitative data, but we still were going to have to plot all those points again, and from previous experience, we knew that was going to take a lot of time…

God was really looking out for us those two weeks. There were so many things that could have gone wrong, so much time that needed to be spent that very few of us had. But you know what? God does neat things: He put it into the head of undergrads to spend their precious evenings and weekends in the lab running experiment after failing experiment after experiment; He put it into the head of a graduate student to pull late (as in 1:30 in the morning) and all-nighters; He put it into the head of a professor to stick with the project even when thing weren’t coming together. We are so grateful to Ali and Dr. Xu for their awesome help! We are planning to submit our work to a scientific journal this summer! Wahoo!

And now... to prove just how crazy we were... (In case you needed any proof)

PS - Some of the experiment descriptions are vague, and that's on purpose. I'm not sure how much our prof wants published just yet...

The SMOC Project: A Series of Events Which Some May Dub as Laborious, Others as Amazing, and Others Still as Rather Insane

For any of you who didn’t know, the last two weeks of my life have been relatively swamped… ok, they’ve been really swamped. Whoever said summer was supposed to be relaxing? The last two weeks have been busy due to my new internship at Longview Fibre, and... finishing up the SMOC Project, a research project that me and my buddies have been working on for the past semester, and if the title did not convince you of the many points of view from which the last two weeks of this project may be… well… viewed, allow me to break it down for you in a slight calendar fashion.

Two weeks ago.

All was well. The school year was over, and only one experiment remained to be done. The team needed three major points for the paper. Two of them were completed and checked with the professor for necessary accuracy. The paper wasn’t due until May 25^th, so some evenings in the lab combined with Saturday experiments should be more than enough to finish the last experiment and write up the results.

Nine days ago

With our mindset of relaxation and ease, I received this email from our professor. He’s been helping us a lot from beginning to end, from getting grants to helping open doors in research for us. I was more than shocked up this email showing up in my inbox:

I am really worried about this project. We planned to submit the paper next Friday [A full week before we thought it was due], however we still haven't achieve any meaningful results yet. Usually, three well-presented results are needed for a paper. The [first point you had] is useless… Then we can start to work on other two results - which we have no clue yet.

Is anyone of you willing to work nights and weekends to get the paper done? I can be around any time you want. Otherwise, I am afraid we have to withdraw the paper...Please let me know who can work on this project and when.

Thanks,

After I woke up from my faint, I began to panic: we thought we had two out of three of these points done… and now it seemed we had none. Instantly, my calendar began getting full: I had no free evenings. Not to mention that this was on top of work, which required me to leave home at 6:00, and now I was getting home at about 10:00. I know that this is a normal day for some people, and I now have a great respect for them: I was completely not expecting this type of schedule though… I had no idea if we would make it, but now, we are more than making it… we are now finishing up the final edits, with the paper being submitted to a conference and to a scientific journal... but you'll have to read the next post to find out what happened to get us here...

Part II will be in a few days… now that I have time to post!

Ever Have One of Those Days Where You Just Can’t Win, Eeyore?

Who would have thought that the first day out of school would be such a downer? The team and I worked from 8:30-3:30 in the lab on our famous LeidenCart (Ok, maybe not that famous, but humor me), and we got no results: nada, zilch, noodle.

Of course, I guess that maybe I didn’t fail, I just found way 2 out of 1,000 how not to make this light bulb work.. but I bet Thomas Edison felt the same way... hence the quote...

Particularly when it was supposed to work.

Particularly when you have a deadline three weeks away.

Particularly when you’re about to start a full-time job. (i.e. time will once again become a scarce commodity)

Anyways... on the bright side of town, I have finished my finals!!!

Maybe there is a little smackerel of sweetness in the week!