No Lab Coat Required

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Before last summer, I considered the term “research assistant” exclusively reserved for science majors in lab coats. And since my intended major and wardrobe don’t fit this conception, I never thought I’d apply the term to myself.

Well, I was wrong — in more ways than one. “Research assistant” has since been added to my resume, and I didn’t have to wear a lab coat to do it. In fact, pajamas were perfectly acceptable attire.

If you're looking for research assistant loungewear, school spirit is a plus. (photo by Melissa Parnagian)
If you’re looking for research assistant loungewear, school spirit is a plus.

Let me explain: After a wonderful semester in Dr. Renita Miller’s writing seminar Race, Gender, and Representation, I knew I was interested in identity politics. The class fundamentally changed how I looked at policies and judged their effectiveness for minority groups. Dr. Miller must have noticed my enthusiasm, because she described her research project – a look at representation’s effects on the Texas State Legislature – and asked if I wanted to help code data over the summer. Relevant information in the legislature’s bills could be accessed anywhere online.

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Research at Princeton: Independent But Not Alone

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Research is a group effort. Photo by Chung-Ho Huang
Independent work and research research are by and far collaborative efforts.

It used to be easy to tell myself that I could do everything alone. That was the way I had mostly done things until college, and I never felt the need to change. It was no different when I began research at Princeton. It was easy to convince myself to not to ask questions, to simply turn to books or articles for help, for fear of pestering and disappointing my adviser and my labmates. As long as I kept my head down and worked, I believed I would know what was happening eventually.

But I don’t tell myself that anymore. In fact, it frustrates me when I look back a year ago to that time. I’m only now filling in the gaps of my incomplete knowledge, a problem that would easily have been solved had I had the audacity to speak up and ask the questions that really mattered. I was just unsure and afraid about what I was expected to know – and somehow, I translated that into the fact that I was somehow expected to know everything. Because of that fear, I ended up neglecting my greatest resources, my greatest friends – my adviser, my labmates, my peers.

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The Rocky Road: Not Always a Flat Trail

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A picture tells a thousand words, but even then it is often not the whole story. Geologic field research is frequently idealized in many people’s minds by the scenic landscape photographs that we take – open forests in beautiful river valleys, lush meadows along the tops of ridges, picturesque deserts, unbelievable views at the peaks of mountains… and, at its best, field research is indeed conducted in places like these. Last summer, for example, I spent 6 weeks gathering data for my senior thesis in the North Cascades, WA:

Looking at rocks (Photo by Sean Muleady)
Looking at rocks…

But amazing landscapes, although of course some of the best parts of our research, are only a small and arguably inconsequential part of the big picture.

Almost the entirety of the research that goes on in geology fails to be captured in the idealized photographs that most people see. To just touch upon some of the work that goes on behind the scenes, researchers have to prepare funding proposals, read the literature that relates to the problem at hand, manage a budget, analyze samples in a lab, and collaborate with other researchers. Although each of these components of research are critically important, today I want to explore one particular challenge that I grappled with over my field season this past summer. Continue reading The Rocky Road: Not Always a Flat Trail

Back to the Basics: Transitioning from Student to Researcher

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Time to hit the books again! (Photo by Stacey Huang)
Time to hit the books again!

Four years after I had begun my first incursion into the research world, I saw myself as a somewhat seasoned student researcher. At the very least, I had some confidence in my research and experimental abilities. But it was not until this year that I realized that through all the lofty jargon and fancy terminology I had been picking up along the way, there was something I had been urgently lacking: the basics.

One of the eye-opening incidents happened just this past summer, when my supervisor asked me to explain to him an optical gas sensing technique known as “2f wavelength modulation spectroscopy.” That day, I had been trying to calibrate a laser that we were planning on using for a methane sensor and had been experiencing some problems. As my supervisor always does when he troubleshoots, he wanted to start from the basics. After all, if we didn’t know how every bit of the sensor worked, how could we figure out the possible sources of problems? But usually he had been the one doing all the explaining, so I was surprised when he suddenly asked me: “Stacey, what is the signal that we’re measuring anyway?” Continue reading Back to the Basics: Transitioning from Student to Researcher