Holiday Spirit

While Milwaukee finally had its first snow fall this past weekend it still doesn't feel like it's time for the holidays.  I'm not into it this year and getting my decorations out has been a chore.  Could be lack of sunlight, could be depression.

Even school doesn't have much in the way of decorations; just these things they stick in the planters.  Of course they're all covered by snow now.

I need to put up my tree.  Maybe that will help.

I am not a Corrosion Engineer

I am not a corrosion engineer.  I do not have a materials engineering background.  In fact, I had one materials class.  My freshman year of my undergrad studies.  What do I do now?  Why I am an engineer in the materials department at a manufacturing research and development facility.

It's not so bad actually.  I am only in the materials department because my area (water) had two people in it: my boss, a water treatment research engineer, and the VP of development, who also happened to be the director of the materials group.  I've been here a year and a half now and while I didn't remember much from that freshman materials course five years ago, most of the memories have resurfaced.  

One of the projects I'm working on now is a new coating.  I'm running a life test on the coating current and today was my weekly day to check the panels to see how they're doing.  One panel looked funny but not in a discernible manner.  The only real "test" I've been doing with these panels is cutting them open once they fail.  Since that wasn't an option for this panel (it hasn't failed yet!) I needed a different test to try.  

But what?  The extent of my tests to now has consisted of weight loss/gain, blister, and potentiostat.  None of which were suitable for what I needed.  Then I remembered something one of my co-workers had suggested for a different coating: AC Impedance.  Unfortunately all I remembered was that the equipment to run the test is in the lab and that it's used for some coatings.  I needed more information.

When professors would retire at my alma mater they would leave behind any old text books they no longer desired and students could pick and chose if they wanted any.  When a professor from my department retired last year I managed to snag the book Corrosion Engineering by Fontana.  This was the book I turned to today to get an idea of what the AC Impedance test entailed.  Unfortunately, Corrosion Engineering only talked about the theory behind AC Impedance, I wanted more.  

The next book I turned to was one from my work's library called Electrochemical Techniques for Corrosion Engineering by Baboian.  This book gave me more details into AC Impedance evaluation for coatings with a lot more graphs and figures than Corrosion Engineering did.  More importantly, from this book I learned that I could take this technology and apply it to a different project to get more insight into a filmed electrode.  

I didn't end up trying an AC Impedance test today, I already had my plate full with linear polarization and tafel plots anyway but it would have been fun to work my way through a different test.  I put the funny looking coating back on test and moved on to another project.  There will always be more days, I'll just have to wait until a less busy one.

Oh, Snow

Hello snow, my old friend.  Today was the first snowfall in Milwaukee.  My parents up in the Twin Cities have already have three snowfalls this year - and not light dustings either.  I knew snow was coming but I'm glad it held off till the 1st of December.

There was snow on the ground earlier in the day but it was all gone by the time I left work at 5.  In honor of the occasion I put up some holiday decorations.   The extent of my decorations?  Penguin and snowflake window clings that cover one of the three windows in my apartment.  I do have a small tree but it's in the basement storage and it's scary down there!  I probably won't set that up till this weekend and besides, I have to clean the apartment first.

It's hard to believe that finals will be soon and the term will be over.

Thanksgiving & Its Perils

This past weekend was Thanksgiving, a holiday filled with food, family, and *ahem* Black Friday shopping.  Due to weather concern I spent my Thanksgiving in Milwaukee instead of with my family in Minnesota but I did make some traditional Thanksgiving fare (sweet potato casserole, pumpkin pie, toffee cookies, and dinner rolls) so I didn't completely miss out on the food portion of the holiday.

While I love shopping, I chickened out this year for participating in Black Friday.  It was very very cold outside!  The original plan was to hit the outlet mall at 10 PM Thursday night.  After a large temperature drop in the middle of the afternoon on Thursday I decided my plan was rotten and that I should just go shopping on Saturday instead.  Yes I could have gone out Friday still, and yes you can (for the most part) get all the same deals online that are to be had in stores, but I didn't really need anything to warrant the crazy shopping.  All I really need are more clothes to replace the ones that I've destroyed working in the lab.

Thanksgiving sure does have its perks.  It's on a Thursday which pretty much guarantees that one will have Friday off from work and maybe Wednesday as well.  When I was working on my bachelor's and master's degrees these days off meant nothing to me as I would have had final exams the week before and the whole week of Thanksgiving as a "break."  Now that I'm in the working world I just get Thursday and Friday off from work but as a graduate student at a big, semester schedule school I no longer have a break.  I had my microbiology class on Tuesday like normal, but my once-a-week Thursday class was moved to Tuesday to account for the day off.  There went my normal Tuesday afternoon work in the school lab time.

On a trimester schedule the week of Thanksgiving was nice because I didn't have to worry about anything school related.  No exams, no homework, and nothing upcoming!  Not so much now.

The peril of having a four day weekend is that now the likelihood that I'll have a lengthy to do list is high, and the likelihood of my accomplishing anything from that list is low.  Sigh.  Today I have a test in microbiology, my part of a grant proposal due, a meeting with my advisor, and some lab work that I've been putting off.  Today is going to be busy.

Darkness

It gets so dark so early these days.  It's hard to stay motivated when I go to work in the dark and come home in the dark.  Plus it's freezing (literally) outside and all I want to do is stay home on the couch with hot chocolate.  This was the view outside my lab on Tuesday at 4 PM.

It should not be this dark this early.  There is one more month ahead of me just like this until the winter solstice. I need to move closer to the equator.

In Class Experiments

One of the classes I am taking this term is called Pollutant Dispersion Processes.  It's the class I like the least of my two, mostly because the few assignments I've had involved MATLAB.  I'm still not very good at MATLAB but I am better than when the class first started.

Anyway, back in October we got to do a fun little in class experiment that involved trekking over to the Milwaukee River and releasing some (EPA approved I believe) red dye.  The main goal was to measure the amount of "pollutant" that passed through the center of the river.

Since I wasn't one of the people do got to don waders for the occasion, I stood on the river bank and recorded this little example of what went on:



I like this type of class activity.

And Then You Edit

So you've written a paper. Phew.

You diligently carved out time every day to sit down and pen a few lines of prose. You paced the floor, you muttered to yourself, you bounced ideas off your colleagues, you did your best to manipulate Microsoft Word into doing your bidding. But before you submit the paper, before you hand it over to someone else to read, you've got to edit it yourself.

After I finished writing my thesis for my masters I was exhausted. Hours were spent hunched over my keyboard pecking away. Candles were burned at both ends. Cliches were tossed about. But read my own thesis?

"I know my thesis like the back of my hand! Why would I need to read it?"

Well...I tend to write like I talk. I think most people do this, it's fairly common in the age of social media/internet. Unfortunately, the writing-like-you-talk style of writing is not ideal when it comes to things like papers for publication...or my thesis. So of course I needed to read my thesis but I honestly didn't do that great of a job reading through it. It's tough to read your own work when you feel like you have it all memorized.

When I saw this article on the Chronicle of Higher Education's website about editing yourself I was psyched. "Perhaps I can find some tips for the paper I'm having a tough time crafting," I thought. And I did but not as many as I had hoped for. The two main tips from the article are in italics below, emphasis mine.

All I can do is urge [you] to pay attention to well-written works in [your] own field, to read not just for content, but also for the nuances of style, and to steal the tools and tricks that good writers use.

I recently read a great journal article about microbial desalination cells whose text seems to follow such a logical manner I can't help but admire it. I could probably do something similar for my topic.

If you don't remember the basics—like what a semicolon does—you might want to remind yourself. If you don't know the difference between further and farther, lay and lie, figure it out (or go lie down until you do). If you are prone to comma splices (as I am), be aware of that and make conscientious choices. Those are not trivial issues. If we don't take the form seriously, the content of the message won't get delivered. There's no point in writing if you're not going to be understood.

Over the weekend I reviewed a paper that was full of mistakes. On one hand the writer of that paper was an English as a second language person and an undergraduate student. I'm not saying that ESL or undergraduate students don't know how to write, I'm saying that I think it's harder to write a paper in that situation. On the other hand a lot of the mistakes were formatting ones (e.g. "Figure 1.title of figure here" vs "Figure 2. The blah blah shows blah.") which I would consider mistakes that anyone could catch regardless of language or years in school.

I've been using Guide to Technical Editing: Discussion, Dictionary, and Exercises as my go-to style guide but that's simply because it was the book that the "Writing and Editing for Technical Publishing" class I took last year used. This article recommends The Elements of Style (4th Edition) plus Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing), and a four-and-a-half star Amazon rating can't be too far off. The article goes on to name other reference books for writing and editing such as Economical Writing, Second Edition and On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft.

These five books aren't the only ones out there. Are there any must-have style guides that you use?