The End. (Kind of.)

So, I’m officially an Ohio State graduate! Again! And all I got was this lousy mug.

Of course, I kid about the mug. I somewhat begged Megan (our fearless MSE advisor) for the mug during the Senior Breakfast on Sunday, because most everything I’ve received from the department can’t be used on a daily basis. That cast metal Ohio Stadium ashtray we made during our first quarter lab? Yeah, I don’t smoke. The huge personalized ceramic stein we received for graduating? It will look nice with some flowers in it, once I have a garden. All those chunks of metal from three years of lab – some mounted in bakelite, some not – don’t even make good paperweights. This mug will be nice for my daily cups of tea, as long as I don’t start word-finding and as a result, cause my blood pressure to spike. (Is it just me, or is “CORROSION” mocking you, too?)

For whatever reason I keep feeling compelled to write some sort of wrap-up of my experiences these past three years, but I can’t do it. Not only will I creep toward schmoopiness and never return, but the idea bores even me. What I will say is that I enjoyed my three years in MSE more than I did my first four years at OSU. I’m sure it had something to do with perspective, and being surrounded by some really fun people, and also this thing called a curve that is used a LOT more in engineering classes than it is in history classes. I couldn’t have done it without the generosity of my professors. I’m not sure I would have passed myself in some of those classes, especially with my repeatedly frightening performances on final exams. (I’m not a terribly good test-taker, okay?) But now, according to Ohio State, I’m a historian/engineer/writer, which is a strange little sandwich of professions. I don’t know where I’m headed next, but I have a sneaking suspicion it will turn out to be pretty interesting. (And it will not involve another bachelor’s degree.)

I’ll continue to write, but now unaffiliated with OSU and MSE, at a blog location to be determined. If you know me personally, shoot me an e-mail to let me know you’re interested in following along in the new location. Otherwise, you’re welcome to leave a note in the comments section with your request for the new web address (avoid the spammers by formatting your e-mail like joeschmoe-at-osu-dot-edu), or who knows, I may just end up posting the new address in the comments section sometime down the road. Thanks for your readership!

I am that girl

I woke up early this morning to drive down to Athens for my good friend Jen’s graduation from Ohio University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. I knew that after the ceremony, her extended family and some of her friends would be picnicking out by some cabins in one of the many breathtakingly beautiful state parks in southeast Ohio, so I wanted to make a quick stop at the grocery store to pick something up before hitting the road.  Sparkling grape juice sounded good to me – fun for kids and adults alike! Who doesn’t love sparkling grape juice?

I figured that it’d be a quick dash in and out of the store – make a beeline to the juice aisle, grab a few bottles of Welch’s sparkling grape juice (I am all about going name-brand for special occasions), swipe my credit card, and be on Route 33 before I knew it. However, there was no sparkling grape juice in the juice aisle. So I began walking purposefully through the aisles of the grocery store and bemoaning the fact that Aldi wasn’t open at that hour. I know where the sparkling grape juice is at Aldi! And it’s inexpensive! I love Aldi!

After about a minute of pacing and grumbling, I ran into a guy stocking meat.

“Excuse me,” I said, “Where is your sparkling grape juice located?”

He gave me an aisle number, and I power-walked in my dressy clothes to what ended up being the juice aisle. I scanned the shelf again, then walked over an aisle to where the pop (or soda – whatever) is located. There was a guy unloading pop (“soda”) from a cart.

“Excuse me, do you carry sparkling grape juice?”

The guy stood up and said, “Um, I don’t work here. I work for Pepsi. And I can tell you that we don’t carry that.”

Oh, you work for Pepsi? my internal monologue said. Is that why you have the word “Pepsi” and its logo embroidered on the left breast of your collared shirt? Please excuse the illiterate moron.

“Oh. Right. Sorry.”

I strode down one last aisle and ran into a (real) grocery store employee.

“Excuse me,” I began, waiting for the employee’s less-than-helpful response. “Where do you carry sparkling grape juice?”

“Oh, sparkling grape juice? That’d either be in the juice aisle or the natural foods section.”

“Well, it’s not in the juice aisle, so I’ll check the natural foods aisle. Thanks.” I walked over to the “sparkling natural foods” section, scanned the shelf and spotted some overpriced Izze beverages (not at all what I was looking for), and wondered if a bottle of plain old (name-brand) grape juice would have the same appeal as sparkling grape juice. I could always shake it up really well, I reasoned. Instead of choosing the ultra-lame route, I walked over to the wine aisle and muttered unpleasantries as I picked out a Cabernet. Not fun for kids, and not fun for people who have to drive for an hour and a half after the picnic.

I waited in line at the cashier, who along with the one other customer in the store probably wondered why on earth I’d been circling the juice aisle for ten minutes. When it was my turn, she asked how I was, and I was all, “Oh, good, good…how are you?” She just stared at me.

Because I am that girl who buys only a bottle of wine at 6:45 on a Saturday morning.

Hmm…

The novelty has not worn off after two years of this. What do you see in this picture? (Pretend that it’s not scaled to 100 micrometers.)

P.S. Whoever fills in the blank, “Oh my gosh! It’s a _____________!” with the word I chose in corrosion lab gets five points.

Lost in translation

Apologies again for the lapse in posting. The quarter appears to be slowing down to something a little less than a full-out sprint, but that doesn’t mean that I have many worthwhile MSE- or school-related stories. However, here are some snippets of things that have made me laugh a little too hard in the past week or so:

The Hungarian professor for whom I TA asked me if I knew “how to dance the chive.” After TA-ing for him for three years, I just let these sorts of questions roll on by, so I told him that no, I didn’t know how to dance the “chive.” Then he asked a student if she knew “how to dance the chive.”

“The chive?” she asked.

He said, “Yes, like on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’”

“You mean chive, c-h-i-v-e?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think that was a dance. I thought that was a kind of onion.”

“So you don’t know how to dance the chive?” he asked.

“No,” she replied.

* * *

Last week, at the end of the eighth week of the quarter, I finally realized that when one of my beloved non-native-English-speaking professors kept saying “rowboats,” he actually meant “robots.” Which made a whole lot more sense than imagining rowboats in the foundry.

* * *

While we were logging hour 55,000 on our corrosion lab write-up, my MSE buddy Brad started singing the kids’ song “Sally the Camel.” Since I’m not one to shy away from breaking into song (especially when I’ve been working on MSE for too long), I took over the singing at the “so ride, Sally, ride” part, then immediately said, “Oh, WAIT! Was I just singing ‘Mustang Sally’ instead?”

Word to the wise: both songs have the lyrics “ride, Sally, ride” in them, but any song by Wilson Pickett is always the far superior choice.

How to think like Caitlin in MSE classes

In MSE 371, a class that covers electronic materials, whenever someone mentions a band gap…

…think of these guys:

And fight the urge to start dancing to this song which immediately starts looping through your brain.

(And then just try to get that song out of your head.)

The long and winding road to the end

So the question has been asked how I feel now that I’m 39 days away from graduation. (I don’t think it was phrased exactly like that, but hey look! I’m 39 days away from graduation!) In a word, how I feel right now: exhausted. This has been my buzzword for a few months now, as a hellaciously busy winter quarter melted into a spring quarter almost equally painful. I also just finished up a four-day Jaunt of Doom, culminating with a Wednesday wherein I submitted a personal essay for my writing class (an essay in which my irreverence is totally going to get me in trouble), took a corrosion midterm for which I didn’t memorize nearly enough and then jumbled up the stuff I did memorize, and gave my senior design project presentation, which actually went over very well (praise be!). Just like in my old history major days, there are some people who are more open to thinking outside the box (in this case, embracing the interdisciplinary bakeware material and cornbread quality analysis), and then there are some people who love the box, embrace the box, dream of the box nightly (all those people who laughed at Amanda and me when we presented our project poster last quarter). When I got home this evening, I almost immediately fell asleep for two hours. And then awoke with a slightly sore throat. Just what I need now: swine flu!

Also alluded to in the comment section of questions is Europe and me visiting it. My plans are very, very loose, not unlike most of my commitments, but the vague “plan” is to make my way across the Atlantic sometime toward the end of July and spent a few weeks acquainting myself with the sites of some of my favorite history lessons that I no longer remember. That means I’m going to Germany. A couple of MSE seniors will be working in labs in Dortmund, so there’s that potential fiesta, and then there’s the trip to Dresden and the Czech Republic’s Prague that’s been seven years in the making. There’s also talk of Paris and/or Amsterdam. A lot of this hinges on airfares remaining relatively low. Otherwise, hey! It’s time to camp out in Hocking Hills!

And since I received two comments regarding my love of the old Nickelodeon staple, “Hey Dude,” I’ll also address that, although I’m not sure what to say. “Hey Dude” was corny, but with better acting than most kids shows. And then there’s the fact that it took place on a dude ranch which is just about the coolest location for a job, if you ask me. I wouldn’t mind going to a dude ranch sometime. At least then my habit of addressing people with “Dude!” wouldn’t be so awkward.

No question about it

That is SO totally a camel!

Opening the floor

Well. As my regular readers (who are dwindling in number, understandably) have probably surmised, this quarter is yet another mildly-panic-inducing busy one. Somehow there have been fewer wacky stories to report from my latter days in MSE-land (besides the situation-specific Dr. Sahai brand of personalized zingers). Some ten of us metallurgy kids (plus Gary) did head over to Dublin for metal casting lab last week, though, and we watched from above the induction furnace as the professionals mixed up a batch of alloys for us. The pros wore these shiny silver spacesuit-type outfits to protect them from the intense heat, although really they looked like leftovers from one of those restaurants that wraps your food in fancy foil. One guy even took his ensemble up a notch by wearing Mork suspenders. Then, once we’d spent a sufficient amount of time inhaling magnesium oxide, I felt compelled to rattle off the theme songs to two of the best Nickelodeon shows from my childhood, “Hey Dude” and “Salute Your Shorts.” (The singing wasn’t entirely unprompted–the youngsters in my class were reminiscing about old Nick shows and couldn’t remember the words to the theme songs. I guess they never crammed their impressionable heads full of ridiculous lyrics like I did. The result: they do well on MSE tests, and I sing about man-eating jackrabbits and killer cacti.)

Anyway, I’m opening the floor to the few hardy souls who have made their way to this sparse little blog. What topic(s) or question(s) would you like to see covered in Caitlin’s Wide World of MSE? If I don’t know the answer to any questions you may have (which is highly likely), I will hunt down the answer and report back. Viva la fearless journalism!

Jokes for those of the materials science persuasion

Last week, Amanda and I were guilted into giving chosen to give a talk at the MSE department’s student awards night. We recycled some of my blog posts from 2008 and presented “How MSE Has Robbed Us of Life’s Simple Pleasures” to a room full of materials scientists. Our greatest fear going into the talk was that our jokes would be met with blank stares and lobbed tomatoes, but in actuality, that only would have happened with a room full of non-MSE folks. (Like my knitting group. True story.)

Anyway, for MSE-ers who just can’t get enough nerdy MSE humor, I present to you my introduction to our presentation:

In the 3 years that we’ve been studying Materials Science & Engineering, our perspectives on the world have changed considerably. For example, we once thought that “creep” was just another name for a jerk, but we know better now. And where we’d thought necking was something that creeps try to do, we now know – well, there can still be some creep involved in necking. You see, MSE has opened our eyes to a world where atoms do a better job of cooperatively interacting with each other than people do, and where things are not always what they appear to be at first glance.

I first noticed this last bit during my first summer as an intern at GE. It may have been the result of staring at steel microstructure for too many hours, but I swore the grains had arranged themselves into the shape of a duck. I asked a fellow intern to confirm whether or not I was hallucinating.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “And anyway, it’s a chicken.”

“Crazy” must have been contagious, then, because over that summer and the next, many of us interns were regularly “seeing things” in the microstructure of our samples. The phenomenon came full circle at the end of my last internship, when one of the students I hadn’t known during the duck incident capped his end-of-term report with a PowerPoint slide featuring a huge micrograph where the grains were arranged in the shape of a cartoon head with its mouth wide open – and he’d added a speech bubble with the word “Questions?”

Crazy may be catching…

When you don’t feel nerdy enough

For my process metallurgy class this quarter, I’m writing a term paper on the topic of “the recycling of used beverage containers.” While scrambling to find journal articles on the topic during the weekend before my abstract was due, I found two articles that looked promising, but sadly were not available electronically. OhioLink is a fabulous thing, though, because I was able to request the volume that contained those two articles–but I’d neglected to see how many pages the book had. Imagine my surprise when I strolled into the SEL earlier this week, expecting a light booklet and instead receiving this behemoth. It’s so gigantic that it didn’t fit in my bag, so I had the pleasure of spending the following seven hours hauling that thing around in the most conspicuous manner to all of my classes. Just so I could have access to those two articles.

They’d better be darn good articles.