I left my heart in engineering

There is a stereotypical conundrum that young Americans in the process of choosing a career or field of study frequently face. It is this--do I choose a field I love, or a field that will secure my financial future? Some are particularly blessed to love a field that happens to be lucrative, and others are particularly unfortunate to love a field that is very unlikely even to provide job security, let alone wealth.

When I was an undergraduate student, I found myself on the fortunate side of this scale, because what I loved was physics. I quickly deduced that I could study applications of physics, via mechanical engineering, and therefore turn my passion into job security as well.

However, although I loved engineering, I always still had the physics bug, so when I had established enough of my career and financial resources to feel comfortable with taking a break, what was the obvious choice but to indulge this bug and study physics?

So here I am at UAF. Physics classes have been fun and all that, but I still needed to choose a research project. The most prominent fields of physics at UAF are space and atmospheric physics. Of course, we have a natural laboratory here, and that is was draws most of the talent. I'll confess here that in my application statement to UAF, I played on this and expressed an interest in studying the aurora. However, in actuality I found that I don't have much of an interest in space physics after all. So, what to do? I was mulling over my options when I happened on an article indicating that one of my profs did experimental research in nanomaterials. I was delighted, and thought that that would be a perfect fit for me! I went to talk to him, and he had all sort of wonderful ideas for research.

Nanotech in Fairbanks! How wonderful! Whoda thunk? But as I began to explore my options, I hit wall after wall. First of all, this prof hadn't been active in research and hadn't had a grad student in several years. Secondly, he didn't have funding, and had a poor track record of obtaining it. His previous PhD student had worked as a TA her entire time! I did some digging around to see what alternate sources of funding I might find. Imagine my surprise to find that in 2001, UAF had founded, to great excitement and hubbub, a nanotechnology center that had all sorts of solid supports and lofty goals--grants from the Department of Defense, connections to other major universities, support from half a dozen Sili Valley companies, talk of bringing high-tech to Fairbanks, etc, etc. But within a few years, none of the goals were achieved, the money was gone, and the center was effectively dead. I talked to my department head, the Dean of the College of Natural Sciences, various personal contacts around the department, some people from the office of the dean of the graduate studies, etc, and all of them hemmed and hawed and sighed and shook their heads sadly. No, they wouldn't really talk about what had happened, except that the head of this nanotech center had been promptly fired, and the Dean at that time left thereafter. And no, they had no ideas for funding for me. And good luck!

So there I was--a great prof, great ideas, but no funding or technical or administrative support whatsoever. The department head, who is a very nice, personable man with whom I have a good relationship, sighed and smiled very patiently at me. "Why don't you continue interviewing other professors to see whose work you'd enjoy?"

Other profs? The thought had completely slipped my mind. After seeing the dangling carrot of manomaterials, all thoughts of holding my nose and resigning myself to space physics had whooshed away. But without funding, it seemed impossible to do the nanomaterials thing. And who else would serve on my committee, with only one faculty member in my field of research? Whom else could I bounce ideas off of? Whom else could I brainstorm with? It seemed a lonely and uphill way to go.

Then I thought, why the hell was I trying to fit a square peg into a round hole? What was I doing, besides trying to turn a physics program into an engineering program? What a surprise realization! I'm an engineer at heart after all! I mean, physics is lots of fun, but it's only fun when it's only fun, and not when I have to commit to actually working in it. And I certainly cannot imagine building a career out of it. So I went to the website of the engineering department. How many times had I read and reread the descriptions of the active research in physics, and sighed and thought, "Maaaaaybe I could do that, I guess. Maybe. It doesn't sound too boring."! First time on the engineering department website, and I found that over half of their profs did research in things I'd be happy to sink my teeth into. The first time I talked to one of them, we talked for almost two hours, about mechanics of materials, microstructure of materials, materials testing, etc, etc. Hey, that's my world! I missed that stuff!

Turns how he's now my new boss!

I am applying now to be an interdisciplinary studies student. My degree will be called "Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics." And I'll still get to take all the cool physics classes I want. But I'll get to work in engineering. And I guess I am an engineer at heart after all. Whoda thunk?