Week Three

The research environment at UIUC has been very positive for me so far. There are several graduate students in this lab, so even though I only work directly with one of them, there are always people to talk to throughout the day, and it's very interesting to hear about everyone else's research. There are many diverse and highly specialized approaches being taken towards fluid mechanics in this lab, and I am learning a lot by listening to other students present their work in our weekly meetings.

The day-to-day routine has been largely what I was expecting; we collect data whenever we can and analyze it whenever it's someone else's turn on the equipment (pretty much all of our research requires the use of a very specialized and expensive machine called a rheometer, and there are only a couple of them in the lab). One thing that has surprised me is how much more lenient the expectations are here for experimental results matching calculations or accepted literature values. In my lab courses at school, I am used to my professors requiring a very close match between my experimental data and the expected values, which makes sense since their main objective is to teach to me how to perform lab tasks carefully and accurately. Here, however, people are working on concepts that have not yet been modeled sufficiently by other scientists, and sometimes obtaining an experimental value that is even just on the same order of magnitude as the expected value is considered a success. I was skeptical of this at first, but the more perspective I get, the more I understand what qualifies two values as "close" and how much that can vary from project to project.

The only thing I have been a little disappointed with at UIUC is the apparent lack of integration between labs. We share our office space with two other groups, and while they're great company (one brought a soccer ball to scrimmage with today after work), there hasn't been much by the way of intellectual exchange, and I don't even know what half of them are researching. I had been looking forward to more of an overlap between our lab and others within the department, even if we are all focused on different topics, so hopefully this will change in the future. Other than that, I've been very pleased with the work environment here. Wishing everyone another good week on the job!

Nikita