The Continued Search for Summer Employment
Posted by Nicole Sharp on 16 March 2005 at 21:10After a week of relative quiet on the academic productivity front thanks to Spring Break, this week has been one of those weeks so far. I eat away, little by little, at the backlog of work I need to finish—particularly with respect to my projects, two of which I am behind schedule on—yet the list doesn’t seem to decrease appreciably, and I am left feeling drained and weighed down.
With respect to my junior lab project (EMAE 283), my partner and I discovered Monday that we pretty much needed to start machining over again with square stock instead of round stock this time. We got our part cut to length, squared off, and our dog bone cut for the strain gage area milled. Today, we drilled and tapped the appropriate holes in either end and milled away most of the sides, so that the stand will cause less disruption to the air flow around the objects whose drag we are determining. Unfortunately for us, we misread the digital indicator and took off several hundred thousandths more material than we were meant to have. We estimate ourselves as having come within about 0.072 inches of exposing the threads in the hole we drilled and thereby rendering the part useless. To make matters worse, when we milled the first side—the one where we cut too close—we didn’t clamp the part very well, so vibrations caused a rather large variation in the depth of the cut. We picked up on the problems pretty quickly, though, and when we adjusted for cutting the other side, we came out with pretty good results. The part is by no means perfect, but it will do what’s intended and we learned something out of the experience, which is all that counts.
The other real thorn in my side is summer employment. I’ve had no real luck so far, and, since I think that company policies will keep me out of a job at Lockheed Martin, I’d really like to locate some research and/or a summer job here at Case. (Ideally, I’d like to take a course in psychology over the summer so that I won’t be taking 19 credit hours next fall.) All of this, however, requires money because the only way to convince my parents to let me do this—and it’s still a rather grudging matter, I find—is to make sure that I have all the money for it myself. My saving grace may have appeared in the form of an e-mail this evening about applications for SOURCE (Support for Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors). If I can find a professor and a project, putting together an application shouldn’t be tough. Getting funding like that would be the best possible solution for me, I think. I could cover housing costs and do some research toward a senior project and/or my graduate career.
Speaking of graduate school, I’ve started searching for schools and programs to which I should apply. Right now my interests for continued study seem to fall in aerodynamics, and I must admit a certain curiosity in experimental aerodynamics over the theoretical or computational variety. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any centralized place for searching for universities and programs the way you can for undergraduate programs. I get the feeling that I will have to rely a fair deal on word of mouth and checking schools individually, and, for foreign schools, I imagine I’ll be pretty much on my own. I am glad that I’ve started, though.