As a first year, I cannot write extensively about the years of work I’ve done in the lab or the publications I’ve produced (yet). But, I thought I would briefly tell the story of what life has been like as a first year, and why I wanted to come to Northwestern and join the Geiger group in the first place.

The first year of graduate school, I’ve found out, is different than the other years- not because you work more, but because your work is divided up between more things than older students who are able to direct most of their energy towards the main reason we’re all here: research. As a first year, my obligations include not just research, but also taking classes and TAing. Taking classes is, well, taking classes. I don’t have a particularly large amount to say about classes, which certainly isn’t a reflection on the quality of the classes (as they have all been well taught), but more a reflection on the fact that I have been receiving formal instruction in classrooms for 17+ years of my life and I am eagerly looking forward to the paradigm wherein the bulk of my learning will be from research seminars, individual interaction with mentors and colleagues, and independent research, both library and labwork.

TAing, on the other hand, was an entirely new experience for me. Though I did have a small amount of experience tutoring in one-on-one sessions, that is a very different dynamic than teaching an entire lab section. As a physical chemistry student who does little wet chemistry and who, it just so happens, never took general chemistry in college nor AP chemistry in high school (a story for another day), I will admit that I was a bit nervous about the prospect of guiding a gen chem lab section through what can be quite elaborate laboratory experiments.

Given the amount of time that classes and TAing have taken up, I can say with confidence that any productive research I have managed to accomplish since coming to Northwestern I owe entirely to the phenomenal older students who have helped me get established on the research landscape here in the Geiger group. Whether its been Sarah with the quartz SHG work, Laura with AFM, Hilary with SFG and computational work, Mary Alice with the contact angle measurements, Alex from the Notestein group who has been working with me doing synthesis, and all the other members of the group who have willingly and helpfully answered my questions large and small, my experiences with my fellow researchers here at Northwestern have been uniformly positive. If I have one piece of advice for prospective PhD students looking to settle on a research group somewhere, it would be to get a sense of how research groups function, not just in terms of how many papers they are producing, but in how they operate on a day to day basis. If every student has to fend for his/herself because people are too busy and/or competitive to help each other, it sounds like both not a very pleasant place to work and a place where more mistakes and unproductive activities will occur than is necessary. The cohesive and friendly nature of the Geiger group was something that drew me to Northwestern and has benefited me immensely since getting here.

Besides just the Geiger group, another big thing that drew me to Northwestern was its emphasis on collaboration. Anyone who attends a visit weekend at Northwestern will hear over and over again about how much Northwestern encourages collaboration, from both chemistry departmental administrators and individual professors. Modern research is such a specialized and complicated endeavor that it is generally not practical for one person to have access to every single synthetic and analytical technique required to conduct a high-level and impactful scientific inquiry. Despite being at Northwestern for less than a year, I have already been involved in multiple inter- and intra-institutional collaborations. Soon after arriving on campus, I spent a week at Penn State with Professors Jim Kubicki and Jorge Sofo learning some of the intricacies of molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory calculations for use in modeling geochemical interfaces. Lately, as mentioned earlier, I have been working closely with a member of Professor Justin Notestein’s group here at NU to create functionalized silica windows as part of a DOE catalysis project that also involves the group of Professor Peter Stair. Being able to draw on the knowledge of not just one faculty member, but on several faculty members with complimentary interests and knowledge, exponentially increases a project’s probability for success.

Finally, to continue my shameless plug for Northwestern as I am reviewing my first year here, another huge positive for NU when I was considering schools was the large number of shared user facilities. This greatly increases the number of analytical techniques available to a student, as technicians are available to train new students to use a particular piece of instrumentation and oversee the acquisition of data from it. Perhaps most importantly, this also means that there are technical experts and staff there to maintain the instrument, fix them when things go awry, and work with you on how to best run a measurement. Don’t get me wrong, I love getting my hands dirty, taking off the hood of instruments and tinkering with screws and valves until you are covered in oil and have absolutely no idea what you are actually doing except, most likely, greatly compounding any problem the instrument might have had in the first place. In undergrad, a grad student with whom I was working and I once completely dis-assembled a mechanical vacuum pump, cleaned and replaced old parts and machined a missing piece before reassembling it – only to find that it still didn’t work. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire exercise, and learned a lot of about vacuum pumps, but at the end of the day, we still didn’t have a working pump. Sometimes, it’s nice to have staff to fix your problems for you, especially when the data you are trying to acquire is necessary for the potentially-time sensitive publications required to progress through grad school. And that’s why shared facilities are great.

That’s all I have to say for now- except, to any prospective students out there: I hope you find a research group that matches exactly what you are looking for on both a professional and personal level. Good luck in finding your new home!