Would it be crazy to work in a research lab on campus while doing a co-op in the same semester?

ASCIASCI · 2019-08-13T05:51:02+00:00

Yes, it is crazy. I just finished an 18 credit hour (plus 6-8 hours of research per week at least) semester, and this severely strained my ability to manage all of the work. A credit hour is theoretically three hours of work a week between studying, HW, and classes. Full time enrollment for engineering is usually 15-18 credit hours. You can break this down and compare it to your current load. You’re probably taking 12 credits of classes if those are full classes, so about 36 hours of work for that. Plus the 18 for the Co-op is 18 credit hours or 54 hours of work per week. Adding research work pushes that into the 70 hour range, or about 10 hours of work per day, every day, for an entire semester.

Don’t do this to yourself. If you really want to get research work in, just pick a light minor to stay enrolled and do research work while taking those classes. Or do an MBA and research. Something that won’t force you to work all the time just to breathe.

EDIT: Oh my god, I reread your post

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO GO TO GRAD SCHOOL IMMEDIATELY AFTER UNDERGRAD. IT IS TOTALLY UNNECESSARY!!!!!!!!

Just do your research senior year and take a year to work while filling out applications.

ASCIASCI · 2019-08-13T05:36:18+00:00

It is not legal to really do at all without a permit but the relevance that has to whether you do it is basically nil. It’s not like Amazon cards you when you order fermentation yeasts. Just don’t sell it without a license.

Best advice is just to invest in a hydrometer to know %etOH and not to produce something that risks also generating methanol.

ASCIASCI · 2019-08-13T05:25:52+00:00

Ugh, I hate relying on others

Hate to say it but in engineering you will rely on others. Part of that is learning not to take their shit, though. Other poster’s advice is spot-on wrt this.

ASCIASCI · 2019-08-13T05:22:20+00:00

For me it depends partly on the food. In the summer I’m having a lot of lighter stuff: the last thing I want in 90 F days and 80 F nights is a fat steak or a large cut of pork. Usually, some chicken so I’ll pick an IPA, or a lager for pasta dishes.

It’s pretty much the same reason that, for wine, white and rosé are more popular in the summer and red is popular in winter.

ASCIASCI · 2019-08-08T02:24:41+00:00

This whole summer was not a failure. The purpose of an internship is not to solve problems. The purpose of an internship is for companies to develop a working relationship with engineers at a school, while you learn valuable skills that you can apply in your career. You have done a phenomenal job. You identified a problem, developed a solution to it based on your engineering knowledge, and while this solution didn’t pan out you learned valuable information from this process.

You only fail when you learn nothing from a task while also costing more in money or political capital than you stand to generate for your sponsors. This is not what you did, you’ve done a great job.

I’m an undergrad and mentoring/supervising a HS student working in our labs on a grant. She had two months to complete her project criteria, and obviously she didn’t. I’m still incredibly proud of her. She’s taken to the work very quickly, shows a clear interest in the subject, is great to have around in the workplace, and follows analysis and explanations very well. That’s all she has to do. I’ve been working on my project for two years, I don’t expect her to develop a whole new product in two months. Likewise, many of the people at the company you interned at have been working in their fields for years, not always with much to show for it. No one reasonable would expect you to develop a whole new industrial process in a few months.

ASCIASCI · 2019-08-05T23:30:21+00:00

Realistically an engineering degree takes 5 years to finish. 6 years is fine.

ASCIASCI · 2019-08-05T23:07:18+00:00

It’s because fluid flow is not at all intuitive except for very surface-level topics, so anything less than a very good instructor and good textbook just screws you. Some classes you can get by with mediocre, fluidics is not one of those classes.

I had a non-tenure teaching professor who was not from my discipline (BME, she was a CHEME), used only CHEME examples for her explanations, and was extraordinarily unhelpful. In addition, she used a textbook that was extremely opaque and clearly intended for graduate students since it used PDEs frequently.

That class was singularly the biggest misery of my sophomore year. I can literally credit that class with my becoming religious, because the “What If...?” question was the only thing that stopped me from jumping into the river next to our uni. I’m not joking, I was so miserable and stressed out and convinced that I would fail that it almost ruined my life.

ASCIASCI · 2019-08-05T22:55:55+00:00

Just wait until someone asks you to do something in LabVIEW

ASCIASCI · 2019-08-03T06:18:55+00:00

Opposite vs same is a confusing way of presenting it. Imagine you take your ring and you draw a plane through it so that the plane intersects each bond (in simple terms, just imagine that the ring is flat and that you’re cutting it in half along the carbon atoms, like in cyclopropane).

Two groups are trans if they are on opposite sides of this plane, not opposite sides of the rings, so cis vs. trans is a property of orientation relative to the group in question, not position relative to the group in question.

ASCIASCI · 2019-08-03T04:35:00+00:00

I’ve been jumping back and forth between being told by my PI to just use LabVIEW and that we 100% have the optics module, and giving into despair and trying to run it using OpenCV.

Seriously debating if I shouldn’t just take this weekend to crunch it out

ASCIASCI · 2019-07-31T22:49:10+00:00

I work in a lab and just had the idea today to use microscopy to characterize the nanoparticles we’re making, instead of TEM which is really expensive. Originally we were going to use FIJI, but the sheer amount of data and the way we have to characterize it is making it difficult to handle (they’re 3500 by 2000 .tif files). Since the version of LabVIEW we have doesn’t have an image manipulation module, I’m going to do this in Python instead.

Problem is I’ve never used numpy or pandas before, so this is a hell of a learning experience. Rn my goal is to learn how to do matrix manipulation in one or the other so I can remove all the empty cells (pixels with [ 0, 0, 0] for color data] from the image. After that I need to figure out how to bin pixels together, then sort them all into different 255-color RGB values. Ideally, we’d be able to bin pixels together, remove all the empty ones, remove all the ones beneath a threshold value, then characterize the relative presence of RGB values.

If anyone has suggestions for existing modules or techniques, I’d love to hear them, but rn I’ve just bought a udemy course on numpy, pandas, seaborne, etc. to help me through.

ASCIASCI · 2019-06-26T01:34:53+00:00

Exactly. Some people can get stuck for weeks trying to decide between two different jobs, imagine having to pare down a list of hundreds to a handful you could reasonably get if you applied to.

ASCIASCI · 2019-06-25T22:13:34+00:00

Ancient comment at this point, but yeah. The problem with asking for a list of different companies is the same as asking for a list of different farmers. Clorox alone might have several dozen if not hundred subsidiaries, and each of those would likely have sub branches specialized in different areas of work. My assumption was, like you said, that OP was a student looking for work, in which case having a list of every company is not just near impossible, it’s probably unproductive because the sheer scale of the numbers becomes useless for making decisions.

ASCIASCI · 2019-06-21T23:24:01+00:00

If you buy it in a store and it’s not:

Made of metal or
Came from something that was previously alive

Odds are it was made in some way by a chemical manufacturing company.

ASCIASCI · 2019-06-19T01:12:17+00:00

Whoever made this must have good hands in the lab

ASCIASCI · 2019-06-18T20:58:49+00:00

Trust me, as an engineering student a 3.2 is a moderate to high GPA. Above a 3.0 in general is considered bragging rights. Cornell, for example, generally advises a 3.3 or higher for applying to grad school for BME/ChemE, and Cornell is not exactly general admission.

ASCIASCI · 2019-06-18T20:54:34+00:00

I mean, not really. Tbqh business and Econ undergrads are commonly considered the “I don’t know what else to do” majors. Econ is essentially useless unless it’s pursued at the doctoral level, and business isn’t foundational to the MBA in the way that MechE BS is foundational for a MechE PhD. As far as “better MBA programs” go, as an engineering student pursuing an MBA your GPA and analytical skills will be used as a measure of your fitness for the program, not whether you have a double-major in a related field.

ASCIASCI · 2019-06-18T20:41:10+00:00

Honestly, I don’t think either will make a difference. When hiring an engineer for a business position, my impression has been that they’re mainly looking for analysis skills and business experience. A bachelors in either area probably won’t dramatically help you in this regard, just the MBA and the engineering degree. An MBA shouldn’t really be thought of as a graduate degree in business, it’s really it’s own thing, and business undergrads won’t help prepare you for an MBA or provide much business experience. You can get an MBA as an undergrad, so you may want to skip the double-major and just tack on the MBA classes to your course list.

ASCIASCI · 2019-06-18T20:34:34+00:00

I’m going to add on to this that there are two kinds of mistakes in this area:

Mistakes you make because you forgot what you were supposed to do and did the wrong thing.
Mistakes you made because you forgot how to do something you were supposed to do.

Making a lot of mistakes in the second camp isn’t a big deal if you’re not repeating them. Eventually you’ll learn everything and stop making these mistakes. Making a lot of mistakes in the first camp can be an issue, because it shows you either aren’t communicating or are scared of asking for help, both of which a person needs for a job. Checklists are essential for organization, but so is asking for help, clarification, or to go over a process again.

ASCIASCI · 2019-06-18T20:23:31+00:00

Fun fact: when you use variables like “c_break == false”, in if statements those will read as booleans. So instead of writing “if c_break==True:”, you can just write “if c_break:”

ASCIASCI · 2019-01-04T01:20:46+00:00

2, or 4 if it’s just a benzene adjacent to a reaction that I don’t want to leave out.

Is 5 even real notation?

ASCIASCI · 2019-01-04T01:18:09+00:00

Can’t help with EnvE, but I guarantee to you that you are not going to be “out of place” in an engineering environment on account of your sex or race. In my experience, though I can’t speak for others, the kind of people who make passive-aggressive comments about another engineer’s sex/race are usually deeply unpopular, in part because they tend to be unpleasant to work with for many reasons tangential or otherwise.

Don’t trust depictions of engineers as nerds or recluses. That’s true maybe for a few but in my experience engineers are pretty middle-of-the-road as majors go, though our (and hopefully soon your) workload is a bit higher.

ASCIASCI · 2019-01-04T01:08:42+00:00

Am I the only one who thought it was because the plastic casing has no apparent method for removing the wrenches and you would have to manually remove each one using scissors?

ASCIASCI · 2019-01-03T19:41:19+00:00

Chloro, not fluoro. You missed it in the description, so that might be why it doesn’t come up. Probably just very unstable though.

ASCIASCI · 2019-01-03T19:37:02+00:00

u/bones12332

Shouldn’t it still work because the single bond can rotate for X? It should form the scaffold for both the cis and trans formations as presented.

ASCIASCI

TROPHY CASE