MRS Fall Meeting notes

The week after Thanksgiving, I traveled to Boston to present at the Materials Research Society Fall Meeting.  My talk was Monday morning, and my poster was Thursday evening -- in between, I watched as many presentations as I could! What I noticed was a distinct lack of activity regarding LEDs ... in fact, in the sessions I was viewing, devices were altogether less well-represented than in the past. Instead, people are focusing on the physics of light emission and absorption.  There were many talks about plasmon resonance and coupling it to semiconductor nanostructures -- this is something that's always been in the background at the MRS, but this time it was surely the highlight of the nanocrystal-oriented sessions.  There were also quite a few presentations on charging, blinking, and multiple exciton dynamics in nanocrystals. I guess I have some new topics to learn about!

Glow, baby, Glow

I'm presenting a talk and a poster at an upcoming conference, and in the process I've been looking around for cool images to share.  I didn't use most of the ones I found, but I think if every burnt-out high-school junior thinking about ditching science could see some of this stuff, they'd all jump right back onto the wagon.

Three colors of Si nanocrystals (inside vials), illuminated with UV light. 

 Si nanocrystals on a mesh, in room light (top) and illuminated with UV light (bottom).

A thin film of Si nanocrystals (the black spots on the glass are actually from the tape we use to stick down the glass slide), in room light and illuminated by UV light.

Raise your Voice

The first time I gave a talk at a conference, I was terrified.  My talk was on the last day, and so I had suffered with those butterflies in my stomach through the whole thing.  What would happen?  What if the laser pointer shimmied with my nervous, shaking arm, and everyone could tell I was scared?  What if I made a mistake and some famous scientist called me out in front of the whole crowd?

What happened was that I got up there and ... the microphone was not working properly.  The technician tried for a few moments to get it to work, but in the end, there was nothing to be done--and so I simply had to speak with a loud voice. The simple act of raising my voice to call out across the room, "Can everyone hear me OK?" caused the butterflies to evaporate -- it was a forcibly raucous and casual interaction with my audience that broke the ice for me. I had no problems presenting my work and felt great afterwards and learned that giving a talk is really not much to worry about.

I've kind of re-learned that this week.  Over the summer I taught Thermodynamics, and my class was about 35 students big.  I got pretty used to interacting with that size of an audience.  But this week, I was asked to cover a few lectures for my Ph.D. adviser, teaching the same course. The big difference is that his class has a 100+ enrollment -- now, that's a crowd!  So I showed up, having reviewed the material, and a little anxious about speaking to so large a group of noisy, chatty 20-year-olds.  But the first thing I had to do was call out, "OK, we're going to get started here!" and then keep my voice elevated as I walked through the development of entropy. Simply by asserting myself loudly, I felt much more at ease with the students, and able to make jokes at my errors and empathize with them over this difficult topic.

In fact, teaching this larger class is almost more rewarding: in a lecture-oriented course like Thermodynamics, you're going to have only a small percentage of students who will participate, ask questions, and respond to your questions.  So in a class of 35, maybe 4 or 5 students participate.  So while a larger class seems daunting, lecturing to a large classroom that's maybe 1/3 full is not much different from lecturing to a large classroom that's 9/10 full--plus, now you have 12 or 15 students who will participate, so there's a much larger return on your lecture-investment!

Teaching is hard work, especially if you want to do it well -- but it's also pretty fun.