Things I Wish I Knew When I Was a Science and Engineering Student

Source: Peter Richardson – NSW Branch Committee

Proceeding through university in a science or engineering discipline is a challenging process in many ways. Knowing what to expect in the approaching years is incredibly useful, and gaining this insight from fellow students will help you to remain prepared for the upcoming stages in your studies. Here are five tips and perceptions regarding the undergraduate science and engineering study path that I wish I had been aware of when I was a student.

1. Notetaking Tips

As a first-year student, newly enrolled at university, it can be challenging to know which information delivered to you by your lecturer is important to remember. This can make notetaking a rather problematic activity, particularly if the content is delivered quickly. However, there are some ways to make the most of notetaking exercises. Listen out for obvious cues from your teacher. They will often advise you which information is particularly important for you to know by saying things such as “this is very important for you to know” and “it would be useful for you to know how to solve this type of problem before you sit the exam”. Make the most of these hints as they have been given out for a good reason.

When highlighting sections of textbooks or notes, try to select only crucial pieces of information so that you can easily find that section on the page when you revisit it later. Avoid copying down large amounts of information such as tables of data, large chunks of text and information that is present on lecture slides or notes. This information will typically be available for you to look back on later. Instead, try to prioritise added information or facts that the lecturer may bring up in addition to the information in front of you. These types of additional information may not be accessible after the lecture has finished. Remembering these small, useful, bite-sized facts leads nicely onto our second tip.

2. Remember the Little Things

Becoming an excellent materials scientist is not about learning a huge amount of information about a single topic from day one. On the contrary, it is more useful to have a good general understanding about the properties of many materials, and their interactions with their surroundings, as possible. Also important are physical testing methods, manufacturing processes and chemical or microstructural analysis techniques. Even if you do not remember every detail, an overview is important, keep them in the back of your mind. Harbouring as much general knowledge as possible will allow you to think outside the box, and one day you will be able to use that knowledge to tackle a problem that the ‘standard’ set of tools cannot solve.

3. Avoiding Misinformation

We are living in the age of information, which leads to unprecedented benefits in regards to our ability to search ‘online’ for anything. However, therein lies the problem: we can search for anything, but that does not necessarily mean that the facts are true. While reports of ‘fake news’ have been published by all forms of media for an incredibly long time, there has certainly been an increase in the number of misinformed articles, along with the presence of social media. It is extremely

difficult, if at all in some cases, to police the posting of false information through our various media platforms. Coupled with this, we have an extremely active online social presence, in which this false information can spread like wildfire. Like anything that is posted online, the initiation of false information is something that cannot be wiped from existence. Differentiating fact from fiction can come down to using common sense; I have seen media articles publishing stories slamming the renewable energy field for “using up all Earth’s wind, sun or waves”. Other articles can be more difficult to determine their truth. The best way to do this is to get your information from credible sources. Try to find the original research article if possible, or ensure that wherever you get your information from is getting their information from a credible source. Such sources include peerreviewed journal articles in which the research needs to be approved by several world experts in the area of the research, or government agencies. However, even this does not always ensure that the information is truthful. A group of graduate students from MIT University wrote an algorithm in 2005 which creates a computer-related research topic and automatically produces an entire research paper (including graphs, figures and

references) from it, with a single click of a button. They submitted these papers to several journals and found that some were accepted through the peer review process for publication. This process of submitting fake papers has since been used to test individual journals’ peer review processes and ensure the quality of research published by our scientific community. The abstract of one of these randomly generated papers is shown below.

4. Reading a Research Paper

Learning how to read a research paper on any topic can be a daunting task, and materials science papers are no different. However, just remember that learning to read these documents is like learning to ride a bike: frustrating, tiresome, time consuming, but ultimately exciting, rewarding and even enjoyable! It is not uncommon for new students in the field to take hours or even days to read a single paper from start to finish. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, if you can read any single sentence in your first paper without stumbling across a word, phrase, abbreviation, symbol or acronym you don’t understand, you are doing well. The scientific community is rife with technical jargon, which plays a very important role. It has been specifically developed within the field to provide an extremely precise description of certain phenomena, which ultimately helps to keep the reporting of new observations as concise as possible. You will spend a huge amount of time looking up new terms, which will then be added to your own vocabulary. This will not only build your understanding of the work presented to you, but also improve your own technical writing capability down the track. Secondly, due to your newfound enthusiasm for research, it is likely that you will try to read the paper from start to finish, taking in every word along the way. While this makes for an excellent learning experience, it is a long and laborious way to read a paper. As you read more and more papers in your field, you will become familiar with the typical jargon, experimental methods, ways in which the results are displayed and order in which the information is presented. With this experience comes the ability to quickly flick to the part which gives you the information you are specifically after, and greatly increases the rate at which you can digest new works.

5. Why Materials Research is the Way to Go

So, you’ve decided to become a scientist. Great choice! You obviously have a keen interest in finding out how the world around you works. Materials science is a fascinating area of science that binds many different topics together such as physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, to name a few. Not only does materials science combine these areas together, it also acts across an enormous scale range. You could be developing new steels or concrete materials for the construction of huge skyscrapers, tunnels and bridges. Alternatively, you could be looking at individual atoms within your material sample through a transmission electron microscope, or designing nano-electronic devices which exhibit single photon emission for quantum communication systems. In all cases, materials science is an exciting translational science, taking new ideas from theoretical conception all the way to engineering implementation. You will play an important role in this translation. Your work could be computational, running simulations to predict which materials have the best properties for a unique application. On the other hand, you could be creating new materials in the laboratory, testing their performance using highly technical equipment, or developing new processes to make those materials in a largescale or economically feasible way. Whatever your role, you will make an exciting and important contribution to the advancement of our scientific knowledge and the development of new technologies.