Day 19: Blown Fuse

So I went to the lab this morning…

Okay, I need to stop using that line at the beginning of every blog post. Let’s just talk about what happened in the lab today.

You can probably tell by the title or at least the fact that the title wasn’t some celebratory phrase, that we didn’t start collecting data today. And you’re right. Error 22 showed up again, and we had to troubleshoot. I read through the ion beam source’s manual online and suggested a few alternatives.

First, we tried turning the controller on again, but this time after power cycling the device (turning it off and then on again) using the circuit breaker.

ERROR 22.

Then, I suggested we check the fuses on the controller. It turned out that one of the fuses was busted. We thought, “Holy smokes, this might be it!” After spending hours asking around for this rare fuse (it’s a 62.5 mA, 250V fuse — this is rare because most fuses are between 1 and 2 amps) by asking around the BU staff, I spotted the fuse in a little package of assorted fuses that Joy gave us along with the millions of other little pieces she handed us. We replaced the fuse, and —

ERROR 22.

Oh, and somewhere in the middle of the day, we got our hard drive disk to be cloned by Guoan, so at least we did one productive thing today. I also sent an e-mail to Professor Ludwig (who is busy in Europe currently), suggesting that we might have to consider an alternative project to what we have right now because my abstract is in two weeks, so it’ll be good to hear from him tomorrow.

After I left the lab, I went for dinner, obviously. I met this girl from Arizona called Feona who is really passionate about social service regarding mental health, so it was really cool hearing her talk about it! She sounded really excited! Also, her school starts July 24 — this means that she’ll be skipping the first few weeks of school because of RISE, and that sucks, because she has to do homework on top of research work now. But yeah, I spent like over a hour at the dinner table because the kids there were cool and we were having some nice conversation.

After that, I headed upstairs at 8:00 pm. I had a counselor meeting and worked on essays, making considerable progress (I am proud of this!). After that, I have been essentially fooling around until now. I’m sleeping early today just so I can get my sleep schedule back on track. I didn’t take a nap today, so that was cool!

I’m signing off now. These few days have been feeling slow and unproductive, but Peco says this is extremely normal in research and that lots of worse incidents have happened. In the spirit of research, I will persevere. Hopefully, the next few days will see some sunshine!

Sincerely, (running out of these phrases)
Max

Random things:

• Apparently, stress, anxiety, and depression levels at graduate labs are very high. Especially in the physics department, people are often sad because they see their friends receive well-paying jobs and starting families — then, they see themselves in the lab, failing over and over again and not producing much meaningful work while also not gaining much money.
• Yikes, the stuff above actually kind of touched me today and gave me a lot of insight on the researching/graduate school community.
• I’m going to a graduate potluck tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll be able to make friends with a few people!
• Should I go on the upcoming Hampton Beach trip, or should I ditch and watch Spiderman with some other people?
• It’s been REALLY hot in Boston these past few days.
• I swear there was something else I wanted to say but I forgot what it was. I’ll write random things down immediately next time.