By summer student Eduardo Montoya >
Before coming to HZB, while having a coffee with one of my dearest friends who studied biomedical engineering, we got into jokingly into an argument of who was the most “engineer” out of the two of us.
The big question was if she, having gone through a lot of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering programming and construction lectures, was the ultimate engineer. Or me, having studied materials sciences and engineering with my countless hours of solid states physics, thermodynamics and surface chemistry, was the ultimate engineer. I clearly lost this debate, and we came to the simple conclusion, that even though the word engineering was in my academic degree, I was more of a scientist.
And then the question struck. What does it really mean to be a scientist? And more importantly, what would I choose as my role?
Who is a scientist?
I started with thinking about the classic view of a scientist. A secluded individual, working in a small group, trying to understand and uncover some natural secret, and also secretly in love with the machines they use for their work. A cliché to a point, but one where I did not fit in.
I knew I had passion for science and for the topics I have learned during my studies; and even many other scientific topics where I have left no link unread in the Wikipedia articles and no video unwatched in the YouTube channels. I love the feeling of understanding and being able to explain in a simpler way the incredible feats scientists achieve every day.
The emotional side
My experience both in prior research projects and in HZB has been an emotional rollercoaster. It has been dealing not only with the technical and scientifical analysis of measurements and experiments, but handling feelings of inadequacy and frustration, when things do not work out as hoped. I have learnt that research is far more complicated than eye meets; and that behind every publication, there seems to be a mountain of problems that were addressed, strategic choices that were made and story that must be told about the issue at hand.
Swim or sink
I understood how complex this is, after having worked on my first real long research project. I decided to do my thesis under the tutelage of a professor, whose time is very limited by the sort of job he has. I felt I was thrown into the water to swim or sink; and what surprised me the most, is how important were the little details that I had disregarded completely while learning about science in the lectures.
I tended to believe that the biggest and scariest formula was going to be the most important, however I quickly noticed, for example, during the melting of glasses for my research, that the most important part of my work to get right was the conversion between weight percentage to mol percentage of the oxides of the glass. Simple, commonly disregarded, but essential in doing science correctly.
Attention to detail plus creativity
The point behind all this is that scientific work requires passion, conviction, attention to detail, a lot of patience and belief and an insane amount of creativity to solve unforeseen problems with relatively little tools to your disposal. And I deeply admire this courage, but it makes me deeply afraid as well.
Failing forward
Failure in science is tangible. You yourself collect the evidence of your own shortcomings in the plannings of your experiments, in the results of your experiments and in the interpretation of your data. And failing your way forward is sometimes a bittersweet feeling, that only tastes sweet when you are looking backwards after you found a solution to your problems.
Then to answer my initial question, a scientist is someone who is brave enough to look at the world as it is, not as he hoped that it would be and is able to deal with the emotional uncertainty that this type of work brings.
The future is open
My work at HZB has me wondering if this is a life suited for me, and if my passion for learning and understanding is enough to choose this path and be able to call myself a research scientist in the future. I sincerely don’t know yet. I think it will take more time and experience for me to be able to answer this question fully. My perception in the moment, is that I must develop a natural Occam’s razor principle of thinking. As a quick example, I needed to find the edge of a sample in a spectral map, and it took me 2 days reading and a couple of Matlab scripts to find an analytical solution. My supervisor instead, seemingly confused by my work, just told me to coat the side of the sample with some carbon and voila; the edge should be clear from the spectra themselves. Such simple solutions without overcomplicating a problem are the gist of what I think I good scientist is.
The one thing I know is that I will always admire those encapsule this definition of a scientist; and that I will always try to use my hard-earned skills and scientific basis to create something useful and hopefully very good for others. Whether that is published research, a product, articles in a popular science journal, or even lectures, is still to be seen.
Finally I will leave you with a small meme that resonates with me, just a little bit.
On the author: Eduardo Montoya Gonzalez is a master student in Material Science and Engineering at Friedrich Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He comes from San José in Costa Rica.