By summerstudent Yara Mahboub >
I am Yara, a bachelor student in my 5th year of the nanoelectronics engineering program, and I joined a whole team of physicists. I guess if there was a reason that made Facebook invent the ‘it’s complicated’ status, it would definitely be to describe the physicists/engineers’ relationship.I took about 6 physics courses, 4 of which I used to attend with physics students. So yeah, I know how that usually works. Although we are attending the same class, you can clearly see in our professors’ eyes every time we engineers kill the vibe, interrupting that never-ending discussion between him and that passionate physics student just to inquire about a nonrelative issue like, ‘Is that applicable?’ ‘Is there a real-life application?’ ‘Can that even be applied in our universe, or do we just need another sigma to see it?’. Physicists will always see engineers as party poopers, and engineers will never understand the point of overthinking something that won’t get prototyped afterward.
Those were my thoughts until I joined my lovely physics team. They taught me the engineering-wise techniques beside the theory behind everything related to magnetic materials. I learned that each small detail should be observed and well analyzed. They showed me how someone could spend hours on a single small detail. It’s not just getting more interesting when you understand; moreover, as perfectionism is somehow considered a survival mechanism in solid state physics. I could now spend 12 hours straight just to observe a skyrmion without even feeling time and to cut a long story short, a skyrmion is a topological quasiparticle characterized by a stable, swirling configuration of spins in a material, defined by a topological index.
Ruined samples are just well-fitted for other measurements.
My supervisors were so innovative that every time a sample got ruined, a wire bond got broken, or even after the sample was burnt, it wasn’t considered useless anymore. Instead, this sample could serve very well for another experiment.
They were always supportive. I won’t ever forget that day when I just gave up on everything after burning a sample in the most stupid way ever—literally so stupid that every time I remember it, I roll on the floor dying of embarrassment 😀
I was so frustrated that I started crying, but one of my supervisors told me that ‘when something breaks in the lab, it just broke itself.’
That mindset of dealing with problems and just trying to find a new approach instead of crying on what already happened actually not only improved me academically but also improved my perspectives on a personal level.
I was there, and I’ll always be here, next to you.
Being far away can be challenging, especially when you constantly seek validation and support of your inner circle to feel better. However, I am incredibly grateful for presence of my family, partner, and friends because their unwavering encouragement makes everything much easier.
Moreover, I won’t ever forget that in the middle of my journey, when I doubted my capabilities, and got overwhelmed, I got a companion to remind me that it is all just in my head, and she knows it because she was there once.
On the author:
Yara Mahboub is a bachelor student majoring in nanotechnology and nanoelectronics engineering program at university of science and technology in Zewail city in Egypt. Currently, she is summer student at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB). Her project focuses on investigation of non-collinear spin textures in strained 2D van der Waals magnets.