Right before I sat down to write this reflection, I signed and faxed back all the paperwork confirming that I will be spending this upcoming summer working at World of Speed motorsports museum again, this time as their Summer Education Intern! So, needless to say, my job and the responsibilities it entails have been on my mind as of late, and it’s gotten me thinking about connections that can be made between the things I’ve learned this semester in lab and the ways in which I can apply them to my summer instructor position. As I’m writing this, my lab partner and I are in the middle of our self-guided final lab experiment, which is an expansion on/reworking of the Coulomb’s law torsion balance experiment that Abigail and I conducted earlier this semester. Our goal is to redo the experiment using a new set of conductive spheres we manufactured in lab out of ping pong balls and a graphite paint conductive coating, to see if improving the conductivity of the charged spheres will result in data that lends itself to a Coloumbic force vs distance graph better fitting the theoretical model.

When Abigail and I first proposed this idea for our final lab, I knew it would involve some degree of hands-on building/creating/engineering in regards to manufacturing the new conductive spheres, but I hadn’t realized quite how extensive this process would be! We spent our first day in lab just making the spheres. It made me realize that I haven’t really built or created anything by hand all semester, which is something that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing. Working on this lab has allowed me to remember exactly how much I thrive in hands-on learning environments, and how instinctive the process of building something often is for me. Lab always involves a degree of hands-on involvement, but this lab in particular, between the manufacturing of the spheres and helping Dr. Ackerman reassemble the broken torsion wire assembly in the torsion balance, has more specifically involved a lot of taking things apart and putting them together, which I am beginning to suspect may be my true wheelhouse.

This skill is one that’s directly relevant to my job this summer as well as my future career goals, as my summer camp instructor position consists in large part of helping my students build hands-on engineering projects such as hydraulic powered cranes out of plastic medical syringes, wooden skewers, and cardboard, as well as helping them take apart and then reassemble things like lawnmower engines, RC cars, and simple circuits. Additionally, in the future I hope to continue working in the automotive education department at World of Speed, perhaps helping teach auto mechanic skills to high school autoshop classes hosted by the museum, a job where the hands on practical skills of assembly and disassembly are critical.

In some capacity, I’ve always known that building things with my hands is something that I have a knack for, but prior to this class, I had never really thought to connect that to a directly scientific application, especially laboratory science. It’s interesting and validating to see that those two skill sets can intersect in this way! It’s helped me realize that I can bring my aptitude for practical engineering to my job this summer in a way which also incorporates the more cerebral and academic elements of my physics education, and attempts to integrate the two. For example, lab this semester has taught/reminded me of the importance of lab safety, for instance always washing our hands before leaving lab especially during the Nuclear Spectroscopy experiment, handling liquid nitrogen very carefully and wearing long pants and close toed shoes, practicing good electrical safety with the high voltage power supply used in the Coulomb’s law experiment, painting the conductive spheres outside due to the paint’s carcinogenic fume hazard, etc. Safety in lab/technical settings is crucially important, and it’s a huge responsibility of mine when I am working with my students at summer camp to keep them safe and ensure they are following safety protocol. I feel that practicing lab safety all semester in this course has been an excellent refresher course and gotten me firmly into the habit of paying attention to safety protocol.

This semester of lab work has also made me far more comfortable with the reality of equipment breaking or not working as anticipated, and has given me experience in thinking on my feet to either fix it or come up with a workaround or an alternative solution. For example, the torsion wire snapped in lab yesterday while Abigail and I were attempting to measure its torsion constant, and I then had to help Dr. Ackerman replace the wire, which was a bit of a daunting prospect, but in the end was totally doable. Abigail and I have had experiments not go as planned other times as well, such as when the ceramic superconductor broke in our superconductivity lab. We ended up designing an alternate experiment where we measured properties of a resistor as a function of changing temperature, which proved to be educational and interesting as well. This flexibility and willingness to change course and pursue a different plan is a skill I’ve intentionally been trying to cultivate this semester in lab, as I recognize that in the past I have had a tendency to get swamped in stress and anxiety when my academic work doesn’t go the way I had originally planned. Paralysis of indecision helps no one, and I’ve come to realize that an ability to think on my feet, restrategize, and regroup will not only make me more academically flexible and confident, but also more able to anticipate and react to situations like these happening at work this summer. If there’s a shortage in supplies or a last minute change of schedule and I am not able to lead my students through a planned activity, as happened several times last summer, I now feel more confident in my ability to swiftly come up with a plan B, or troubleshoot a way to make the original plan work.

I think earlier in this semester, I often felt anxious that I wasn’t learning as much in lab as I felt that I should, or maybe that I wasn’t understanding the physics as much as I was supposed to. I’ve since come to realize that maybe the point of lab is less about understanding the precise ins and outs and minutiae of every single physics concept we study, and more about learning practical skills such as teamwork, flexibility, time management, resilience, patience, focus, and safety precautions- or at least that’s my takeaway. Lab has, more than anything, ultimately taught me a lot about the ways in which I learn, such as which techniques help me feel confident in the material (writing everything down as I go, explaining things to my lab partner, working hands on, remembering that I can still get worthwhile learning out of an experience even if I don’t get every detail of the academic work perfect) and which don’t (stressing about time or details, not writing things down in lab, relying on the process of writing the lab report to teach me the physics instead of learning it myself during the prelab phase). I’m of the firm belief that you cannot be an effective teacher without a healthy degree of self awareness as to the ways in which you yourself learn, so as someone with a learning disability who plans to go into education, often of children who also have learning disabilities, the reflection component of this course has been of great value to me. Between the reflections in this course helping me externally process the revelations I have had about my own learning style, and the multiple talks on education and specifically physics education and accessible physics education that we have had in my physics colloquium class this semester, I feel like my strengths as both a teacher and a student have been further developed, and I have lots of new ideas as to ways I can include and accommodate students with different learning styles, better help all of my students overcome their own learning anxiety, and engage more fully with the material.

One connection I have made recently is that as I continue to gain experience in technical and professional writing with an instructional, procedural purpose (such as the lab reports and lab notebook entries I’ve made for this class), I am also furthering my skill and comfort levels in step by step, instructional writing (including troubleshooting guidelines!). This is a skill that will be very helpful in my job/internship with World of Speed this upcoming summer, as part of my job responsibilities include writing up step by step instructional curriculum material to help the museum’s education department document how to guide students through different hands on engineering projects, activities, and experiments.

It’s a unique and important skill set to be able to communicate a set of technical directions in a clear, concise, and approachable way that anyone can pick up and follow, and I am gaining increased appreciation for the “presentation of procedure and results” part of experimental laboratory science for helping me develop and strengthen this skill set- though, as I discussed with Dr. Ackerman earlier today, I have room for improvement in the “concise” department, and aim to work on my ability to edit my technical writing for brevity. In particular, the goal of “make it understandable by someone with intro level physics background knowledge” when writing a lab report has an interesting parallel to my goal of “make it understandable to someone with an education background who has not performed this activity with children” when writing up project curriculum for my job.

Another new goal of mine in this class as well as others I am enrolled in (E&M, Problem Solving) is taking full advantage of any opportunities to further my learning by making connections between the material I’m learning in each of my courses at a given time. For example, the last experiment I did in this class was Magnetic Force and Torque, and I realized upon starting the experiment that my understanding of torque was not as robust as I would like it to be, so I asked Dr. Lovell if we could spend some time solving torque problems in Problem Solving. This allowed me to strengthen my learning of the topic from multiple angles, AND get the most out of both classes. I could learn about torque academically in Problem Solving and study it hands-on in lab, while gaining a better background understanding of the theory behind torque so as to understand the lab procedure more thoroughly.

Forming these types of topical connections in the material of different classes has always helped me to feel more engaged and synthesized in my learning, which is very motivating for me as a student- if I feel like everything is “clicking,” I feel more confident in my own academic abilities, which historically helps me to relax and focus more on the process of learning as opposed to worrying about academic performance. Also, making connections between the things I am learning in different classes helps me to see the “bigger picture” in a way- it helps all my classes feel more worthwhile, because it gives me a taste of how the things I am studying in class on the small scale can synthesize in a more widely applicable way. Right now in E&M, we are wrapping up our study of electrostatics and starting our exploration of magnetostatics- this conclusion and final review of the theory behind electrostatics connects nicely with the lab my lab partner and I are currently working on, which studies the Coulombic force between two stationary, geometrically identical, charged spheres at various distances between the spheres’ centers and at various charges.

In addition to discovering opportunities to foster my technical and instructional writing skills and focus on getting the most out of my classes by trying to seek out topical connections between their material, I am also excited by the opportunities presented by the final lab project in this class, especially the brainstorming and research and experimental design stages. Earlier in this semester, and in the past in general, I would feel a fair bit of nervousness and apprehension towards the idea of designing an experiment all by myself- the thought of initiating lab science independently without external guidance brings with it a laundry list of places where I could make mistakes or make poor choices that will undermine the strength of the experiment later, in the execution stage.

However, the introspection and analysis of my own learning patterns that have been encouraged by this class through the reflection assignments have helped me to understand daunting challenges in science as an opportunity to lean in and learn and trust the uncertainty and hesitance for what it is: merely an indication that you have more to learn! I have become more confident in my own lab skills through this course, and I am now excited by the concept of brainstorming experimental setups that could let me investigate things I find genuinely interesting or exciting, or perform labs which have obvious ties to my intended work post-graduation in the automotive industry.

Finally, the final lab idea brainstorming process has been exciting for an additional reason. At the moment, I am in the process of designing and executing my own self-guided, independent, open-ended physics problems in Problem Solving, so I have many opportunities ahead of me to make connections between the self-guided project design journeys in each of these two different classes. I am optimistic that both projects will shed light on each other!

Since my last reflection for this course, I have completed and submitted by first full lab report using Latex, and it was a learning experience!

While Latex is not “fully” coded (ie, it has less active coding involved than, say, a Jupyter Notebook running Python), Latex does use some coding elements and syntax to help create the formatting and visual styling of the lab reports for this class. This ultimately has been giving me the opportunity to learn a new skill set, much like I discussed in my last reflection for this course- when I talked about feeling as though by learning how to synthesize my prior knowledge of Python with my new scientific data fitting knowledge, I could develop a new, lab-oriented skill set which I would be able to apply in future courses at Agnes Scott. Learning Latex as another programming language or syntax of sorts furthers my digital literacy by expanding the practical applications of my coding experience to include professional lab report template creation and typesetting in Latex in addition to data fitting in Python.

While it can be at times a bit tedious, I definitely see the value in learning and mastering Latex- it allows me to create a document directly in PDF form and specify all of the visual typesetting, alignment, and styling as I create it, with built in capabilities to handle scientific features as well, such as the inclusion of figures, tables, plots, and equations. When writing lab reports in the past, I have known myself to spend entirely too much time trying to get the visual styling and alignment of my figures, equations, etc. to look nice and orderly using Google Docs or a similar word processing system. I can easily get stuck in this step, and wind up wasting time wrestling with Google Docs’ autoformatting trying to get it to look how I want, when I could better use that time to strengthen the content of my lab report. Using Latex, I have found that it is MUCH more efficient and less frustrating to use a programming language designed for typesetting. It saved me a lot of time, allowed me to stress less about the formatting and just focus on the content of the report, and helped me to create a lab report that “looks” very professional, which is a new skill I have acquired through this class. Thinking back to lab reports I turned in last semester in Modern Physics that were composed in Google Docs, they did not look nearly as professional and polished as the lab report I just recently submitted for this class, and they took ages longer to format. Thanks, Latex! This course continues to challenge me to expand and update my digital literacy knowledge and apply it to a new set of scientific applications, helping me to develop a blended skill set that I did not possess before taking this class. I’ve also learned a lot about the formatting of a professional lab report, and it’s been interesting to compare and contrast this new set of expectations with work I’ve submitted before, such as lab reports in Modern Physics, and look at the difference between the two- two columns versus one, the introduction of an abstract, the derivation of equations instead of merely including them, etc.

I feel as though I am developing ways to harness computers to “think smarter not harder” so to speak- utilizing coding engines to handle the tedious parts of lab reports such as formatting and data fitting and save myself time while creating a more polished product that is closer in line with what the scientific community would expect from a paper or lab report. It is a goal of mine to continue developing these new skills to the point where I feel comfortable with them and they are second nature. In the past, I have known myself to approach learning new digital literacy skills (how to use a new program, a new technique in Python, etc.) with a fair amount of apprehension, and I think this class is giving me a lot more confidence in just diving right in to trying to pick up a new digital literacy skill without stressing out about it and feeling intimidated. Feeling intimidated by something is one of my personal biggest barriers to learning. Conversely, feeling confident using material, applying it to different situations, and teaching it to others is my personal benchmark for knowing that I have truly mastered it, and so I am grateful for any ways to feel confident about a new skill instead of intimidated. Especially for people with academic perfectionist anxiety issues, as I discussed in my last reflection, it is important to remember that you can’t learn anything without feeling out of your element at first, and that the more you embrace that feeling, the more you will be able to master, and the less nervous or worried you’ll have to feel along the way, so you can just focus on the material instead of beating yourself up for not understanding it perfectly.

In addition to developing my digital literacy skills through data analysis and lab report formatting using Python and Latex, this class is also helping me develop my troubleshooting abilities, between troubleshooting errors in Python (shoutout to the five hours I spent last weekend fighting with Jupyter Notebook over what ended up being a single missing asterisk), troubleshooting errors in Latex, and troubleshooting errors with equipment in lab itself. As someone with ADHD, I do not tend to consider myself an exceptionally patient person, and it can be really tempting for me to give in to my short attention span and find the quickest way to fix the problem instead of really taking the time to fully troubleshoot an issue that I am encountering and find an elegant solution that’s a bit more time consuming. The problem with giving in to this impulse is that without taking the time to fully unpack the problem and fix it, you likely lose the chance to fully understand what was causing the problem in the first place. Additionally, the quickest way to solve the problem is not always the best way, and in my personal case, feeling like I took the easy way out soothes my ADHD’s attention span impulse to move on to something new, while driving my academic perfectionism anxiety up the wall and creating an unproductive (at least for me) feeling of insecurity over the quality of my own work, which then hinders my progress.

I’ve run up against this problem several times in this class (not so much in lab, where the combined brainpower of me, my lab partner, and Dr. Ackerman can help guide the experiment in the direction of a hands on genuine solution to the problem) while data fitting in Python and compiling code in Latex. Often times with coding, when your code isn’t compiling there are numerous things you can do to get it to compile correctly and run without an error, but many of these do not necessarily fix the problem, especially in the case of data fitting where the quality and strength of your fit is crucial and will affect your residual plot and chi squared value. As I experienced several times with this particular lab’s data fitting, sometimes you can jury-rig something to get your code to compile properly- without being certain that this “band-aid fix” actually did anything towards fixing the underlying problems in your equation that are causing the fit to have a weirdly high chi squared, which I suspect is what might have happened with my last data fit. The lesson I learned this last lab report is that you have to ask yourself if whatever you just did really fixed the underlying problem with your fit or if it just made your code compile without an error, and if the answer is the latter, you have to take the time to try to figure out what’s really wrong with your fit. It is necessary to have the patience to sit there and focus and figure out the actual problem instead of being tempted by the band-aid fix, even if it is tedious, and this is a skill I currently feel is a bit underdeveloped in me- though I have noticed progress in it since I began taking this class, so I hope that with intention, I can continue to develop my patience in troubleshooting through this course. Developing this skill would serve me well not only in this class, but also in life in general.

Plus, as someone whose job consists of teaching science, physics, car maintenance, and coding to children through hands-on experiments, my workplace and work skill set requires tons of patience- in managing a classroom of excited and rowdy children, in the necessary patience involved in the helping my students with the troubleshooting portion of hands on engineering projects, and in teaching the children how to develop their own patience when working on these projects. By developing techniques to work through the frustration of the troubleshooting process, I will be able to share these with my students next summer- especially students with ADHD like me, who may have additional difficulties with patience and who could use some extra support in the classroom.

Overall, I am starting to develop a belief that good, professional laboratory practices and good science (keeping a lab notebook, patient troubleshooting, utilizing digital resources to make your life easier, etc.) not only allows for taking better, more accurate data, but also for developing a number of widely applicable personal skills that one might not instinctively associate with science (patience, flexibility, coding ability, determination, etc.). Thus, it is my goal to seize this opportunity and take full advantage of it to make sure that the lessons I learn in the lab get carried with me outside of lab and into my everyday life, so I can apply them to my personal relationship with learning, my job/internship, and future classes at Agnes.

Since my last reflection for this course, I have learned a lot about the process of laboratory physics. The concepts that come to mind first though are data fitting using Python, as well as the importance of flexibility when it comes to handling unexpected obstacles in lab while completing an experiment.

Data fitting using Python has presented a bit of a challenge, but I am looking forward to sticking with it, honing my skills, and becoming more confident in doing it, as I have learned throughout college that I internalize and really process academic material best when I am not daunted by it. I mentioned this aspect of my personal experience with learning in my last reflection, where I discussed my tendency to get “stuck” or “bogged down” in material and feel very intimidated by it if I do not feel as though I understand it completely. This is something I hope to work on in the future, as I realize it is normal to feel less adept with material you are not yet confident in, and that is a part of the learning process that I hope to embrace, rather than dread, in the future.

I have used Python before numerous times. My father is a network engineer and cloud developer, so he taught me to code at a young age, and I have built various websites, gone to a couple coding-based summer camps, and taken three coding classes since then- two of which have focused exclusively on Python, taught by Dr. Depree at Agnes Scott College. This past summer, I helped my younger sister code a video game project of hers in Python using a visual novel engine, and I also taught Python to children through my summer camp instructor job, using Hour of Code to help them develop their own video games. I was expecting the data fitting using Python to pose no difficulty whatsoever due to my experience with the language, but I quickly realized that while I may have Python experience, I do not have any data fitting experience, meaning that this course has provided me with a new skill set to embrace learning. I have never tried to integrate Python with scientific applications before, and becoming more confident in doing so over the course of this semester is something I anticipate being really satisfied with and proud of, as it will represent a synthesis of my personal coding experience and my academic scientific education. I also see the value in becoming adept at data fitting using Python, as it will give me a professional and more professional/appropriate way to fit data for future lab reports than what I had been doing in Modern Physics last semester, which was using Excel. Interacting with my data in a more involved way like this encourages me to really understand the data that I have collected, and how it fits with the scientific model/expected value in various specific ranges of the data or at specific points. I feel like it allows me to see the comparison between my collected data and the expected ideal in a more thorough way than simply taking a percent error between the slope of a plot and the expected value would, which in turn allows me to better understand my sources of uncertainty, or things I could have controlled or accounted for better in lab. Also, prior to this class I had no prior experience with using chi squared tests in a scientific capacity- we touched on them briefly in the statistics course I took last semester, but it’s gratifying to be able to apply that technique to data that I’ve taken, rather than data which was given to me in the context of an assigned statistics problem.

Between scientific use of Python, data fitting, and chi squared tests, I am beginning to see my knowledge from several separate past sources of my education converging on each other in a way that helps me develop a new, lab-oriented skill set which I look forward to applying in future courses at Agnes Scott! Additionally, while I do not currently plan on attending grad school, I do hope to continue my work with World of Speed automotive museum this upcoming summer, where I am slated to teach our coding summer camps again, and I hope that working with Python in this course all semester will help me refresh and dust off my coding skills and get re-familiar with the syntax so that I can be even more helpful to my coding students this summer than I was last summer.

The other primary lesson I feel that I have learned since my last reflection for this class is about how important it is to be flexible in lab. Science, as I am learning in this lab, does not always go the way you plan! This is okay. All of the most important scientific discoveries have come from a scientist witnessing something unexpected, so I think it’s important to embrace and appreciate that aspect of the discipline. Science is about studying the unknown, and the thing about the unknown is that we cannot always predict it. Additionally, lab equipment can be finicky, and experiments involving electricity can easily be thrown off by a variety of sources- an unusually dry of humid day, or the scientist wearing a particularly staticky sweater, for example. My lab partner and I experienced an experiment not going according to plan recently, when the 4 point probe we were using to study a superconductor began malfunctioning and broke, leading to us having to develop a new experiment on the fly. I was a little nervous at first, because doing academic projects without a clear-cut plan can be nerve-wracking, but then I remembered the importance of treating every change of plans like a new opportunity to grow and become more flexible as a person. So, with help from Dr. Ackerman, my lab partner and I developed a new plan, and it’s one that I feel confident in, even though we’ve crafted it ourselves, without a lab manual or provided instructions. I look forward to treating this experiment as an exercise in independence, and a new chance to build my confidence in my lab skills, which I know from past experience goes a long way towards furthering my learning of material. It’s okay if the lab doesn’t go perfectly, and chances are it probably won’t- science can be messy and finicky, but that’s okay, because it’s a part of the discipline I love so much.

Over the course of this semester, it’s a goal of mine to become far more comfortable with adapting to experiments not going as planned, as flexibility is an important skill in all aspects of life. Furthermore, a lot of my job next summer is going to be helping my summer camp students complete hands on projects- which I know from last summer’s experience ALSO have a tendency to not work out quite the way you had hoped. I look forward to the flexibility I plan to develop and cultivate in this class helping me be more successful at my job next summer.