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i had my weekly meeting today with my advisor. it started out different from normal, with her asking me about the other person in our lab group named george. he seemed like, if i may lightly stereotype for a moment, the standard egyptian student here. works hard, but would rather work out stuff himself than trust someone's already published paper. that in itself isn't too bad, since you get a lot of experience working through things instead of taking the quicker route although you end up taking much longer to get things done. also, whenever he is confronted with a conflicting opinion or viewpoint he becomes very defensive. granted, he may be right most of the time, but he takes it very personally.
throughout this semester george expressed a bit of disappointment with his classes here, compared to back in egypt where he received his masters degree. he had some valid points, optoelectronics was rather tame if you came from an optics field. also the courses available to optics-oriented students is rather limited compared to computer systems or circuits students. apparently, today he spoke to my advisor expressing his final and abrupt decision to leave after this semester ends this week. no one heard a thing about this until today, and he said he is not changing his mind.
i can understand if you are not comfortable with the situation you are in and he has all the right to leave. the thing i don't understand is that he just passed his DQE's and has promising research into an area that is far from competitive. optics is not like circuits where you have 40-50 groups throughout the world competing for a single design optimization contest. the design we are using has been around for, at least the mach-zehnder interferometer, since the 60s or so. of course fabrication and technological advances make the capabilities vastly different, but the design is something that isn't excessively innovative yet even though no one at all is working towards an MZI biosensor besides us. seems like walking away from a really nice situation since once we get a device working we can truly make innovative changes to it for heavily increasing the sensitivity, and thats a big plus. if you're just concerned about the lack of difficulty in classwork then i dont see that as much of a reason to give this up. classes are the least of your concerns in grad school and for the most part they are inconsequential compared to your research.
he signed papers as to the confidentiality of the project, even though i doubt he would do anything with the information he has about the sensor. theres problems of a corporate sponsor, a clean room, and existing masks/fabrication items that are just non-existent for the most part in egypt.
as far as how this affects me, i am now essentially taking over the entire project. my advisor assured me that it shouldn't be a problem and i shouldn't worry about being completely swamped with two people's amount of work. she continually says i'm doing a great job with what i present, research and achieve, and her having advised 3 students through graduation in the past 4 years should mean something. i do think i've done a good job, i just need to get used to the fact that you cannot do everything and there are some things that just will fail. i dont like having her approve my plan for the next week, and then i end up not saying i did every single thing i set out to do.
i'm not quite sure what year the other two members of my lab are in, jun i think took the DQE test last fall so this would be the end of his either 2nd or 3rd year. shengling i am fairly certain is ending his third year. i am the only student in the lab group that is currently on a TA(teaching assistant) stipend. if george is gone, i think after next fall i can rely on having an RA(research assistant) stipend which will give my the same money and tuition payment for my normal research work. that relieves quite a bit of unnecessary stress.
i'm going to have a lot of work to do the next handful of years, but i think once we get a device going we will have a lot of things to get decent papers written for. for optics, that's what matters too, so we'll see. my 1st semester thoughts: things have gone incredibly well and i enjoy this more than i even thought i could. even though i didnt sleep last night, i'm happy, and things are increasingly on the up and up.
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