As a materials science student you will also get to spend time at the Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis (CEMAS). It’s a relatively new facility with millions of dollars of equipment including diffractometers for XRD analysis, scanning electron microscopes (SEM), and transmission electron microscopes (TEM). The construction of the facility itself was carefully thought out so as to limit any interference with the microscopes, ultimately resulting in a center that houses some the highest resolution microscopes in the world.
Microscopy really brings out the beauty of materials science. The bottom image depicts an electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) pattern, an EBSD crystallographic orientation map, a TEM image of a grain boundary, and an SEM secondary electron image.