My STEP project consisted of an 11-week internship at Battelle Memorial Institute as a Material Science and Engineering Intern. I worked on a few different projects in the lab during my time that included lots of coatings work, such as developing a formulation and process for creating rubber articles using a dip coating method, and performing and measuring surface modifications of titanium. I also programmed and performed some iterative calculations in MATLAB for material evaluation.

Being in a professional environment, like an internship, I was able to understand how to balance being independent and taking initiative in my projects while also knowing when to ask for help if I was struggling. As an intern I had come in with the mindset of wanting to be largely independent in my work to demonstrate I had the technical knowledge and capability to take on any task and work on any project. But I had learned that asking for help or insight into issues you may be having with a project does not necessarily mean you are not capable of the technical difficulty of the project, but understand that there are more experienced scientists and team members that may have run into the same issue that you can learn from.

During my project, and oftentimes in the research industry, I would run into several roadblocks in my project that I would not necessarily know how to overcome based on my prior academic and internship experience. I would take the initiative to go back into the literature and research what the root of the issue may be, test some other solutions that I had found, and sometime still come up short. It was a frustrating to feel as if you had tried every possible alternative and still the problem was not solved.

Reaching out to my project manager and supervisor helped me work through the problems that I was having with my project. They had offered advice based on their academic and research background and brought up points of view that I had not thought about in the past. We were able to work through the issues I was running into on the project.

Not only did I talk to my project manager, but other scientists in the department. Everybody I had talked to were not only willing to help, but were also genuinely interested in the work I was doing. Even having a casual conversation about the project helped brainstorm solutions that I had not previously thought of.

This change in my understanding on how to work on technically challenging problems is valuable because it’s inevitable that I will encounter other technically challenging work throughout my professional career. I’ve learned that now, although the first step to solving a problem is still to double check your work and go back in the literature, it should not discourage you from reaching out to other people with the roadblocks in your project. Their help will increase the productivity of the project, in addition to being a learning experience for yourself as a scientist.