Friday, June 11, 2021
By:
My second week as an SPS intern is drawing to a close, and I feel as if I’m starting to get settled in with my new job and responsibilities. This week has breezed by, as I started to dive into learning some rheology, while also starting on my first project for the blog: an exploration of some of the rheological properties of mayonnaise. This project has given me a good taste (no pun intended) of the more experimental parts of my work. I got to make 6 batches of mayonnaise, each time making small changes to the process or ingredients, all while keeping a careful log of the rheological properties of each batch. It’s a far cry from my usual, improvisational cooking style, but it’s great to see the ways in which little changes to my process can have a big impact on the final project.
This being my second year of remote work, I’ve gotten good at finding ways to keep myself sane during long days of similar feeling work. With the world opening up a little bit more I’ve been spending lots of time working in coffee shops. Reading dense rheology papers is so much easier with a great cappuccino, and it’s amazing to once again feel like I’m a part of a world with other people in it, rather than a little research rat locked up in my basement 8 hours a day.
As I’ve started to build my own content, I’ve also been learning the style of educational articles. It’s a totally different style than I have written in before, making much more use of metaphors and back on the envelope calculations. It’s a fantastic challenge to try to make complex, often mathematical concepts accessible without sacrificing the validity of the explanation. In my reading, I’ve found lots of articles that focus on building educational content for classrooms, integrating pedagogy and ideas for experiments with their descriptions of physical concepts. Reading these articles has really opened my eyes up to the ways in which many popular science articles can fail to communicate the fundamental ethos of science of experimentation and questioning. I love the idea of finding a way to communicate science that brings the reader into the scientific process, asking them to form their own hypotheses and make their own way toward potential discoveries. I’m excited to work some of these ideas into my future projects this summer and to get started next week with my own educational article that we’re hoping to write summarizing the soft matter kitchen project.
Until Next Week,
Jess
Jesse Zeldes