First two months at MIT

My goal is to produce results that will allow me to write up a good quality thesis and finish my Master’s degree. I have chosen MIT to do my fourth year due to number of reasons: first, because I had the opportunity to do so, second because it is a brilliant school with incredibly smart, passionate and proactive students and third, because the research here is more oriented towards entrepreneurship and business than at Oxford.  

This year is an incredible experience since everything is purely on me. No one tells me what research should I do, what experiments should I run or even when should I come to the office or the lab. I wasn’t told what effect should I investigate nor what system to look at. I have absolute freedom in the choice of my experiments and their scheduling but at the same time I have absolute responsibility of getting the work done.

Admittedly, it took me some time to settle down, figure out the gameplan of my research and start experiments. After a month of researching published papers on the topic I was interested in – novel way of sintering of nanophase separating alloys – I have decided to investigate the mechanical properties of these systems and the evolution of their microstructure during the sintering process. I have been trained on multiple measuring devices including a scanning electron microscope and a transmission electron microscope that has maximum resolution of a nanometer (0.000000001 of a meter)!  At the moment I am preparing my samples and soon I will start measuring their properties. Simultaneously I am working on the theory and prediction of those properties. The application of alloys prepared using this new method ranges from body armour, concrete penetrators, and turbine blades to superstrong magnets and electronic microcircuits.

Besides conducting research I tried to explore the opportunities MIT and its clubs offer. As I mentioned I joined the gymnastics team despite never doing gymnastics before. I have the possibility to train 7 times a week in a gym that is so well equipped that puts Oxford’s gym to shame. I have also done a sailing course which allows me to borrow a 2-men boat anytime I want for free. Furthermore my friends and I have managed to participate in the midnight sailing which happens every full moon on the river Charles. The social life at MIT is also way more fun because in spite of the work for challenging courses MIT’s students are not stressed by the extremely short trimesters that Oxford has. They therefore have more time to either enjoy themselves or pursue career in terms of internships/research. With good time management students here manage to do both and MIT is often ranked amongst the most fun colleges in the US. The cliché phrase everyone uses here goes as “work hard, play harder”. Personally, I would say MIT’s students are, unlike Oxbridge students, extremely well-rounded. Great in many various subjects, sports and but they also have social skills.

Since this is my last year as an undergraduate I was also looking at what could I do next year and I am seriously considering continuing in research at one the institutes with top materials science. Those are MIT, UCSB, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. I am looking at the research groups at those universities, what systems and effect they are investigating and what impact does their research have. I have to send out my applications in the December. At the same time I have my eyes open and actively keep looking for something that would attract my attention so much I would decide to start my own business. You can tell such thinking is particularly encouraged here at MIT since every professor here has at least one spin-out company and owns at least 10 patents.

In my next post I will attempt to compare Oxford and MIT more systematically and try to give advice on which one to choose when applying for undergraduate or graduate school.

TEM, transmission electron microscope