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So in the previous episode, I talked about why, I guess briefly, I decided to go to grad school and
that is mainly due to sort of plain assumption by one of the professors that I had interaction with
and the fact that she just assumed that I was going for it and that maybe gave me a weird
confidence that, oh, like people just thought I was going to go for the research career. I
didn't necessarily think that that was an option for me, but let's see if that can happen at all.
So that was one. And two, I was also being told by the museum people that
I need some kind of PhD in order to do the kind of job that they're doing. Again, I
I wasn't sure at all at the time I could do the job that they were doing.
PhD sounded like an insane monumental work. And if you are in the US system, you go from
undergrad to five-year PhD program straight most of the time. So I mean, you could do master's,
more on that maybe if anyone's interested. But the nice thing about going to US system is that
if you do get into PhD program, your master's portion is going to be paid for. So you will get
a stipend as a PhD student. So like a little bit of okuryo, a monthly income and health insurance
and whatnot. So you are more like an employee than a student because you get paid to sort of
be a student. Not a lot, perhaps. It really depends on the city that you'll be going to,
that the grad school program is at. It also depends on whether it's a public school or
private school. It also sometimes depends on which department within the school it is at because
different departments have different budgets for PhD students. But it's safe to assume that
it's not much more than, let's say, Shoninkyu plus a bit more. So in exchange of getting paid
just a little bit for five years, you will be able to do research full-time and get the degree,
hopefully at the end of five years. So that's the deal. But it's a five-year commitment.
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And mind you, you can still drop out and it's not like you have to pay if you decide to drop
out after master's degree. So it's a lower risk in that sense. But most people who start PhD
want to do all of that five years and do plan to do that five years. So that's the assumption.
Anyhoo, so I decided five years, it's a lot, but let's see, it might be worth doing. And it
sounds like I have some shot at becoming a researcher full-time. And that was the first
time ever that it occurred to me that perhaps I have some kind of talent to become a full-time
researcher. Because up until that point, I was an enthusiastic student, but I was not
the best of the best student. I was not getting awards left and right or getting A's all the time
with no effort or little effort. It wasn't like that. I sometimes had to work very, very hard
just to get a B. So it's not like it came naturally to me. But it was the first time
that somebody saw me doing research and thought, this girl could do research full-time.
So I wanted to give it a shot. I wanted to see. And if I didn't get in, so be it, right?
Application, it's a lot of work. It also costs you money, but it's ultimately not as much
of a risk expense compared to possibly not doing the career that you want. At least,
that's what I thought. I was like, it's worth giving a shot, is what I concluded. So I went.
First, I needed to sort of research about different grad school programs. And it helped
that I had a clear reason why I wanted to go to grad school. I didn't want to just go to
grad school because that's what my mom did or dad did or something vague like I didn't
really want to do shukatsu and the obvious next step was grad school. And it wasn't even
academically motivated either. I wasn't like, oh, I'm clearly really good at being a student. So
natural next step is a grad school. It wasn't like that either. I had some idea on what I wanted
to do with that PhD once I get it. And so I could sort of backtrack from there. In order to become
hireable at the museum as a scientist, what sort of skills do I want to have? What sorts of
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resume do I want to have at the end of five years to make myself
most marketable for the museum jobs? So in order to do that, I talked more with some museum folks
to figure out what specific skills are they looking for? What sort of degrees? What sort of
schools? Do they care which school I went to, you know, or do they care if it's a master's, not a
PhD? Well, two things I found out is that one, it has to be a PhD more or less, especially if you want
to get a museum job in America as a scientist these days. Yeah, so no master's as an option for me.
And number two, that they don't particularly care what type of chemistry I did
in PhD so long as I become an independent researcher. So they cared less about exactly
what I was doing. They said that it didn't even have to be related to museums or artworks.
But they did expect me to be able to design experiment, conduct experiment, troubleshoot,
maintain the lab activities, all of that on my own. So basically, that is what sort of PhD would
prove it. As a degree, it would tell the world saying that Asami is capable of coming up with
a hypothesis, designing the experiment around it, conducting the said experiment, and troubleshoot,
go back and forth, retry, develop more hypothesis, etc. I can do that all my,
more or less, you know, not to say that I can do everything by myself, but like I can,
I have the skill sets and experience to be able to do that. So that's what I wanted out of PhD.
So that was nice to clarify that because then I can really focus on, okay, what is it that I want
to spend my next five years doing research about? At that point, I was interested in spectroscopy,
because I realized that more and more museum science activities were becoming spectroscopy
based. That helps that that that allows and enables non-invasive way of analysis,
which means that you don't have to damage the sample or you don't even have to take
a little piece of artworks in order to conduct your experiment. You can just shine the laser at it
and like learn a ton of things about the artwork, whether it's pigment, binding medium, layers,
compositions, all these other things. So even with my baby undergrad, you know, spidey sense as a
scientist, I figured out, you know what, the trend in a museum science is going towards non-invasive,
09:07
which means more lasers. I want to work in my PhD using lasers. That's what I thought that that's,
that's, that's my, you know, 22 year old self thinking, okay, I'm gonna go look for laser labs.
And I also found out that the more sort of laser oriented labs I was looking at,
and I, I still wanted to do molecular spectroscopy, right? Like I didn't want to do physics as a
degree, because that's not one that's not my background. And two, I was less interested in
sort of particle physics way of inter using lasers, or like ions or other things. I was,
my primary interest was what chemistry happens when you shine a laser at the molecule.
So that directed me to more into molecular dynamics field. So not just looking at spectroscopy
in a static way in like one particular set point, or like one particular spot in the time axis,
right? I wanted to look at what happens to chemistry over time, over some period of time,
whether that be, you know, hundreds of femtoseconds, or hundreds of nanoseconds,
or even longer. And that's when I stumbled upon ultrafast molecular dynamics. And they were
shining, many of the communities of this ultrafast molecular dynamics people were shining
typically UV lasers, because that's some of the most accessible and the most energetic
laser poles that you can shoot at molecules. So they were shining UV poles to a molecule
that has some sort of absorption cross section. And they were looking at what happens to the
molecule after that. And again, my naive 22 year old pre-scientist self, baby scientist Asami thought,
hey, UV to molecules, that's like how we care about artworks. We worry about artworks being
damaged by sunlight most of the time. I mean, there are many other ways you can ruin an artwork,
but sunlight is one of the most crucial elements when it comes to museum science, because you can't
really avoid exposing artworks to natural light. You know, most artworks are best seen in natural
light. And if you're thinking about sculptures and stuff, they're exposed outside in the elements.
So I thought, hey, this might be the closest thing I can do that's still relevant to sort of
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the kind of sciences that I'll be worrying about that I'll be thinking about in museums.
So from then on, it was fairly easy because ultrafast molecular dynamics is not a big field.
I mean, it's big in its impact, I think it's becoming even more bigger
in impact. But in terms of the number of people who are involved,
there were limited number of people who are doing experimental work on it. And that was another key.
I did not want to become a simulation-oriented theoretical scientist, which is important work,
and I knew that. But I knew that what I wanted to get out of, again, at the end of five years,
the end of five years is some skills to handle laser, like a hands-on skills. So
I knew that I wanted to join an experimental group. So all of these things basically helped
me narrow down to very few short list of grad school programs that had one experimental
molecular dynamics, ultrafast molecular dynamics research group, and two that has museums within
the within the university or is sort of in the partnership with universities. So that if I
wanted to go collaborate with the museum people, I do have an option. And even though that's not
what I ended up doing, I'm glad that I thought about this because that definitely helped me
narrow down the options. So that's it for how I sort of went on searching my grad school program.
In the next episode, I think I'm going to talk about which lab I joined and how I chose. And
maybe go a little bit more into what I would do differently if I had another shot at grad school.
Stay tuned. That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us at Eigo De Science
on Twitter. That is E-I-G-O-D-E, S-C-I-E-N-C-E. See you next time.
