Why I quit my master’s at Cornell
My area of study at Cornell was Fiber Science. When I was looking for a graduate school to attend, I was specifically looking for a school with a textile engineering program. There are only a handful of schools with a textile-related program; one of them is Cornell. I know this is supposed to be a good school in New York, so I chose it right away.
My project was self-healing resins and composites. People come across composites plenty of times in their daily lives. For example, carbon fiber reinforced composites are used for the exterior of some cars. The composite is strong and lightweight compared to the traditional metal frame. I won’t get into the self-healing aspect just yet, but know that the science behind self-healing is still being studied.
This is my experience as a graduate student, and since I did not complete my fiber science degree, I do not consider myself an expert in self-healing composites. I write this not as a scientist but as a student and a former research assistant who made many mistakes that I hope readers of this article can learn from.
The basis of the research was unreliable
The self-healing aspect of the resins/composites comes from small capsules — microcapsules — embedded into the material. When a crack propagates in the resin/composite, the crack is meant to open the capsules. The capsules then release a healing material. For example, the healing material can be two-component epoxy. The two components react and solidify. The healing material is meant to, essentially, ‘glue’ the crack shut.
While I was reading articles on how to make the microcapsules, I felt that the whole story was not being told. The authors only wrote about successes and not about failures. They only took snapshots of experiments that fulfilled their goals. No article reported yield (actual mass obtained divided by starting materials x 100). I suspected their yield was very low; otherwise, they would have boasted about it in their study. This was a huge problem for me because I needed to produce the material successfully and in large quantities so I could put them into the resins. When I put their methods into practice, I failed to produce their results consistently.
Furthermore, I felt like my task was to do the impossible. Instead of producing spherical microcapsules, I was meant to produce elongated microcapsules. Elongated microcapsules are predicted to have better results for self-healing (for very technical reasons that I will not get into). The capsules naturally form in spherical shapes because the minimal surface area of a sphere leads to minimal interfacial energy. And if there is anything I learned in chemistry, it’s that nearly everything is striving to achieve the lowest energy state. The articles I referred to claimed to obtain elongated microcapsules reliably, but again, I suspected they only took pictures of their successful experiments. I, myself, obtained elongated microcapsules twice out of about 100 tries. I was not able to replicate the results.
I lacked confidence and communication skills
I told my advisor that the procedure was failing, but he insisted that I try new variations to make the elongated microcapsules. And so, I spent about two years trying out variations. I should have communicated with both him and my other advisor why I thought the capsule articles were unreliable. I should have insisted much earlier on in the project that I could not do it and insisted that I take on a new project. But I was timid back then; I hated confrontation. My former self could not imagine working up the confidence to tell my advisor that I did not trust all these published papers.
Overwhelming instruments
I have a BS in chemistry. The instruments used for chemistry analysis are very different from those used for fiber science. With all these new instruments and lab methods, I struggled to keep up from day one. In my first year, I was given the green light to audit the Fiber Science course. This meant I did not have to do the Fiber Science labs, which I chose not to attend many. This was a big mistake on my part. These labs showed us how to perform and make sense of tensile tests, which I needed for my project. Thankfully, this instrument was not too hard, and I figured it out with help from my lab mates, advisor, and lab technician. However, attending the labs would have given me more confidence with the tensile testing.
There is also a specific shape to test the sample on the tensile machine called the dogbone cut. I thought the dogbone was more of a suggestion because many people in my lab did not use it. I used it during my last months, and it gave much better results. The moral of that story is: don’t just follow what the other students are doing. It may work for them, but it may not work for you.
None of my courses prepared me for the thermal analysis tests, which was the most challenging analysis I did. We briefly went over it in Fiber Science, but we did not go over how to perform the actual test. We were given ideal results, but we were not shown how to obtain these results. Eventually, I found a YouTube playlist that walked me through the steps, but it was too late. I had already spent months getting less ideal results.
I had to work hard to understand the instruments I mentioned and many more, which would have been fine if I had not been constantly challenged in other areas of research. If my experiments weren’t repeatedly failing, maybe I could have managed. I should have realized that this was too much for me to handle on my own; I could have asked for more help or less work. By the time I quit, the many challenges and failures had extinguished my confidence and motivation, and I could not power through it anymore.
Social aspect and collaboration
My last reason for leaving Cornell was a very human one. I felt alone, and this was not just because of the pandemic. I had a small lab of about eight people. We sometimes talked about our issues, which was always helpful, but mostly we suffered silently. We all pretended we were doing fine. It is clear to me now that we should have been talking as a group and working as a group. Our projects were very similar. Each one of us was making the same discoveries as the others. We independently made the same mistakes and learned from those mistakes. We didn’t even have group meetings. It was incredibly inefficient.
