FROM CLASSROOM TO CONVERSATION
For some students, college can be a paradoxical time. You want to branch out, but you also want to narrow your focus to a major or career path. At Tufts, one need not decide between the two. I sat down with electrical engineering (EE) professor Tom Vandervelde and his EE student Corlene Rhoades ’22 to discuss how being an engineer, a researcher, and a student allows you to explore the infinite interests and endless possibilities that Tufts has to offer. BY BLAKE ANDERSON ’24
So, how do you two know each other? Corlene Rhoades: I went to one of the [electrical engineering] research showcases, and someone was presenting on [Professor Vandervelde’s] lab, and I followed up with him. Tom Vandervelde: Corlene contacted me and we came up with the idea for a summer research project. Something I think is funny is that Corlene and I actually met in person for the first time this last fall. She worked in my lab over the summer, she was my research advisee, and she was in one of my courses—and that whole time we didn’t meet in person. We were just chatting in Halligan one day, and that was the first time we had actually met! Corlene worked in my lab over the summer in 2020, so we had plans to do a much different summer program. Obviously COVID intercepted those plans and changed things. So, in the end, we ended up doing something online. CR: Towards the end of the summer I worked in the lab. I got to use the ellipsometer to shoot different beams of light and learn about samples, so that was pretty fun! TV: A big part of what we do in the lab is making new materials one atomic layer at a time. And we can design the composition of these materials as we build them up. One of the big things we have to do is characterize this work. CR: I think personally one of the experiences that I took away from doing research was learning how much I didn’t know and how much was left for me to learn. I was seeing all these cool things going on in the lab and all these sub-research areas that I didn’t even know existed. It was fascinating to learn just how much was out there. When you had these questions, Corlene, how did you go about answering them? CR: To start research, I was given a few things to read about to give me further background in this area. That gave me a foundation for some of the things that I was looking for. I asked a lot of questions to other people in the lab, who were always super helpful and would say [things like], “This is a trend of this, which is related to this phenomenon.” It was nice to work with other people in the lab and learn all these little things that popped up.
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