Monday, back to work.

On Monday, I had planned to go back to STMicroelectronics in Agrate Brianza where I used to work to have lunch with my former colleagues and check out the old stomping grounds. I arrived around 1 pm and was met at the entrance to ST by 3 of my ex colleagues. Not having my badge anymore, my colleague Andrea vouched for me at the entrance and we stated that I was with NYU, seemingly at ST for the afternoon for important business.

We walked through the plant, past familiar buildings and some familiar faces. Once we walked into the cafeteria, I spotted my group of once colleagues, now great friends. Just as if no time had passed at all, we took our spots in the lunch line and started joking around and the guys started playing the classic practical jokes that had been constant between us while I worked at ST. Even the lunch pass that I was given by my colleague Marco stated that I was a representative of Motel Rona, a skeevy motel just across the road from ST that we always used to joke about. Classic!

Lunch at ST is provided by the company, so it's free to employees. Five courses: first course is pasta or rice, a second that's meat based, vegetable sides, water, fruit, bread..! And not like the cafeteria fare you might find in the US either, this food is really tasty.

After lunch we went back to the building where our lab is located, enjoyed a post-lunch espresso and a cigarette, and then went into the lab. It was really great to be back there. I had been a part of the research group when we first opened that lab, and from when we first moved into the lab and were busy choosing new equipment and apparatus to being in there on Monday a lot of work had been done. The PCR device that our team has been developing for the past few years has advanced leaps and bounds since I joined the team 3 years ago, and made huge progress even in the past 6 months. Great job ragazzi!

Swedish chef

I think my love affair with Milan is ending. We've had a great run, made amazing memories together and fallen in love over the years. Recently however, upon returning to Milan after skiing in the Swiss alps with my mother and sister, I realized that I might be moving on from my relationship with Milan. We just seem to be growing apart from one another.

In the past few months I have applied to a number of PhD programs in the USA and Canada. After a slew of rejections (I received my last rejection letter about 2 months ago) things have been suspiciously quiet on the PhD application front. This has given me plenty of time to make myself crazy with all the "what ifs?" that are swirling around in my head. So what if I'm not accepted anywhere? At this point I've already given my 3 months notice to my landlord and we've even found new renters; expected to move in the first week of June. Will I stay in Milan, even if my head and heart have already moved on? Or should I move closer to my family in New York, even though I don't have anything solid lined up there? Believe me, it's not an easy desicion.

I've recently been toying with the idea of changing careers (please don't tell my mom, she'll kill me). Yes being an engineer is rewarding and I love the work I do but there are other options and I have other passions which I might find just as much pleasure pursuing professionally. For example, I might want to try my hand at being a pastry chef. Baking has been a hobby of mine for a long time, and with positive feedback from friends and colleagues I've been motivated to consider this as an alternative to chemical engineering... I mean afterall, they are really similar: selection and preparation of just the right ingredients, mixing components in precise quantities, heating to a specific temperature for just the right amount of time to permit a chemical reaction to occur, and ensuring the final product comes out just right.

Who knows, I might be the next Swedish chef!

mafipulating with the Jane Grey

This week I'm working at Università di Politecnico di Milano. I come here to use the laboratory in the chemical engineering department from time to time through a collaboration that my company has with the university.
When I'm here I'm a regular lab rat. Donning a white knee-length lab coat and latex gloves I run around the lab setting temperatures on ovens, picking microchips out of acid solutions with sharp steel tweezers, and weighing out polymer pellets to a thousandth of precision. While this may sound like a drag to some I get wrapped up in it, doing my best to make sure each reaction goes as planned.
The past two days however haven't been that successful. While cleaning the microchips the hydrochloric acid corroded the chips and killed their electrical function. This caused me to lose a day of work as I tried again and again to get some functional chips out of the cleaning process. In the end my success rate was a measly 5/17 chips.
I think I need to take a few notes from the Look Around You scientists as they so skillfully mafipulate with their Jane Greys. Check out this episode about water... clear, refreshing, and impossible to describe!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCWA7uevo_Q

Gold-plated microwaved yeast

Hi and welcome to my blog, "quo vadis?". As I'm writing I'm kind of wondering who in the world will be reading this, but I guess that's a question I can't answer at the moment! Since I'm really new at this and I don't even know what kind of information is really "blogworthy" anyway I suppose I can start off by telling everyone why I decided to start this blog.

It was yesterday. I was at work, listening to a salesman make a presentation about a super-spiffy maskless lithography machine that our research group is considering buying. This salesman was classic. About 50 or so, nice suit, leather shoes (all Italian people wear is leather shoes), well-prepared with a box of jellied fruit candies and a presentation full of micrographs that would tickle the imagination of any nanotechnologist. (Don't ask me why but I found that my attention kept drifting away from the micrographs and towards those sugary jelly candies..) Another detail about this guy that I couldn't avoid noticing: he was bald, like totally bald, and freshly shaven, with carefully-trimmed eyebrows, but with the hairiest earlobes I've ever seen. It's mind-boggling to me how someone who clearly pays attention to their appearance, and especially their facial hair, can skip over trimming those windy, wirey, 1-inch long earlobe hairs. Some things are beyond my comprehension, I suppose this is just one of them. Signore Lobehair presents this instrument to us using a PowerPoint presentation and flipping through the slides of micrographs while briefly giving examples of different potential applications. He pauses at a slide with an image of a microstructure that has an application he thinks we'll be particularly interested in, remembering that our group is involved in nanoBIOtech, biosensors, and so on. The application here? Attempted genocide of yeast cells, ie. saccharomyces cerevisiae, through the use of a microwave, was evaluated by coating the seemingly-dead cells in gold and measuring any movement of the cells with the electrode sensor. If you've ever asked yourself if yeast can survive being microwaved, just slap some gold on those puppies and measure their movement with an electrode. Huh?! Anyway, as I was listening to this I was just thinking that it sounded like a terrible science fiction flick or even a future episode of "Look Around You", or maybe just the greatest idea ever that I need to share with the world through my new blog..!

My life in the past year has flip-flopped between comedic, distressing, confusing, desultory, random, and tranquil, but always interesting. I hope you'll all enjoy these entries from my young-adulthood, whether they're about work, friends, fun, love, family, travels.. or anything else in between.

Ciao ciao!