Researcher's Autobiography

As a young child, I used to write these imaginative short stories, just for fun. I always had a wild imagination, and I think this helped facilitate my desire to write these stories. I appreciate the actual writing process -- as opposed to the typing process -- because, like the quote on our Groups page, it seems like the hand can have a mind, or an agenda all its own. I have a leather-bound journal my parents gave me for high school graduation, and from time to time I like to record my thoughts in it. Sometimes an entry will be pages long, and sometimes an entry is a sentence, or a word I like, like ephemeral (I like both the appearance and the definition of the word). Sometimes my hand wants to do math, and so it will do math. Once I figured out a way to generate Pythagorean triples (3,4,5 or 7,24,25); that was weird.

Much of the research I've been doing as of late is for my Senior Design project, in which we seek to improve the measurement of an MRI contrast technique called T1. For me to explain what T1 is would involve delving into particle physics, and nobody wants to read about that. Since August 2009 I've read every article, book, and paper I can get my hands on about the topic. A lot of the material I've learned is ancillary and not immediately relevant to our project, but it helps to give me some perspective on what we're doing and why it's important that we do it. As an engineer, background research is extremely important in any design process. After all, how can you figure where you're going if you don't know where you are and how you got there?

I regret to say that creative writing is not a muscle I frequently exercise in my engineering curriculum. As I'm writing this, I'm thinking it would be a good outlet to write for pleasure.

I think what helps me to be successful on writing/research assignments is to plan an outline before I start writing. But, I really like this 'freewriting' process Professor Nichols encourages us to use; often times I find myself concerned with my spelling and grammar as I'm writing, and it distracts from that which I'm actually trying to externalize.