Me, scientifically speaking

Prologue

This text will be in English because, at this time, that is the language of Science.

I don't intend to explain how I look in terms of Medical Sciences. Nothing about how my parents made me. At least not in terms of Medical Sciences.

I mean to say who I am in terms of my scientific journey so far, what I think it will become in the near future, and what I would like it to be (and might become).

Introduction

Both of my parents were present and involved in the multiplicity of interests I developed while growing up.

This is one of my privileges as a white cisgender boy, belonging to the middle class since birth. Both my parents had a BD and a post-grad specialisation before I was born. My father's major was Economics, and my mom's Architecture. Both were also technicians. My father's in Chemistry, and my mom's in Building & Construction.

From my maternal grandparents, I got my manual skills. My grandfather was a maintenance handyman for the import/export company he worked for. That company had a building with a house annexed to it. I lived in that house with my parents, my grandfather and my grandmother until the latter died. Then, for the next ten years, just with my parents. That was possible because my grandpa was also the housekeeper of the building.

My grandma taught me the art of cooking and sewing. My grandpa passed a plethora of hand skills to build and fix a huge variety of stuff. Not to mention all the shortcuts and makeshifts. By cooking, I mean from a simple egg to the most tasteful Grandma recipe you can imagine. By stuff, I mean all the things needed to keep a house, as well as the first steps into carpentry and woodcraft.

Before enrolling in the Electronic technician course, those skills encompassed my technical universe of things.

From my parents, I also got my interest in the humanities. Besides always taking me to the theatre, movies and museums, I was always stimulated to reflect on society and how and why it works as it does. The critical thought.

The unique thing I miss is having had a better literature initiation. There was a lack of classics and stuff like that in my house. So I cannot say I am exactly an erudite sort of guy. But let us say I am "in search of lost time." (I actually would like to read that someday 😁.)

Theoretical Background

After finishing high school and the Electronics course, I chose Telecommunications Engineering as my undergraduate major. At that time, I thought Telecommunications was the derivation from Electronics I liked the most. Unfortunately, the specific discipline cycle started only after the sixth term, each a semester in duration. Thus, I went through most of the undergraduate course, which fortunately shared more than 60% of disciplines with the Electronics major, before knowing that I was not that much into Telecom to pleasantly finish an Engineering course on that.

But I did it. Not pleasantly.

Especially because when I was 22, my father had a fulminant heart attack. The fact that He would not see me graduating devastated me. He was a special nurturer of my inclination for the exact sciences.

I had just started my first science research program for undergraduates at my college. In Brazil, we call these programs 'scientific initiation'. It was no good. My self-confidence was completely broken. Nothing very good could come from me at that time. No outstanding grades. They were good, although -- I didn't become dumb -- I just lost a significant part of the incentive. The project I was working on didn't go much further than a superficial simulation of fibre-optics non-linear phenomena (four-wave mixing in Raman amplifiers).

Subsequently, I enrolled in another research program to study light polarisation. I wish I could have generated more than the study itself. I tried modifying an open-source visualisation software written in Python. But I was just starting to learn Python, and the software worked with advanced visual Python packages. The project was to be developed with another student, who agreed to be responsible for most of the programming, since he already had good experience with that programming language. For personal reasons, he simply stopped showing up in the lab and only confirmed his quitting from the project after six months.

Simply put, that led me into a right mess. The idea was to show a dynamic Poincaré sphere representation of polarised light using the software's existing settings. The result was a sphere not corresponding to the settings that, once generated, crashed the whole software. This result could not be shown at the college conference. Therefore, what I could show was just a summary of the study on vector and matrix forms for representing light polarisation (Poincaré and Jones), besides a proposition to modify the software.

Then, I needed to find an internship. Besides being a first step into the market, it was a requirement from the college to graduate. A friend of mine offered to introduce me to his manager at the company he worked for. A Telecom Engineering internship position had just become available. Well, that worked out, and I was hired. That was a pipeline-pigging company in the oil and gas sector.

After my internship ended, it was converted to a full-time position. Clearly, it meant I did well as an intern. As a matter of fact, in the first six months, still as an intern, I finished the development of a device they had been trying to develop for a long time. The work itself was great, but the job, well, it depends on the ambience of the workplace. At that time, it was horrible toxic environment. Thus, I learned an important part about management: what not to do.

I decided to quit this job when I had the opportunity.

Methods

Joining the pieces, I started searching for something missing in my education so far, and that could lead me to better places to work. So I looked for a Master's program. Maybe related to the Arts, I thought. Well, better a little closer to Engineering. Why not Design? I tried in two different Design schools... and failed. Not miserably, but didn't make it. It is harder when you must be accepted in a place by people who (rightfully) see you as a complete outsider -- 'thought that was good in those tribes.

I considered a professional Master's program dedicated to the societal impacts of Technology. This kind of vision is also absent in my official education as a technician and an engineer. Almost worked. But my research project was not so much in tune with their ongoing developments.

Then, I was finally accepted to the Master's program I graduated from. It addressed most of the things I was searching for: a "Production Engineering" Program, basically a summing up of Managerial Sciences and Operations Management, so I would learn the right way to manage organisations, my adviser was a Designer, and my subject of research had to do with important parts of my life, when it comes to technical interests: I started to study Makerspaces, speccialy the collaborative kind.

The year was 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic crossed the path of my research. Firstly, I thought there was not much I could do -- I intended to visit several of these shared workshops, interview people, study what was developed there, and build some knowledge from it, maybe discover something inherent to Brazilian shared workshops. That could not be done, at least not by the methodological approach I had in mind.

Only what I could do was keep developing something about the theory of classifying and studying this kind of workshop. To my surprise, and the benefit of many lives, these very makerspaces started organising themselves to collaboratively fabricate face shields, a protective personal equipment (PPE) essential when facing an airborne disease. And many of them did so, putting out their production numbers and with a clear description of how they organised their production.

Results

Ok, so now I have got data and theory to compare. A published article was born: https://doi.org/10.4013/sdrj.2021.141.18.

A few months after that publication, I started to feel the weight of the isolation due to the pandemic. It got me almost two years to fully adapt and be able to start writing again and finally finish my dissertation, so as to get my M.Sc. degree.

I recovered, worked hard, fulfilled my duties with the university, and my dissertation was born and properly defended. Now, I am a Master! A Master of Science! A Magister Scientiae! At that time, an unemployed one 😅. But I wanted some time out from academia. No doctorate on the horizon...

So I thought: now I need to get money! I began studying really hard for the public selections programmed to happen that year. Got back to focusing on my technician and engineering side. It worked. I got the third position in the most disputed role in a public selection for technicians in the major and most important company of my country.

Discussion

During my studies to pass a public selection, I started considering pursuing a doctorate related to the organisation where I would get the job, specifically one aligned with the main work I would undertake there. I even considered Economic Sciences for a while, because of a development bank for which I applied to its public selection. Since I didn't pass the selection, I remained in the position of technician.

Thus far, the idea of pursuing a doctorate in the area I am working in still lingers in my mind. I work with turbogenerators and turbocompressors: the pinnacle of multidisciplinary engineering. It sits alongside rocket science. But time needs to work for me first, to mature this idea. Meanwhile, I will work with time to build myself and my life in ways that are only now possible because of my job.

Otherwise, I still think about developing some studies, like some free-style projects. Maybe with some friends. Not that it will turn into something publishable. There is no better way to explore a theoretical subject you are interested in than by attempting to research it. If it is a matter of a practical nature, nothing is better than trying to develop something with your own hands.

Conclusion

One of the most beautiful things about science is that conclusions are not definitive. They are part of the introduction for another research. Like the cycle of life. There is so much of a coincidence, it is hard not to think about the words of Carl Sagan: "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself".

References

Footnote: This text took about four years to be finished.

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