This week I finished growing my sample and began to characterize it to determine its orientation. Under the guidance of several graduate students in our lab, I learned about the floating zone method, single crystal diffraction, and Laue diffraction. Each day I had the opportunity to talk to and learn from a different member, each who was more expert on the techniques and equipment that I needed to use for this experiment. In addition to lab work, I began to prepare a presentation for our poster session halfway through the program. I attended more group meetings within the lab and had the opportunity to ask more questions about the direction of my project.

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I felt that I had a lot of control over how I paced my work, both in the lab and in the office. It’s a fairly jarring departure from how deadlines and exams are in a regular semester, but it also shed some light on how I could better manage my time and my stress during the school year. I think a lot of times we tend to put a lot of weight on details, that we exaggerate their importance and start demanding more and more from ourselves and our work. It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture when there are deadlines to met, projects to finish. The program staff made it clear to us that while our responsibilities included full participation in our laboratories, it was equally important to go out and explore, to make relationship with the other interns, and to immerse ourselves in cultural exchange. Taking a step back, being a college student isn’t only about our coursework. While this is something we’re all aware of going into our first year, it’s taken me a few semesters to experience for myself just how much can end up being too much. As a student, our job is to learn, but that learning isn’t confined to the classroom, or even to campus. Figuring out how to pace ourselves so that we can approach both work and leisure mindfully and openly is one of those things to learn.

Over the weekend I explored some of the surrounding area and parts of Tokyo with a few of the other interns.

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Every student in the program is assigned a tutor. This is a graduate student in our laboratory who is available to help us out whenever we have questions during our time in the program. Mine picked me up at the airport and showed me to the accommodation and around the surrounding area the night I got in. I didn’t get to see her much until a few days later since our first few days were orientation with the program. Along with orientation, the program staff had scheduled for us some excursions, group activities, and guest lectures to help us get to know more about each other and UTokyo.

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Our first excursion was to the Hongo campus, pictured above. This campus is one of the university’s main campuses for undergraduate studies. The Kashiwa campus where we had our program is home only to the GSFS. The Hongo campus is in Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood, so we also included a visit to Senso-ji that afternoon.

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Senso-ji is Tokyo’s oldest Buddhist temple and is surrounded by a shopping arcade. It’s a popular destination for tourists and locals alike.

The next day, we started with a guest lecture by Dr. Kimura in Advanced Materials Science. His lecture covered the relationship between a material’s structure and its electromagnetic properties. Later that day the program staff threw us a welcome party where we got to meet the other participants’ professors and tutors.

On the third day, another guest lecture, this time on solar cells and waste heat. This was also the first day that we started working in our laboratories. I’ll include some information here, but write about the whole experiment in more detail separately. I began by working to synthesize my sample from oxide powders. The powders needed to be heat treated after being ground, so there wasn’t much work to do for the rest of the day. Instead, I spent some time with some of the other interns and got to learn about them and their research over coffee.

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As far as lab work goes, I spent the remainder of the week working on growing my sample, still. I began sitting in on our group meetings, which were mostly conducted in Japanese. I don’t study the language but I tried to follow along just the same. Each group meeting, Dr. Arima will also present a small lectures, mostly in English. Through the group meetings I had a chance to see what the other members of our lab group were researching and to learn a little bit more about some aspect of multiferroics. In this first meeting, Dr. Arima explained to me what the end goals of my project were and we talked about how the physical structure of MnWO4 relates to its electronic and magnetic structure.

For the weekend, some of the interns got together and went on a hike in Chiba. We spent more time than we expected on Mount Nokogiri, but the time we spent together and the views we saw were well worth getting lost. Some of us had also gone to Shibuya and explored a little bit.

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In this first week, I definitely felt some culture shock and struggled a lot with the language barrier. It was humbling and frustrating but it was also really grounding and motivated me to learn to work past these challenges.

The University of Tokyo Summer Internship Program is a six-week summer program that offers students hands-on research experience in STEM and social science. Participants get the opportunity to join one of many host laboratories in the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Frontier Sciences (GSFS) and complete their own research project under the direction of the lab group. The program is divided into two cohorts, both of which are comprised of undergraduate students from universities all around the world.

This summer, I participated in Program A as part of the Arima-Tokunaga laboratory. This lab group is under the department of Advanced Materials Science and focuses on multiferroic materials.

For more about the program, see: https://www.ilo.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp/summer_en

For more about the Arima-Tokunaga Laboratory, see: http://www.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp/materials/arima-tokunaga_e/index.html