Many times different engineering disciplines are also involving e. From a work point of view, a Materials Engineer is accountable for making novel products and processing practices on already provided scientific paths.
Whereas responsibility of Materials scientists is to discover, create, and develop new materials. Many universities prepare graduates, who are both Engineers and Scientists in a particular area. This trendy field consists of four broad groups of Materials. The experts have to prepare and generate materials with novice attributes that can meet the needs of people in the country. The role of engineered materials is going to be significantly enhanced in the present and future times.
The significance of materials in all aspects of life cannot be denied. To be honest, I found that most of my peers with physics backgrounds were better prepared than me for graduate school, because the physics undergraduate classes made them actually learn theoretical math. My materials science classes gave me wide, practical knowledge, but in my opinion this is much easier than degrees that teach deep, theoretical knowledge.
Most materials science students do specialize in certain topics, and there are always resources to challenge you, but if you want to get a materials science degree with the minimum effort, Calculus 2 will probably be your hardest class. From a less greedy but still kinda greedy standpoint, materials scientists have great chances of getting grant money. I previously mentioned that many of my graduate student colleagues come from physics backgrounds.
The reality is that universities allocate funding based on research that is profitable. Since materials science research is usually application-based, and can often be directly applied to industry, universities and researchers make tons of money from materials-related patents.
As a result, they tend to allocate more funding to materials departments. Consider that materials departments tend to have fewer students than other departments, and the per-capita funding is usually among the highest of all university departments.
Additionally, industry may directly fund specific projects. If you pursue a Ph. Funding is also important as an undergraduate, because you may be paid for undergraduate research. In every field, undergraduate research is the 1 thing you can do to improve your resume. In materials science, there is enough funding that you can often be paid to do it! Materials scientists tend to have some recurring personality traits. The nature of our work requires logical application of the scientific method, but it also requires intuitive leaps of creativity.
In my very first materials science course, we read a philosophical book and some poems, discussed how to defend the university in case of a zombie attack, discussed how to stage a military coup in a hypothetical 2-dimensional society, and built tube furnaces from scratch. One of our first lectures was about how to remove the imaginary division between STEM and humanities.
As someone who was also majoring in English, I was thrilled. Some of my exams were extremely open-ended. My professor would hand us a paragraph with a hypothetical scenario and a goal—we could present any solution to the problem. Another time, we needed to start a colony on Mars. Many research topics in materials science involve interpreting data from microscopes. There are definitely logical procedures that should be followed when collecting the data, but interpreting images often relies on pattern recognition.
As a final thought on the combination of logic and creativity: if you like chess, you will probably enjoy materials science. The combination of logic and creativity that materials scientists hone in their research often gives them a jump-start when learning chess. In a way, I hope to destroy this unique benefit of materials science departments. One of the goals of this website is to publicize materials science and engineering so more people know about the field.
However, currently materials science departments are usually among the smallest departments of any college of engineering. When I entered undergrad, the class that graduated before me had 12 students. My class graduated 24 students. In grad school, I attend the oldest materials science program in the world. There are about 40 students in my cohort. I have also had the contrasting experience of being an English major. I can think of maybe two people that I had more than one English class with.
My materials classes were offered once per year, and every student was in every class. We all got to know each other—and the professors—very well. As a department, we played lots of games together. We won intramural frisbee two years in a row, but we also played some other sports, as well as card games and board games. We studied together, helped each other on research projects, and went to conferences together.
Somehow, we even got permission to make swords! Professors always had an open-door policy. I could talk to them about career advice, financial advice, and relationship advice. Even in grad school, where the department is much bigger and I mostly interface with only one professor, we still have a tight-knit feel. Many materials scientists room together. Our cohort frequently has game nights or potlucks. The entire department hosts a weekly coffee hour, and even as grad students, we send a materials science team to every intramural sport.
However, the departments do tend to be small, and I have only positive things to say about a well-funded small department. Chemistry, physics, and math have been studied since antiquity. Mechanical engineers have plied their trade since the invention of the steam engine. Electrical engineers have existed since the lightbulb.
However, the electron microscope—a tool which proved many of the fundamentals of modern materials science—scarcely predates the computer. In fact, there are so many more computers in the world than electron microscopes, I can confidently say that materials science is less developed than computer science. We figured out the thermodynamics of the steam engine within years of its invention.
Computer science predated computers. In contrast, materials scientists are still arguing about how to reproduce swords from years ago [7]. Ten years ago, some materials scientists won the Nobel prize for sticking some scotch tape to pencil graphite and synthesizing graphene [8]. While other STEM fields have had decades to develop, materials science lags behind.
We are now in the golden age of materials science, where groundbreaking discoveries are being made annually. We know how to make more efficient cars. Did you know that the SR blackbird—one of the most iconic spyplanes—is not airtight? What Is Materials Science? Materials science focuses on the relationship between the atomic and molecular structure of a material, the properties of the material such as strength, electrical conductivity or optical properties , and ways in which the material is manufactured or processed into a shape or product.
Another important part of materials science is how products can be improved using the knowledge of structure and processing techniques and how structure and processing influence material properties. This includes the study of the wide variety of classes of materials, from metals and composites to natural fibers and biological structures.
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