I think we’re writing an “Aha” blog post in a couple of weeks – probably more pertaining to pedagogy – but I had an aha moment (or day) yesterday, so I thought I’d share.  I was at NC State yesterday from about 8am to 8pm.  The largest portion of that time was trying to trouble-shoot a piece of equipment (or several pieces of connected equipment – liquid chromatography-mass spectrometer machine).  I realized that these scientists (really, in this environment, the grad students) do most of the maintenance of the equipment.  They don’t generally call people in to fix the instruments – there just aren’t really people to do it.  I’m sure that Thermo and the other equipment companies have some people who can do some major repairs, but the instruments are so precise and intricate that there’s constantly issues with them.  And the equipment companies would rather sell new equipment than fix the old machines anyway.

I asked the grad student  who’s known as the instrument guru how he got that moniker and he just said that he probably played with the equipment more than the others….this is really expensive equipment, but I guess that that’s the only way they’re going to figure out how to fix things.  My first day here my mentor showed me one of the primary pieces of equipment that they use – two former grad students built it.  I never knew that this level of engineering was required.  Industry may be different, but I suspect that they still have to trouble-shoot a lot.  I should point out that we never did get the machine working quite right yesterday!  Hopefully we’ll figure it out today.