Applying To Materials Science and EngineeringApplying To Materials Science and Engineering
Parag Banerjee (parag@uor.org)
The National Academy of Engineering describes "Development of Advanced Materials" as one of the 20 greatest achievements of the 20th century (http://www.greatachievements.org/greatachievements/ga_20_3p.html). It is indeed true that Materials Engineering forms the backbone of technology in this country, as anywhere else. Out of the top 50 engineering schools in the US, all have active Materials Science and Engineering department and/or a faculty. Schools of Physics, Chemistry, Nuclear Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Medicine, Ceramics, etc hire faculty and conduct research in the field of Materials and Metallurgical Science and Engineering. Unfortunately, each of these schools is devoted to a different type of research and this creates an extremely confusing and interdisciplinary field.
A junior year student is thus, presented with a difficult scenario wherein he/she has to make career decisions based on limited and scattered information available from past seniors and alumni already based here. The purpose of this write-up will be to put things in perspective for a candidate graduating with an MME degree about what to look for, while applying to the schools in the US. The write-up has been divided into various sections. They are the following:
NOTE: The views expressed by students and alumni in the pages that follow are their own views and perceptions based on their past experiences. This write up is meant to serve only as a guide for the students to help them apply to MSE schools in the US. Following the tips does not guarantee an admission or aid but does indicate favorable conditions and acts that might.
I. Rankings of Schools
Rankings play an important part in deciding which schools to app to. After making an informed decision based on other factors (like GRE, recos, acads, etc), the question boils down to choosing field-specific Universities.
Tip:
Avoid low ranking Universities, if possible. Apping to the same university by two different candidates (clashing) does not reduce either one’s chances. If the school has funds and the credentials are good enough both will get through.
For some years now, the National Research Council (NRC) has discontinued its rankings. These government-based rankings were definitely more credible. By far the most popular of the rankings are from US News. Although media based and much hyped about, these rankings do give a general picture of the schools and their standings – to the layman, at least.
The rankings have thus to be used with caution. A ranking of the top twenty MSE schools at US news makes one realize that the schools do deserve their positions. Indeed so, and they will remain in those positions ± 10 in the next few years. But does that spell gloom and doom for those schools not featured at all? Unfortunately, a good many schools are not featured at all in these rankings. The reasons could be attributed to small school size, highly focussed research (e.g. Rutgers University or Alfred School of Ceramics, John Hopkins), small intake, fewer faculty (Purdue), etc. But these are tremendous opportunities that apping students might miss while looking at the top 20s.
Tip:
Shortlist no less than 5 schools and normally no more than about 10 schools. Divide these schools into the following categories - ‘sure shot’ or best bets, envied, backup schools.
To put things more clearly- the following points are worth considering while choosing a school-
1). The university rank.
2). The field of specialization,
3). The group/professor involved,
Unfortunately sometimes, students getting into good universities get advisors who do not meet up to expectations (advisors otherwise also known as "slave drivers"!). On the other hand, people getting into lower tier universities might get into lucrative and intensely funded fields. Choosing your schools is thus, a fine balancing act and it also hard, of course, to give weightage to each of the above points.
Tip:
Rigorously read all application packets that arrive home. Thoroughly review all departmental and faculty information. Write emails to professors to clarify genuine doubts and keep a tab of where funds are a plenty and/or where interesting work is being done. Needlessly bugging professors (a.k.a. "licking") might earn a bad reputation for our school in the long run. A professor with publications in the last year or so means he has funds and active projects going on.
II. Fields to choose from
Basics:
To develop an interest in research work one must be aware of what research is being done in the first place.
A cursory glance through any standard MSE journal would reveal to you that the field is highly multifaceted. Here is a look at the Journal of Applied Physics (JAPs) contents.
LASERS, OPTICS, AND OPTOELECTRONICS (PACs 42)
PLASMAS AND ELECTRICAL DISCHARGES (PACs 51-52)
STRUCTURAL, MECHANICAL THERMODYNAMIC, AND OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF CONDENSED MATTER (PACs 61-68, 78)
ELECTRONIC STRUCTURE AND TRANSPORT (PACs 71-73)
MAGNETISM AND SUPERCONDUCTIVITY (PACs 74-76)
DIELECTRICS AND FERROELECTRICITY (PACs 77)
INTERDISCIPLINARY AND GENERAL PHYSICS (PACs 1-41, 43-47, 79, 81-84, 89-99) COMMUNICATIONS
The list of contents is dynamic, i.e. that they keep changing with time. Note that the Journal is devoted to Applied Physics only. Different journals will have different focus and fields of interest. However, a look at these contents over the last five to six years would provide a fairly good idea of which way current materials research is heading. For example back in the 80’s, the section on Biophysics (not featured in the current issue) and Nanoscale Science and Design were not featured at all. The reason is simple: No research was being conducted on these topics and the constraints were:
1). Technology (Folks were still dealing in microscale dimensions)
2). Money
In that order! The move towards smaller dimensions made funding in Nanotechnology possible. With funding came research, with research came results and results gave rise to papers. Thus, the need to start the new section arose.
But these topics seem so far away and distant from the courses that are offered at Roorkee. Unfortunately, there is little that the alumni can do and only wish that the department hires a fresh generation of teachers and researchers. One of our alumni laments,
"As for background from Roorkee courses – it was pretty bad – wish I had a real solid mechanics course. Also, more use of math somehow (don’t have a good enough idea how to) would have helped. Hope students have courses in electronic and magnetic properties, ceramics and polymers now that we are a Material Science department Nobody cares anymore about fuels, furnaces or mineral properties etc."
Tip:
To set oneself to face this barrage of technical jargon and make some sense out of it, preparation has to be done right from the sophomore year. Take some time out during a weekend and spend some time in the library and look into the Journals Section. One of the most popular journals which is not really very technical is MRS Bulletin. The idea should, at no point, be to ‘mug’ the articles! All that is required at this point is to be AWARE of things happening in the research world, a general idea of how research is carried out and most importantly, to develop an interest for a certain field or sub-field.
The other top Materials Journals are-
Better still, for those interested, journal reading and reporting could be made part of the Saturday Seminar curriculum.
Fields of Interest:
MSE is a very diverse field and many exciting things keep happening from time to time to make research in this field exciting, fast paced and dynamic. Unfortunately, rarely does it happen that an apping student gets his or her choice of field to work in. Many universities prefer the candidate to TA for the 1st semester and then choose their thesis advisor from a number of professors and their respective projects at the start of the 2nd semester. However, few universities do state clearly in their offer letter, the name of the advisor and the projects that he or she is dealing with. Here is what one of our alumni has to say about his experience at Drexel University.
"At Drexel you are offered a TA ship (department offers this) when you come in. You don't have to choose your advisor when you get in. You can spend a quarter or two making your decision. Your co advisor can be outside the Mat Engineering department- so you have opportunities to do inter dept stuff."
Notwithstanding this, the chances of getting into a field of choice are increased by apping intelligently. We will touch upon a few of the currently popular "schol" fields.
"I work at the Process Reliability Group at Micron Technologies Inc. The company is the largest manufacturer of DRAMs, SRAMs and flash memory in the world. Since the semiconductor industry is extremely volatile, fast paced and ever changing, our group has to keep abreast with all the latest happenings in this field - both in the academia and the industry. It includes going to conferences to report and compare our findings, keeping active relationships with research labs, Universities etc. This makes working here extremely challenging! I am in-charge of characterizing and predicting silicon dioxide reliability in the chips. Current thicknesses of oxides range in a few tenths of angstroms (a few monolayers of atom!) and highly sophisticated and sensitive instruments have to be used to measure interface properties, traps densities, ionic and electronic mobilities in Si and its oxide. A lot of research is also being done to look into alternate dielectrics with higher dielectric constant than SiO2. The move to copper interconnects is perhaps the next big step that all companies have to go through now"
-Parag Banerjee (1998)
Charan Gurumurthy focuses on another interesting problem at IBM,
"There is a currently a big drive towards green (environmentally friendly) microelectronic products. The pressure comes not so much from environmental groups as from market competitiveness. A major challenge in achieving green products is elimination of lead, which is proven to cause serious neurological disorders. Lead is the primary candidate in solder joints that are used as electrical and mechanical interconnect in modern day assemblies. Alternative no-lead alloys suffer serious disadvantages from higher cost to higher melting temperature. While cost can be absorbed elsewhere or transferred to the customer, handling higher melting temperature is difficult. Need for cheaper products have led to increased use of organic materials, which are quite unstable at the melting temperatures of no-lead alloys. Also, organic materials tend to absorb
moisture. Let us assume, the moisture gets collected in a micro flaw (which is unavoidable), as temperature raises, during assembly operations, the moisture subjects the surrounding organic materials to incredible pressurization leading to catastrophic failures. Note, the rate of raise of temperature in the assembly process does not favor the kinetics of water diffusion out of the flaw and also thermodynamics works against us: the
chemical potential in the flaw and the surrounding material is in such a fashion to drive uphill diffusion. The solution to this problem requires a multidisciplinary research team consisting of material scientists, fracture mechanics community and engineering physicists."
-G. Charan (1994)
Here is one of our alumni discussing his research at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio under Professor Arthur Hauer in MEMs.
"My research involves wafer level testing of different mechanical properties of the MEMS devices. These mechanical properties are tensile strength, fracture toughness, elastic modulus, residual stresses, fatigue strength. Determination of these mechanical properties is very important in MEMS to establish the suitability of a particular material for a particular MEMS device. These properties for the thin films, differ quite significantly from their bulk counterparts, and depend heavily on the processing conditions. Thus the experimentation in my research involve fabricating testing devices on Silicon wafer using standard MEMS micromachining techniques and on-chip testing. The device is a testing specimen attached to an interdigitated combdrive type of electrostatic actuator. An AC or a DC signal can be used to actuate the device, to produce enough force, to cause failure of the specimen."
-Amit Kaushik (2000)
"What areas are hot – again this is specific to Cornell mat sc. – biomaterials – it is a new field and there’s lots of work to be done. There’s a lot of money in the field too – so funding should not be an issue. Since it is so new anything you do would be "pathbreaking"!!!!!! At Cornell because we have a nano fabrication facility anything nano (nano-composites, electronics, MEMS) continue to be hot. Molecular electronics is also a very new and interesting field – but we don’t have anyone working in that – there’s a new Prof. in physics though."
"My thesis was a study on the effect of boron additions (0.03 to 0.09 w/o) on P/M Fe (with and without C). The study analyzed the effect of B on mechanical properties (TRS, tensile strength, hardness and hardenability) and microstructure (fracture surface & metallography) of the alloy."
Gautam Swaroop (1997)
"I analyzed and developed new tools for Electromagnetic Forming of Aluminum 6061 tubes in T4 condition. I was also involved with electromagnetic forming for:
Subhrangshu Datta (1998)
Simulation and modeling work form an integral part of materials research. For all the progress made in the understanding and application of materials through experimental research, the fact remains that we are unable to predict the behavior of materials or track the evolution of their microstructures from the atomic to the engineering scales. Normally, MSE modeling work involves predicting the performance and behavior of complex materials across all relevant length and time scales, starting from fundamental physical principles and experimental data. For example, in the field of fracture mechanics, modeling the fracture behavior of a material would provide engineers to predict toughness and strengths of material as a function of composition, microstructure, temperature, environment, loading conditions, etc. This is an extremely powerful tool in the hands of an automobile manufacturer! It is also an extremely tedious work. However, with increasingly fast computers these simulations and models have become a reality. One of our alumni talks about her work in detail at Cornell.
" I am working on discrete Dislocation Dynamics simulations of dislocation interactions in thin fcc films – to cut through the jargon – I use a code that discretises any given dislocation into small line segments, calculates the force on each of these segments due to applied stress, other dislocations, its own curvature etc. and then moves the segment (depending on its glide plane and burgers vector) in response to the force. Interactions among dislocations can be treated either by linear elastic superposition or by s set of rules specified in the code. The code is written by someone at IBM (not doing any coding was one of my preconditions for taking on this project) – I understand it enough to be able to modify the boundary conditions, set up different problems and look at the output. Till now I’ve done simulations of pairwise interactions under cyclic loading (load-unload and see if dislocations form any structures by interacting) The next step will be to put in dislocation sources and see how they behave under cyclic loading – also have to allow dislocations to cross-slip, which we do not allow as of now.
Another part of the project (that hasn’t happened so far) will involve looking at copper thin films under a TEM as they are heated and cooled. Stresses arise in the films due to differential thermal expansion, since they are on a silicon substrate. The aim will be to see dislocation interactions and since heating-cooling is equivalent to loading unloading – we may be able to compare simulation results to TEM results."
Prita Pant (1997)
Tip:
Be on the look out for new fields with potential commercial applications in the next 5- 10 years. Be ready to adapt and mould to new fields, subjects and areas. Be well read and well informed all the time! Apping to other departments may have risks involved, but are definitely worth a try, if you have focussed and oriented yourself with relevant courses/thesis work. Sometimes, ‘sister’ departments like Mechanical Engg, etc have so much funds, they do not know what to do with it!
III. FAQs
Typically, MS programs are much shorter than most MS + PhD programs. A typical MS program may take anywhere from 1.5 to about 2.5 years to complete. One of the main reasons for doing an MS study is to get an advanced degree as soon as possible and then apply for jobs. It thus becomes important that the school, thesis topic and advisor and the courses taken be relevant to current industry trends. For example, there is no point getting an MS in Mechanical Metallurgy when the automobile sector is taking a beating!
The advantage of a non-thesis option is that it makes the MS much shorter (sometimes only two semesters long). The disadvantages far outweigh this one single advantage. Typically, jobs are closely associated with thesis topics. Moreover, MS based jobs are mostly experimental or lab/research based. Having not undertaken an independent research project during an MS may hurt you professionally in the long run. Sometimes, if you have been funded as an RA, there is no other option than to work for that project. In that case, it is best that you use that project for your thesis work. Many universities do not grant MS under non-thesis option at all.
There is one thing about studying in America and that is anything that makes sense can be done! Talk to your advisor about this. None of the Universities have any such restrictions.
For the studious few who want to spend ~ 4-6 years in the campus, this is the only way out! PhDs are the most valuable asset that America possesses as a by-product of its higher education. Career paths may lead into the academic world, research world or the business world. The opportunities are just immense. Past PhDs from our college have found places with Universities (Ohio-State), research Labs (Oak Ridge National Labs), start-up companies as well as established companies. If you do decide to stay back, this is also the most coveted class of advanced degree holders that are given preference to, during immigration procedures.
This is a tricky situation. Most universities have spent time, effort and money to get you here. It is thus a binding contract on you to complete your part of the act. However, if there are reasons that you have to leave, talk to your advisor (never keep him in the dark!) and explain him the situation. There is nothing that a little bit of talking can’t help solve. However if you do leave there is nothing that the University can do. What will happen would be that the next several batches from Roorkee would have to suffer because of you.
This is an extremely good question. Books are extremely costly in America. They are the privilege of the rich. So do get the following books depending on which field you are hitting upon-