HAZARD LAB

Hello there! I'm your average 22 year old emo attempting to become a nuclear physicist. I'm really into radioactivity/radiation, and this interest extends into nuclear reactors, isotope production, radiation detection, vintage radioactive collections, and suspicious vats of glowing green goo. I wanted to document my slow progress towards becoming a real life mad scientist, and I hope you enjoy the ride! <33

I'm currently in a nuclear engineering PhD Program, and expect most of my work to include nuclear physics, radiation detection, and general discovery stuff in fission. I'm currently still new to the program, so I'm sure things will become more clear as I keep working! Fun fact: I met my advisor through a tumblr mutual :O

I have a degree in physics from my undergrad university, where I worked at and operated the nuclear reactor on site :D I interned for a company using it and mainly worked in medical radioisotope production and radiation detection systems. I also worked on radiation detection stuff over a summer at a national lab, but I can't talk a lot about that one >_<

I've always been pretty fascinated with "sciencey" stuff, but honestly was more of a humanities kid for most of school. My greatest joy in life was high school theater and I spent a good amount of time crying over base level math homework and hiding in the costume room. When I was 17 my dad called me into his office to check out something using his homemade Geiger counter. He handed me an old antique vase we'd had forever, and when held close to the detector, you could hear a ticking noise. For some reason this completely and utterly exploded my brain and I immediately took to the internet and the library to learn about every single thing on radioactivity that I could. I cannot stress how suddenly I went completely off the rails. It became my personality within days.

This coincided with the time I needed to figure out what to do with my life, so without a second thought I decided to become a physics major so I could irradiate myself to my heart's content forever and ever. In the meantime, I got a geiger counter, started collecting radioactive junk, and even worked at a local kids science museum just so I could wear a lab coat XD When I finally got to college, I was so excited to finally become a real scientist....and then immediately failed my first class. It turns out having a minimal math education and a few mental health issues bubbling out of my brain really did not coincide with "good grades" and I struggled with a steadily decreasing GPA for almost all of undergrad. But I KNEW nuclear science was all I wanted to do, so I kept pushing myself harder and harder, half breaking myself in the process, to stay in the race. In my last year I finally found meds that work and keep my head clear and started fixing my grades but for the most part...the damage had been done :(

Luckily for me, I was also determined to get myself into research!!! It turns out even though my school has a nuclear reactor, it doesn't have many nuclear scientists....As soon as I got to campus, I started training as a nuclear reactor operator, and it was SOOOOO COOL getting to learn how a reactor work on a mechanical, physical, and chemical level (and to get to push a bunch of big glowing buttons). Here, I met the one nuclear professor at the school - a chemist. Even so, I literally begged on my knees for her to let me work in research and she was impressed enough by my passion (or desparation) that, although she didn't need a physicist, she knew the CEO of a company who did, and introduced me. I started working for them, and finally felt like I was getting close to my goal - working in nuclear research. No matter how much my brain wanted to kill me, or how doomed my grades made me feel, I always felt great getting to push my brain to do "real science". I did a lot of research for an undergrad, which I think is why I was accepted into some grad schools even with my poor grades. The moral of the story: pushing a few buttons, writing a few lines of code, and being willing to mildly degrade yourself for your dreams will go a lot farther than you might think.