“What do Materials Scientists do?”, one always asks me.
“We do everything”, my usual answer is. “Metals, plastics, composites – all of these are developed, researched, tested and brought to the market by us”. Well, marketing is not really our main point or strength, but everything listed before is. The program includes several parts. Its main focus is knowledge of developing and commercialising new materials and understanding their applications. Here we learn about theoretical principles of materials science, investigation methods, and we do scientific projects. The second part is entrepreneurship – we study basics about business plans and standards, which are going to be used later.
Before diving too deep into the technical aspects, let me share my background and how I got into the program at the University of Tartu. Exact sciences were always of interest to me. I have been fascinated by chemical transformations and reactions since my final year in school, and this was the reason I did my Bachelors in Chemistry. However, as I was finishing my degree, one question appeared in my head. Is it possible to use my knowledge of chemistry in engineering and technological fields? And if yes, then where exactly could I study anything related to this? Charmed by such an opportunity, I had started my search – and now I find myself in Tartu, expanding my knowledge in the evolving scientific field of material sciences.
If you ever heard about elastic modulus and Brinell hardness, polymerization techniques, and the life-cycle of composites – congratulations, you already know quite a lot about our routine tasks. Understandably, materials scientists do not perform it all alone; there is always a strong team of engineers to help us.
Nevertheless, we learn how to test the pieces of materials on our own as well. One of the laboratory works was dedicated to checking the behavioral performance – the hardness mostly – of metal alloys under changing conditions. It was fun, especially for me, as I have never done this type of analysis before.
Testing a piece of metal with liquid nitrogen
There is another thing, which I found much more appealing, though. It was our discussion seminar on the Development of Materials. One of our lecturers, Tarmo Tamm, made them very interactive and engaging. He always wanted us to find the reasons for our statements – and why we thought a certain way. And when I write so, I mean really thinking. We got already known facts out, combined them with the information from the book, analysed and tried to choose the best way of creating a product. This approach completely changed my perception and outlook on many things, actually. Now I can with higher probability say that I am becoming a materials scientist. Every time I go somewhere and observe some interesting (from the designing point of view) challenge – like handholds with probable metallic coating in the swimming pool – I cannot stop my brain from finding answers for questions connected to this product.
What could I say about my previous studies? Well, they helped me a lot, mostly due to the fact that I did not need to get acquainted with some of the topics as they were familiar to me; however, physics and math were a bit of a struggle. My classmates have background education, which differs quite a lot from mine. There are engineers, physicists, materials scientists, and production designers. We may all face cases, which were never unexperienced before, we all put at least some effort to keep up, but, as one says, no pain no gain. I guess that such a variety of knowledge is what makes this program amazing: the combination of multiple scientific views may once (or hopefully more) do good for us.
Team building activity: scientists also need some rest 🙂
The other part of our program includes entrepreneurship. We learn the basics, have group work on our ideas, so somebody may end up starting their own business in the 1st or 2nd semester already. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? The professors encourage us in this regard. I remember, once our lecture began with the motto “Choose your destiny, or someone else will”. Sounds quite motivating, for sure. Also, a part of our thesis is a business plan. Basically, what we have to do is to assess if our master theses are valid as future businesses.
I am enjoying it all for now. There are always some challenges and assignments, sometimes too much homework, rarely any boredom. Good to know is that science requires effort, and materials science needs some creativity as well. So my advice is not to be afraid to think outside of the box. This way everything is going to work out.
