I’ve been busy the last week moving my self publishing 2.0 blog to its new location. I’ve also been doing some cleaning up, which is what brought my first self publishing experience to mind. It wasn’t fiction, but it wasn’t exactly non-fiction either. It was the Master’s Thesis for my Electrical Engineering degree.
There are two basic paths through a Master’s program in engineering. I believe the more popular path is to take two extra electives and a course in which one gives a short presentation on some subject or another. The other is to write a traditional thesis. I spent around eight months in the lab trying to grow diamond thin films with radio frequency plasma assisted chemical vapor deposition at low temperatures. Believe it or not, that’s pretty close to the title of the thing, which shows I understood the value of keywords before Al Gore invented the Internet.
The film above barely has any substance to it, I’m guessing it ran for less than a half hour. These photos of my old samples a couple days ago and didn’t check them against the appendix in the thesis so I’m just guessing. The next film shown looks like a full run, grown on a water cooled substrate. The whole CVD process is done in a vacuum chamber, and since I needed to pump in hydrogen to strike the plasma with a slower flow of methane, I really should have ballasted the vacuum pump with nitrogen – but nobody mentioned that until the vacuum oil was hopelessly hydrogenated.
It took me about a month of solid effort to write up the results on an old Wang wordprocessor (hardware) that emulated a PC XP running early DOS. I think I was able to get Word 2.0 to run on it. In any case, part of the requirement was producing several copies on archival bond paper, one of which was sent of to the monopoly agency that “publishes” dissertations and scans to microfiche for posterity. I’d call that self publishing of the expensive variety. I didn’t bother ordering a bound copy for myself, and I never looked at any of it again for 20 years. The final film was grown on a heated substrate that I borrowed from the plastics department. By that time I’d lost interest in my adviser’s advice and just wanted to succeed.
I received the degree after the tradition grilling by a panel of three professors, in large part, I assume, because I remembered to bring donuts. The department didn’t have any funding so I didn’t have access to X-ray equipment, which is really the way to characterize a diamond thin film. A guy tried Laser Raman Spectroscopy for me, got one peak in the right place, but couldn’t repeat it. The SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) showed some crystallization, but that could have been anything, and I don’t remember the results from the optical diffractometer. My favorite tool was an old Zeiss PhotoPhot microscope, that could do 1600X optical magnification, around the limit you can get with glass lenses, and 2500X if you projected it to the Polaroid photo head. I could see and photograph films, but so what?
I guess it kept me out of trouble for a year, and that’s about all I have to say about graduate school.
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