Overcoming Obstacles at STScI

I am writing this having just solved a not-so-straightforward problem without help from my mentors. I will not claim that I had decided on facing the issue in some heroic feat of figuring it out by myself. I did not have much of a choice. Just about every person I could have contacted concerning the problem was busy on Friday, so I was forced to either figure it out on my own or sit idly until they free up (i.e. Monday).

Tasked with recalibrating the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS for short), one of Hubble Space Telescope’s most crucial instruments, things can get out rather complicated. More so given that I am an undergraduate with a fledgling astronomy career… There are some things that simply require expertise beyond my scope and things I am just not quite adept at due to a lack of experience.

My usual route out of such obstacles is to ask. Ask. Ask. Ask. I continue to nag my mentors until one is free and budges to help. Usually after a short discussion, we arrive at some solution or figure out a path to one. But there are times when my mentors just are not free. They are very busy and have plenty of tasks at hand, supervising me being just one out of many.

Yesterday I had just that case. I had to find some trends in data with time, which may not be a straightforward task. I decided that instead of waiting, I may try approaching it. Granted I had no idea if I would find a solution, but it was worth a shot! Several attempts (that lasted hours) failed. Others seemed to produce tantalizing results but still not good enough. Then I recalled that I did something vaguely similar in a class I took in the winter semester.

I pulled out the code I used for that class to remind myself of how I approached the issue. I managed to use that to work out a solution for the problem I had at hand. And voila! I found the trends, to a pretty decent level of accuracy.

This was surprising. I was not aware that I could really find a solution to an unfamiliar problem on my own. But apparently I could. What I learned in class gave me enough of a foundation from which I could extrapolate a functional solution. Comes to show that we are often capable of more than we think. It also felt very rewarding to say the least.