RET 2013 Blog: Erin Smidt

Meet Erin Smidt

RET participant Erin Smidt (right) and her mentor Jianyi Jiang.

Teacher Erin Smidt describes her science classes as “organized chaos.” She loves it, and so do her students.

Smidt, 33, is one of a dozen K-12 teachers doing a six-week internship at the lab this summer. She’s a 7^th- and 8^th-grade teacher at Deerlake Middle School in Tallahassee, a former elementary-school teacher who realized she wanted to work at higher levels with students in her favorite subject: science.

“I think science is fun,” she says. “I enjoy the hands-on part of it. I try to have at least one lab a week. Sometimes I have two or three labs a week, and some labs last several days.”

She likes her kids to work together, talk, collaborate, brainstorm. They enjoy interacting and doing hands-on stuff, and can learn a lot when lessons are structured that way.

During her summer at the MagLab, she’s doing hands-on stuff, too. Her task is to examine superconducting wires that may ultimately end up in a small but powerful magnet. So far, she’s used a cutting-edge microscope, created and polished a puck (or sample holder) for evaluating the filament density of superconducting wires, and read up on magnets and superconducting materials.

This is her second summer internship at the Magnet Lab. During her first, in 2010, she worked with scholar scientist and expert microscopist Yan Xin, who is stationed in the MagLab. This summer, her mentors are Associate Scholar Scientist Jianyi Jiang and Florida State University Professor Eric Hellstrom, whose labs are in the Applied Superconductivity Center across the street from the MagLab. She’s enjoying being in the smaller building, where it’s all about superconductivity, the ability of certain types of wires to conduct electricity without resistance.

“It’s really cool to see what other people are doing here at the lab, and to see they are doing cool stuff,” Smidt says.

Check back in a week or so to share more of her experience.

---Kathleen Laufenberg

Erin Smidt collaborated with science writer Kathleen Laufenberg on this blog. For more information about the MagLab’s RET program contact Jose Sanchez at sanchez@magnet.fsu.edu or (850) 645-0033.