More Flux

A lab job helped her go from high school to Harvard

By Kristen Coyne

Carolyn Kim didn't have much of a clue what she was getting herself into when she phoned the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory one day during her junior year at Tallahassee's Leon High School and said she wanted to volunteer.

Carolyn Kim.

"I had taken a lot of science courses but I'd never been in a lab or known what scientists really do," says Kim. "I just wanted a chance to experience how things work in a lab."

So for the next two years, Kim took a two-pronged approach to studying science. At school there were her books, homework and exams. At the lab there was work that challenged her on many levels, testing her hands, her mind and even her character. Kim landed in the lab of physicist Stan Tozer. After she had put in a few months of after-school shifts, Tozer was impressed enough to put the her on staff. More than a year away from a high-school diploma, Kim was pulling down a salary at one of the nation's most prestigious laboratories.

"The graduate students and postdocs were scared of her – she was sooo smart," Tozer said. "She sat down, she listened and she did it. So we figured, 'Get her on board.'" At the Magnet Lab, Kim saw science in action. It was less about the laws and equations of science than the kind of grit it takes to do science.

In Tozer's lab, Kim saw her conception of mistakes turned on its head. On exams in school, errors were bad and punished with lower grades. But in a real lab environment, mistakes are not only inevitable, Kim learned, but often plentiful – and an invaluable part of science. Kim made tiny gaskets and even tinier coils for use in Tozer's experiments. Fashioning the miniscule tools was hard – "I didn't know they made wires that thin," she says – and many of her creations ended up in the trash.

"I think I learned that a lot of what scientists do involves a lot of errors, and you have to be very patient," says Kim. "When I was trying to do things I messed up all the time – and that was pretty informative."

Kim worked on incredibly tiny coils such as the one shown here.

It was also informative to see Tozer and the rest of his group wrestling with their own snafus. When running experiments in the magnets, the scientists would stay late into the night – sometimes early into the morning – as they troubleshot problems. "They were trying to figure out what's wrong with it," Kim says, "and they kept on trying different things."

Which taught her another lesson not revealed in textbooks: To succeed, you need to stick with it.

"I kind of learned to be patient and to not give up, to be persistent in what I do," says Kim.

As she got the knack of gasket making and other lab tasks, Kim was often left alone to complete projects. At first she was surprised to be left unsupervised. Then she was surprised, and pleased, to learn she could direct herself just fine, driven by her own curiosity and desire to do good work. "Sometimes they would tell me to do something and they wouldn't watch over me or anything," Kim says. "I would learn to do my own work and be responsible for my own work, which is what I have to do in college."

That hands-off approach to mentoring was no accident.

"I just want them to be self-starters," says Tozer of his junior staff. "We try to wean the student of any misconception they have that we're going to tell them how to do it. Hopefully they fail miserably a few times and then come to us with questions. It's a model that works pretty well."

Those skills are paying dividends for Kim, now a freshman at Harvard University. She isn't sure yet what field she'll pursue, though it will almost certainly be in science or math. Regardless of her path, the patience, persistence and responsibility she learned at the Mag Lab have helped lay the foundation for future success in science – and life – that no text could possibly have taught her.