Local eclipse chasers to shed light on experience

Some of the most important lessons a student can learn are not taught in a classroom. That's what Jean Sack,knives supplier a senior majoring in mechanical engineering, discovered last summer thanks to her experience with the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), funded by the MIT Energy Initiative and BP."Research is a completely different side of academia, and gives you a chance to connect concepts you learned in classes to the real world," Sack says. "This was a liberating experience for me and it gave me the confidence to move forward.There are affordable kitchen knives that perform just as well as their more expensive counterparts.Shun kitchen accessories, the gem of culinary implements are produced by keeping with the proud Japanese tradition of sword making."This wasn't Sack's first experience as a UROP, however. As an eager — perhaps too eager — freshman she did a UROP during the Independent Activities Period. But Sack found that she had not yet sufficiently developed skills or enough knowledge to contribute, especially considering the short time span she had on the paluminum beamroject. But by the time she was a junior, Sack decided to give UROP another shot. She went through a list of mechanical engineering professors conducting energy research and decided to contact those who were running the most interesting projects. Associate Professor Evelyn Wang saw Sack's potential and put her on two main projects: improving heat transfer of condensation, and working on and with a prototype of a solar thermophotovoltaic (STPV) system.Sack's work with condensation, which she performed with PhD candidate Nenad Miljkovic, involved conducting several runs on a variety of surfaces to characterize the heat transfer effectiveness of different types of condensation enabled by different surfaces. Additionally, her work on a prototype of a STPV system, performed with PhD candidate Andrej Lenert, involved concentrating the light from the solar simulator in order to reach higher temperatures to find when the most energy can be obtained from the PV cell. Sack found this work especially interesting because "STPV has the potential to revolutionize solar energy, since it uses the entire solar spectrum and thus has much greater energy potential."One of Sack's favorite parts about her UROP experience was the people."Andrej and Nenad were incredible to work with, and were patient and really fun to be around," Sack says. "It was wonderful to be in an atmosphere where brilliant people asked for and appreciated my thoughts on projects, as well as asked what my plans were for graduate school, and provided an endless resource of experience and advice."