During this first week and a half or so of Senior Project, I have been jotting notes down on any effects I may notice on my learning abilities and processes. So far, I’ve only noticed one significant change in my learning, which is the way I process information. Normally, when learning about a new topic, or refreshing myself on an old one, I take the information I’m given at face value, and just try to commit it to memory and understanding right away. I know this is still my first instinct when learning, as when I started my research project on lasers on Tuesday March 31st that was exactly what I did. I immediately started looking into the science and mechanics behind laser cutters right off the bat. However, during the classes I helped to teach later in that week, as I explained things to the students I noticed something that perhaps should have been obvious, which is that I was better able to explain the things I understood on a very basic and fundamental level first, before going into the more complicated topics. To better explain things to them, the rest of the work I did that week was started from the base level and developed from there.

However, this also affected my independent research project. When I started my second research session, I didn’t continue from where I’d left off last time; rather, I went back to basic principles of lasers, such as the effects of changing wavelength on the energy output and range of the laser, and the fact that all the energy of the laser is being focused into a single point due to the coherency of the waves that make it up. Initially I didn’t notice that I had gone back to basics, but a few days ago I did, and I thought about why that happened. I realized that while I understood what I had taken notes on, I couldn’t possibly have explained it to anyone else since I hadn’t learned the basics. I’d learned some of the complexities and obstacles involved with cutting through steel with light, but not how that was able to be done in the first place. Even though I wasn’t about to teach the science of laser cutters to anyone, learning the basics helped me to understand the other things I had learned better. It created a much more coherent stream of ideas, from creating a laser via stimulated emission of photons by electrons through producing gaseous, vaporized steel by cutting with lasers. By getting to a place where I was more comfortable explaining what I had learned to someone else, even if I wasn’t going to, it helped me to better understand what I was learning in the first place.