Learn what research during SIMCODES is really like.
Office Space
SIMCODES has shared office space for the cohort in 1761 Gilman Hall (one of ISU’s chemistry buildings). Gilman is next to Ames Lab and Hach Hall. Most chemistry mentors will have offices in either Gilman, Ames Lab, or Hach. Computer science is not too much further away in Atanasoff Hall.
Additionally, your mentor may provide you with access/space with the rest of your mentor’s group. This is at your mentor’s discretion. Note that due to federal Department of Energy policy, it is a somewhat involved process to get you unsupervised access to Ames Lab; however, visitor (i.e., supervised) access is easy to obtain and can be arranged on occasion.
All locations are within walking distance of university housing, and near CyRide stops. Parking on campus requires special permits and summer interns are NOT eligible for such permits.
Computer Access
SIMCODES focuses on computational chemistry, computer science, software development, and AI/ML. You will be making extensive use of a computer. To that end, we assume each student will be bringing their own laptop and will be using that laptop for development. The detailed specs of your laptop, like operating system, hard drive capacity, RAM amount, and GPU type, are relatively irrelevant. If your laptop was made within the last decade and can access the internet, I just about guarantee it will be fine. If you do not have a laptop or you do not plan on bringing a laptop, please reach out ASAP so we can make arrangements.
Communicating
Research in the SIMCODES project is a team endeavor. SIMCODES uses different communication technologies to convey different information.
We strongly encourage you to use Slack (https://slack.com/signin#/signin) for day-to-day communication; unless you are discussing a specific piece of code, then we’ll recommend GitHub. In case you are not familiar with Slack it is a communication platform like Microsoft Teams that is very popular with the software development community (and non-Windows users). While Slack tutorials are available (https://slack.com/help/articles/360059976673-Slack-video-tutorials), it is, for the most part, fairly self-explanatory. Compared to email, you’ll find that Slack excels at group conversations and is just as good as email for one-on-one conversations.
Important announcements are communicated via email.
Research Expectations
This is a full time position and you will be expected to work 40 hours per week. You can do a lot of research in 40 hours and it is thus helpful to take notes as you go so you can remember what you did. Experimental scientists usually do this in a lab notebook. Theorists rarely do this. Instead we track our progress