Kevin Hoang  

Hey Jillian, how are you?

Hey Jillian, are you able to hear me?

Jillian Anderson  

Yes, hi! I can hear you.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah, thanks. So I wanted to start off by thanking you for joining me today in my interview. And before we actually get started going into the questions, I wanted to introduce myself a little bit. So my name is Kevin Hoang. I'm a senior at Peachtree Ridge High School. It's around the Atlanta area around 30 minutes from the city. And the reason for my interview here today is because as a first generation student, whose family members have not ever gotten a higher degree than high school, I wanted to reach out to PhD students like yourself, who have gone through the process and have gone to that academic level, and seek advice, because as a first gen student, I found it hard for myself to find college specific advice. And I contacted you specifically because you have a PhD in mechanical engineering. And in high school, what I do is I'm part of my high school robotics team, I lead our design and the building of our robot. And what I wanted to do in the future is also to become a mechanical engineer. So that's why I'm seeking out to PhD students like yourself.

Jillian Anderson  

That's really great. Thanks for sharing your background with me.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah, no problem. 

Jillian Anderson  

I guess I'll tell you a little bit of my background, if you'd like. Um, so yeah, I'm starting my fourth year of the PhD. Next Tuesday, I actually changed majors, and dropped out of college a few times before I decided to become an engineer. And I think that comes from kind of similarly to you. While there are other like college graduates in my family, there are no engineers, so I didn't even know it was an option to be an engineer until later in life. And then when I found out that's what I wanted to do, I enrolled in my community college. St. Louis County College. I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. And then I went to undergrad at Missouri University of Science and Technology and Rolla, Missouri. And now I'm here at Stanford.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah, I actually have two cousins that went to Stanford a while back. One of them played football. And the other one is getting her PhD at Michigan right now.

Jillian Anderson  

So, yes. Oh, that's great.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah, so you already started off by introducing to us about yourself. But can you tell us who you are? And like, a little bit more of your heritage and background?

Jillian Anderson  

So yes, I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. I was born and raised there. My My mom was born and raised there. I think that's, that's really all there is to say about that. My family has been there for a while is still there. I guess when I graduated from high school, I was pretty aimless. I didn't, like my family wanted me to go to college, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And I kind of thought, oh, I want to be like my aunt. So I started out in accounting, thinking that I really liked math. But then I didn't really like accounting, it turned out. So I got an Associates in business just to like wrap up some degree, instead of going finishing in the accounting degree. And then I studied music for a little bit because I've always played music my whole life. And then I just didn't know what to do. So I traveled for a few years. And when I was traveling, I was also working on some sustainable farms, off grid farms, and I was learning about alternative materials and alternative means of survival. And I was really interested in it and I came across these sustainable buildings called Earthships that are made with recycled materials. They're like very, very efficient and like, don't need any utilities. It's all built into the structure. And I was really blown away by them. And I really wanted to learn as much as I could and build my own one day. So I kind of like tried to do that for a while with in various routes. But ultimately I went on their website and I looked at job openings. And they said they had an opening for engineer. I was like, let me try to do that. So that's when I went back to community college for the engineering degree.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah, of course. And then, right now you're at Stanford, correct? Yes. So why Why exactly did you decide to actually pursue a PhD instead of stopping after Community College.

Jillian Anderson  

So I've always loved school. The community college degree, it was... Community college is always a stepping stone, like the credits will transfer into university. And because I paid for everything out of pocket, and I, I didn't really get any fellowships, or scholarships until I got to university. So it was the more affordable route for me, especially starting out not knowing what I wanted to do. I was able to have a really flexible schedule, and work at the same time that I was going to school. So the community college was great. And I highly advocate that for everyone. There's no reason to go into debt for school. And then I went to undergrad and throughout Community College and in undergrad, I had professors encouraging me to go to graduate school, just by the work I was doing by the amount that I was showing, I enjoyed it very much. So I think I was really pushed in the direction of grad school. And from the get go from learning about Earthships, and alternative materials and ways to be way like ultra sustainable, like radically sustainable. I thought that we need new materials, we need new things. And the way that we develop new things is through research. So research felt like what I needed to do to achieve my goals. And everyone says if you want to do research, you got to get a PhD. And so that's kind of that's kind of the path that I was guided on to. But you know, actually an undergrad I did a lot of research without even having a bachelor's degrees. So I don't know if that limitation is real. But it certainly introduces you to more people to be in the educational institutions, and it gives you the tools to, to pursue a lot of different things. So that's kind of why I'm doing a PhD. I'm really passionate about what I do. And that's what they tell passionate people to do.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah, of course, after undergrad, did you have any considerations of other graduate schools besides Stanford?

Jillian Anderson  

Yes. So I applied to, I think, seven schools, or six or seven. And, honestly, when I got into Stanford, you know, you see, like, Oh, this is a dream school, it's not going to happen. So I got and I was like, Oh, I'm obviously gonna go. But I would have been happy at a lot of different schools. I looked at Washington University in St. Louis. Because I've done research there in undergrad, I applied to Georgia Tech, MIT, Harvard, Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern, and Berkeley. But I went with Stanford ultimately, obviously.

Kevin Hoang  

Did you actually get into, if you don't mind me asking, Did you get accepted into the other ones?

Jillian Anderson  

I got into like, half of them, and I got rejected from half of them. So, um, but I think it was good to apply to a healthy number of schools. I had like some safeties in there. And some, you know, some dream schools. So and I think that my application actually kind of got better as I worked on it, like reapplying to schools. And, you know, they'll ask you different questions and different prompts. And I think I was able to, like, flush out my story more and like, make it more robust by being exposed to different application processes.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah, and obviously, Stanford is like one of the top schools in the US. But like you said, I'm not sure which other schools you got in. But let's say you were to get into MIT. Why exactly did you choose Stanford over the other schools, besides it being the fact that it is a top university?

Jillian Anderson  

Um, so there are a number of reasons why I chose Stanford. First of all, I love San Francisco, and I was really happy to be able to live close by and get to explore the city. Next, Stanford, really, when I was like touring schools, there was a huge emphasis on community here. And I think that that is like one of the most important things because graduate school is so difficult. It's really important that you feel like you belong somewhere and you feel like you can reach out to people. And I think that Stanford has really come through I think I have really like a lot of different outlets to be supported by community in different ways. And that's really essential to making it through this.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah. Now at Stanford, would you mind going into, like, what sort of projects you have worked on? Or projects that you're currently working on?

Jillian Anderson  

Sure. So I'm in the Nano heat lab, and we study heat transfer at nano and micro scales. And what I do is, and most of the research I've done is develop materials or processes to alter surfaces to study how we can improve phase change, heat transfer. So right now I'm building a vapor chamber out of silicon. And the idea is to make evaporation, from liquid to vapor, and condensation to make those mechanisms work more efficiently for computer chip cooling. And that's like a little bit tangential to like, the ultra sustainable materials that I came in wanting to work on. But it does, like it does touch that topic. And I'm really getting to learn interesting physics.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah, so your real world application of this research is for computer chip coding, right? Yes, it does it can apply to anything else.

Jillian Anderson  

Can it apply to anything else? Yeah, I'm sure it can be. I would like to see it applied to Earthships or alternative buildings, eventually, and making buildings more efficient, and more self sustaining. It can also be applied to like lots of industrial processes. We want to be able to recover heat from, you know, assays that use a lot of heat, and they just like, throw it out and are trying to get rid of it. And maybe if we?

Kevin Hoang  

Yes, are you cut out there?

Jillian Anderson  

Yeah, I'm back now, I guess.

Kevin Hoang  

Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Okay. Yeah, you were you cut out at the point where you're talking about how you can use it in for buildings?

Jillian Anderson  

Yeah, so I've also worked in HVAC or heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. That's another application for highly efficient surfaces, and he transferred and phase change. And also, I think I was saying like other industrial processes that want to cool things and get rid of heat. There's lots of applications for heat transfer at a macro scale.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah. And then going on into your research. You said that you're creating a lab experiment. Do you use CAD software to help you create these experiments?

Jillian Anderson  

I have in the past, I'm not using any CAD right now. I'm doing some micro machining and Stanford's nano fabrication lab. So it's like etching of silicon wafers to make different micro structures. So we're using like plasma enhanced etching  tools, and things like chemical vapor deposition. And I'm using these tools to structure the surface of silicon wafers. And to study how different geometries can enhance evaporation or enhance capillary fluid motion.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah, that's actually that's pretty cool. Because the many of the tools that you're saying I kind of like, have an idea of what you're talking about that same time, like no idea what you're talking about.

Jillian Anderson  

Yeah, it's, it's a lot.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah. And then, can you go on into describe a challenge that you faced in your academic journey or your research journey? And how did you overcome it?

Jillian Anderson  

Um, I think I'll speak to some research I've done previously, where I'm having maybe a similar problem right now. But this previous research was a WashU. And it was for like, a 10 week summer experience. And now you know, I'm here for four years and I'm having a sales experience. So while this was resolved in a few weeks, I'm facing a few months of this problem now. And I guess the problem back then was just not really being able to get my experiment to work and having to try lots and lots of different things, and review the literature over and over again. And after multiple attempts coming to my advisor and saying, I think I have it working and her telling me no, I don't have it working still just kind of that devastation. And, you know, sucking it up and trying and trying again. And I think I think that that is just like a persistent challenge of doing research. Like, we think we know how something is going to work. And we find out how it actually works eventually, right. So yeah, my experiment right now, it's not working for quite some time. And I think that lots of PhDs go through this. But you just have to keep trying, and one day, you will learn something from it. And the main thing I learned from my previous experience was to ask questions frequently and early. Because no one has all the answers, but people can help you piece together something to get you going in the right direction. I think that's probably the number one most important thing of doing research. It's like we're here to ask questions. Right? So ask the question.

Kevin Hoang  

Going into the people who are helping your research, can you share a mentor advisor who has greatly influenced your career or thinking.

Jillian Anderson  

I would speak again to my my WashU advisor, Patti Weissensee. She, at the end of my experience, she gave me some compliments, that made me feel a lot better about how difficult the summer had gone. And I remember she came to the lab one day when I was setting up my experiment, and she goes, Oh, now you're really an engineer. And I was just kind of confused, because I had like, thrown some paper clips, in some boxes I had found together. And it was just like, the most ridiculous setup. And she's like, No, that's really how engineering is. And I was like, Oh, thank goodness. And I would also want to shout out to another mentor I had at the community college, Dr. Terrence Freeman, he always said to take every opportunity that you can to present your work and to speak in front of people. And I've taken that to heart. And he always encouraged me to really participate in in, in everything, whenever there was an opportunity, he would encourage his students like, oh, you should go to this event, you should go to this conference. And I think that that's really important to stay active in your community, and to get involved in the type of work that you want to be involved in as early as possible.

Kevin Hoang  

Yeah, and then going back to like you said, when you were in, you said that during high school and then coming out of high school, you kind of didn't have a direction that you particularly wanted to go in, but um, during like, even your elementary or high school years, was there any were there any subjects that like definitely piqued your interest?