Oh boy. One of my classes started with a completely unfamiliar topic (fracture mechanics) and the accompanying lab was outside anything I had ever learned, including the lectures we had to cover the material. Unfortunately, my lab partner and I have similar backgrounds and neither of us knew how to approach the subject. In this course, the labs consist of numerical programming and each group has one week to turn in their submission.
I took the lead writing MATLAB code, as my lab partner is not comfortable programming. I asked if he could make a glossary or begin writing the report while we deciphered what the instructions meant and trudged through each line of code, which was available to him via Git.
About a week later, most of the code was working but I had also written the only words on the report. We had one day to finish and every other group had supposedly already turned in their lab. It's 5 P.M. on a Friday and I get this email from my lab partner:
“I tried writing a code of my own but was not able to get it to work. I hope yours worked, because that's the only hope we have to get the lab submitted😃.
Thanks for taking the lead on this, I hope in the future there will be something I can take the lead on😊 so you don't have to do all the work alone.“
Wow. Great. It was a long night but I couldn't get the second half of the lab working, and about midnight I emailed my professor to ask for mercy. There was just one bug in the code but I couldn't find it. The problem was asking us to model crack propagation (i.e., growth of a crack given some initial conditions) under cyclical bending. My code was showing me that the crack didn't grow — it immediately went into catastrophic failure. I couldn't find a dimensional error.
The next morning, my professor asked to take a look at my code. An hour later came the reply:
“... Looks like you are right about the initial crack length... Thanks for catching this! (See email to the entire class)“
Well, at least that felt good!