One of the electromagnetism courses I took during my studies in Electrical Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece was “Scattering Theory”, taught by Prof. Dimitrios Chrissoulidis. I did my diploma thesis under his supervision, studying how a pulsed wave is scattered by a sphere with an eccentric spherical inclusion. It was my first experience doing research. I chose this topic because I wanted to study how the electromagnetic waves of mobile phones affect our brain. At that time a lot of research was being done on the thermal effects of these waves on living organisms but I was interested in studying the non-thermal ones. My idea was that I would model the head as a sphere, and then the brain as an eccentric, pulsating spherical inclusion. And then I would study how the brain pulsation would be affected by the incoming wave. It took me a year to do the calculations for the scattering of the wave by a sphere with one, non-pulsating eccentric spherical inclusion. (And then another 5 years to finalize the results and publish them; ok, while I was working as a software engineer, then doing a master’s degree, then working on my PhD). My takeaway was that research is painful and obtaining results takes much longer than you initially think. And that nonetheless I wanted to pursue a PhD degree.
Related peer-review paper:
Scattering of a pulsed wave by a sphere with an eccentric spherical inclusion, Vervelidou&Chrissoulidis, 2012, Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 29(4), pp. 605-616, doi:10.1364/JOSAA.29.000605.