The Story Collider

his week, we're presenting stories about the struggle to find friends. Science can be a lonely job -- but it can also connect us to others in ways we'd never imagine.Part 1: Feeling isolated in her new job as a particle accelerator operator at Fermilab, Cindy Joe finds comfort in the friendship of her unconventional pet.Part 2: Patrick Honner starts to doubt his lifelong love of math when graduate school becomes a lonely experience.Cindy Joe is an engineering physicist working with several of Fermilab’s experiments studying neutrinos, tiny particles that might hold the answers to some of the universe’s biggest mysteries. A first-generation college student, she grew up dreaming big in the back of her family’s Chinese restaurant in a small town in Arkansas. While obtaining her bachelor’s degree in physics, she also became a licensed senior reactor operator at Reed College’s nuclear research reactor. She then moved to even bigger machines, working as a particle accelerator operator in Fermilab’s Main Control Roo