The editor of Microscopy Today has asked me to write an article which describes the Placement Office of the Microscopy Society of America and I have accepted this opportunity to bring the history and operation of the Office to the attention of ms readers in what follows the word “Candidate” refers to a member of MSA who is in good standing and who has registered appropriately with the Placement Office as actively seeking a position or a change, and “Employer” refers to institutions or companies who have registered with the Office as having a position open.

Years ago electron microscopes usually had an hour meter as a standard part of the instrument Unfortunately hour meters have been eliminated from many modern scapes and are not even readily available as an option from most microscope manufacturers.

An hour meter is a very useful device. Every microscope I've owned or supervised has had an hour meter that was factory installed, added by helpful field service persons, or that I installed myself. Few of us would enthusiastically buy a car without an odometer, why should we want an electron microscope without an hour meter?

If supplying an hour meter on an electron microscope costs too much in production time or money, certainly it would take only minimal effort at the design stage to plan a connection point or plug to operate a clock as an ancillary part of an appropriate circuit.

Let's face it, optics is a fascinating field, but it can bore you to death. My purpose in writing these articles is to show that there are simple, intuitive ways to look at microscopes that can illuminate rather than bore. I have been an optical engineer for many years and have observed many unique ways of looking at optical instruments. I hope that I can share my enthusiasm and insight for light and its manipulation and give some insights that microscopisis may have missed. The microscope is particularly interesting because the glass lenses often do more than one job at the same time. Most of the principles of optical microscopy are directly transferable to electron microscopy, and I will point out specific cases as I go along.

This month we are going to deviate from Mark Lund's normal discussion and talk about one of the practical problems that must be considered when using an x-ray detector on a scanning electron microscope to solve real-world problems.

Several years ago I worked in the analytical laboratory of a major semiconductor manufacturer. One day a process engineer came into the lab and asked us to develop an analytical method to determine the amount of copper in an aluminum film on a silicon wafer. The levels of copper would be somewhere between 0.5% and 1.0%. He gave me a sample, saying that he didn't know the exact concentration of copper but was certain that it was at least 0.5%.