Final week!
Cant believe it went by so quickly! I spent the afternoon modifying my poster to decide at the end of the day that I still didnt like it and in fact did not like the majority of the changes I did. Therefore I restored my version from freaking 11 am yesterday and I am going to do it all over again. Hopefully I will like my poster more by the end of today. Hope yall are all doing well with yalls posters! See everyone on FRIDAY!
Happy Monday guys!
It’s our last week! Where has the time gone!Today was my last day working on my research. I was running my transfected cells through the flow cytometer! I had some cell death (we kind of knew that it would happen), but I should have some much needed results on my poster!
I hope everyone has a great last week!
Happy Learning!
Down to the final week of RET and reflecting on what a wonderful learning experience this has been. I am looking forward to seeing everyone’s final posters this week.
Today I got to use the camera that measures contact angle and finally visualize some differences in our products. I also ran a dispersibility over time test to see how well my samples stayed in solution. I will be adding these results to my poster over the next day and hopefully everything finally comes together into a cohesive story.
Happy final days, and thanks for all the wonderful memories these weeks!
Well, after successfully hardening the clay into ceramic, we began testing the pieces (a regular clay for control, and a TiO2 coated piece) using methyl blue. We had a surprising reaction because the TiO2 absorbed some methyl blue, which didn’t bleach as we exposed it to UV light. The methyl blue solution did degrade some for both the control and the coated piece. However, there were still trace amounts of methyl blue for both samples after 6 hours. I got to use a UV photospectrometer to analyze the samples, which was pretty awesome.
We tested Saturday to get data, and we started another reaction today. Hopefully, we’ll get better results!
Oh my goodness everyone!! Here we are on our LAST WEEK!!! How crazy is this?! How fast does time fly?!
Last week, I mostly worked on my video and poster that we had to complete for NEWT RET. In the mornings, I would autoclave tips, tubes, and/or prepare agar/buffer for the week.
I also showed a high school student that was interning in our lab how to pipette and to reduce the amount of bacteria being exposed.
We’re almost done!!
This week, I focused on trying to clean up the signal from the webcam in order to get a clean reading of pulse rate.
This involved including Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) coding into my python code.
Te results were very clean for trials using a finger directly over a webcam as seen below
By the end of the week, I could pick up the pulse from a section of my forehead using the webcam, but the signal has a lot of noise around it.
This week was hectic- I finalized my program on Wednesday with a lot of help from Yong, our mentor. Although, I wanted to the computer to calculate the heart-rate- I ended up settling with raw manual data analysis.
I was working on my poster like a madman on Thursday and Friday. I am quite proud of my final product. I haven’t received my feedback, so that should be exciting. I used a QR code on my poster as well- thanks to Jimmy for that idea.
I got my results and conclusion- I would have love to increase my sample size, but I ran out of time. As a group, we have to start planning how we will teach next week- I’m interested to see how high school students will be different compared to my middle-school students.
See the poster from 2019 RET Summer Symposium
Thanks to my mentor Yongyi Zhao, my fellow interns Azka Bukhari, Gary Johnson, Shelia McDaniels, Ali Ozek, & Pamela Williams, RSTEM team Allen Antoine & Christina Crawford, & the NSF Expeditions in Computing (Grant NSF-IIS-1730574).
Week was busy with preparing data for poster. Also, learned about Electrospray Ionisation Mass Spectrometry.
This week the lab has been under maintenance routines. I learned how to transfer the liquid helium from the Dewar to the probe tank of the Magnetic Properties Measurement System.
Also, how to load a resistivity sample puck, Macy explained the maintenance routine for the glove box and how to change a filter.
Finally, I witness how to take apart the X-ray diffractometer. Cool eh! I remember taking everything apart when I was a child. Hopefully, I will be able to obtain my data before Monday, since I’m still waiting to analyze a a sample.
