Week 13!

     Time flies and here we are at the end of the semester! My days have been filled with quite a lot between classes, work, and TRAIN. I have however had the chance to work more on the final details of my paper and fix some things on my poster after the AZ NV Academy of Science presentations. In addition to this I have been working on future steps as I would like to continue on this experimental process with microplastics in some new directions starting in the fall. The nice thing is I have an internship this summer that looks at aspects of the microplastics as well. So I am hoping that can continue by aiding my experimental design and process. 

    I am excited to be able to take a trip to ASU tomorrow to be given a tour of a lab over there from one of Dr. Cotter's old students who is now a grad student at ASU. In addition I am also excited to see everyone's finish presentations in the next couple weeks! I am wishing you all the best!

Week 11!

     Oh my goodness, my business is at an apex, or I hope at least. The 21 credits I am enrolled in this semester decided to get feisty all around the same time so I have been in battle mode to say the least. It's been a good experience in that it has helped me to decide to turn the credit dial down next semester. 

    This week has been defined by a few things for TRAIN. The first is the poster presentation this Saturday for the Arizona Nevada Academy of Science annual meeting. That has translated into a lot of practice sessions and going over the poster we had printed this last week. I am very excited for the opportunity and the judging brings a level of anxiety, in the best way possible. In addition to that I continued to work on my rough draft for my research paper. Its always fun, and slightly tedious, to go back through and translate all of the notes and different aspects of research to one paper. I have enjoyed it though as it is such an important aspect of being involved in the world of science.

    While I have been doing a lot of microplastics work this semester and standardizing protocols and such: I haven't been able to get into electrocoagulation as much as I had wanted too. I do have some parts and am close to running some trials on my experimental design which really excites me. However I wouldn't be able to get to this place without doing the work that I did this semester. 

    That being said I am still excited for the road to come. 

Week 10!

     It has been a very busy week in light of the upcoming Arizona Nevada Academy of Science annual meeting next week. I was able to complete the poster with some other team members and am very excited for the opportunity to be able to present. That took up a lot of my time over the last week. 

    In addition to working on my poster I had a decent load of lab work that I needed to take care of. We had some issues with some experimental controls and the team decided to redo samples and filtrations of water samples from the five stages collected earlier in the semester. That translated to a couple of late lab evenings where I ran 400ml through a vacuum filtration process. After which I allowed them to dry for 24 hours and dyed them with Nile Red. The team and I will be counting those filters tomorrow and I am excited to see how the counts go. 

    Finally, I have been quite busy this week with school stuff as well. It feels like that time in the semester where everyone is starting to see the finish line and we have a decent amount of tests. Nonetheless I am happy to be in a good position.

I am receiving some parts on Monday for which will allow me to start some electrocoagulation experiments so there is a lot to look forward to in the near future!