5/28/24

This was the start of our Climate and Sustainability REU program since Monday was a holiday. Traffic was also not to underestimate.  Even then, I was still excited to meet the rest of the REU student. It was a long day full of new information. It felt like I had an overload of information in my brain at that moment. Overall, It was nice to be able to get to know the other REU student before the official start of my REU.

5/29/24

This day was about our general lab safety training, biosafety training, and meeting with our mentors. It was another day of getting loads of new information. I was also excited to meet my mentor for the first time. After the trainings that we had to attend, the REU students met up with their mentors. It was nice to spend time getting to know my mentor before he showed me the lab that I will be working at this 8 weeks. I was excited to be working at the McCary lab during this summer. I also met another lab researcher currently working on her lab experiment for this summer. It was very nice to know that I would be able to work with other people along the research project. All in all, I believe that this going to be one of my summer that is full of learning and research experience.

5/30/24

I am now getting the hang of driving in downtown. This day is mostly about getting paperworks done and arranging my planner so that I am keeping up with all the new things I have to do. Me and my PI also talked what are goals are for the research project we were going to be working on. I was also tasked to complete a research proposal for the research project we were doing.

5/31/24

Today was a rainy day so I had to drive and walk to lab slower than usual. I did some readings for my research proposal. Afterwards, one of the people in my lab showed me how to identify different types of arthropods we have in the lab. It was really cool to look at since we had this crazy microscope which also had a camera built in. As we were looking at it, I was guessing what was the taxonomy and what their specific species was. One of them was really cool that even my PI had too look at it to understand what it was. It was a mite, specifically a oribatid. It had parasites either coming out of it or trying to get in on the chest part. All in all it was a great first week for my REU. I am so excited to start working on our lab experiment and my independent project that we wanted to have along with it.

image inserted was the oribatid that we found interesting.