Hello world,

We’ve reached the last stretch of our journey. With only one week left, it feels like we’ve only been here for a short time. I know most of us are still scrambling, trying to gather some results for our poster (myself included).  The date is 07/22/2024, marking the beginning of week 9

 

Monday (07/22): Today was my busiest day yet. I spent the majority of today preparing my poster draft which is due at 11:59 pm today. In order to prepare the poster, I needed to get my graphs and results ready so I spent about half of my time working on that. For my research, I was given three polymers to work on but due to the sake of time and results available, I will only be presenting one polymer at the symposium.

Tuesday (07/23): Today was quite similar to yesterday, with lots of repetitions and data analysis. Before heading to the cubicle, I had the weekly OURI meeting which went over resume/CV workshops. It was very useful and I plan on implementing some areas into my resume and CV to make me a better applicant. For our weekly REU meeting, we gave feedback on each other’s posters. My feedback was very helpful and I was able to utilize some of the comments. I also scheduled some more time with the rheometer today so I can acquire the necessary data that I needed for the polymers. However, I wasn’t able to get through all the polymer samples I took because each individual test was more time-consuming than usual and I had someone who needed to use the rheometer after me. In addition, I had an appointment at  Walgreens for my bacterial meningitis vaccine. The shot was faster and painless than I expected.

Wednesday (07/24): Today, I continued working on my final poster. This step has been a lot harder than I was expecting and I think the main problem is trying to identify what to include on the poster and what not to include. I also don’t have all the data I need yet so it has been pretty difficult trying to work on it when it all revolves around the data. This is also my first time making a poster. But all in all, I think the main problem is my slight dislike of posters. I prefer using a presentation rather than a poster because I find that easier to organize. In addition, I find posters to be quite limiting due to the many specific requirements that it requires but I’ll get over it. It’ll all be done in no time.

Thursday (07/25): Another day of working on the poster. I have made quite a lot of progress today. I reorganized the structure of my poster compared to what I had on the draft and I organized the pictures to ensure they were the same sizes. I also worked on reducing the amount of white space that I had on the poster. To finish up the remaining data, I scheduled some time with the rheometer today and tested polymer 3 on shear rheology.

Friday (07/26): Last day of the week and another with the rheometer as well. Today I spent a majority of my time getting data for polymer 3 with no brine in it. I made some more progress on my poster as well by adding more images but I’m still missing some data which I am computing in excel and that takes a while but so far so good. I plan on working over the weekend and finishing by Saturday. Here’s a peak at what it looks like so far.