Hello World,

This week has been full of progress, data collection, and hours at my cubicle. Due to the increase in the work I had this week, I couldn’t organize my blog daily and write as each day happened so I’ll summarize each day to the best of my ability. On Monday, I read some documents that had been sent to me from my mentor a week prior. The documents were very insightful and helped me understand more about my topic, polymer flooding. After a while, the optical tweezer handler came up to my lab and we went over data analysis from my previous experiment and what that looks like. Although not as complicated as the machine itself, the data analysis section from the optical tweezer was intimidating at first but I was able to get the hang of it by Thursday. I also worked on my abstract based on the feedback I received from my mentor and Dr Faiza.

On Tuesday, I scheduled a time slot with the rheometer. I prepared some polymers as my mentor requested. For these polymers, they were made without brine. It only consisted of di water and each individual polymer.  The polymers required two hours to be completely dissolved in the water so the last polymer was made on Wednesday. I was able to test the other polymers that had already been created, which gave me more data to use on my poster.

On Wednesday, I completed the preparation of the polymers. I also used this time to analyze the data that I had received from rheometer on Tuesday. I forgot to take my flash drive with me to the rheometer so I had to transport those data into excel manually. This was a  lengthy procedure but I was able to complete it on Thursday.

On Thursday, I worked on my presentation. I forgot to note that I had started this presentation on Monday and had been slowly working on it all this while. This presentation will be an extensive info session on what my research session. It’ll help make it easier for me to put together my poster since I’ll already have the overall information, I’ll just have to handpick what to put on the poster. I also continued analyzing the data that I had received from the optical tweezer. I had to manually import the data into excel as well. On Friday, I finished off all the data that I had received from the optical tweezer. The results didn’t come out quite as expected and looked funky so I will reach out the instrument handler about my error.