Last hello everyone!

This last week, I got my poster printed, practiced presenting and got feedback. Tomorrow is the big day – research symposium! I am excited yet nervous, however, I’m glad to know many of the guests there understand I’m an undergraduate and may not have all the knowledge.

The first thing I’ve learned throughout this program is that everyone here is a cheerleader for each other. The community throughout this program (Dr. Zafar and the other interns) are undeniable, and I believe that helped me push through tough assignments and force myself into uncomfortable situations. In my admission essay to Rice, I wrote that community is the first step to success, and I believe that’s reflected throughout this program.

Next, I learned that research is not always “ground-breaking”. I was hoping to make innovative observations, yet that did not exactly happen – which is okay. I’m happy with my results and being able to have lots of data.

Another thing I learned is research cannot be valuable without being able to communicate it effectively. As I’ve practiced presenting, I try to simplify things as much as possible each time while keeping the scientific explanation in the back of my head.

Last thing I learned; I want to continue to do research. Through the SERS Program here at Rice, I hope to continue research in a space science field!

I’m so happy to share my experience with the most amazing people during this REU. I’ve enjoyed the weekly meetings with the other REU interns, OURI workshops, and support from Dr. Zafar.

I hope I get to come back and share my experience as an REU student and inspire other students.

Thank you all so much, and I hope to stay in touch!

This week, I had to wrap up my lab experiments so I could plot my data and organize it for my poster presentation. The project’s approach kept evolving, even up to this week, which was challenging. Eventually, we pinpointed the concentrations to measure, allowing me to establish a control group for comparison.

I spent most of my time at my desk, plotting data and writing my abstract. I preferred doing this work at Fondren Library or a nearby coffee shop. Writing the abstract was quite enjoyable due to the strict character limit, which helped me reflect on the past eight weeks. This week, everything finally came together. Connecting the repetitive tasks from the past weeks to my results and conclusions was tricky, and while I don’t fully grasp how to interpret all my results, I’m satisfied with the progress and conclusions I’ve reached.

Because I have recently focused on preparing for the research symposium this Friday, I have not done much lab work. This week, however, my mentor has begun planning for her next set of experiments as the school year approaches. Right now, she is investigating the kinetic adsorption of granular activated carbon (GAC) and zeolites. To do this, we are shaking our contaminated materials for differing amounts of time and running them through the HPLC or LC-MS to quantify the amount of PFAS adsorption. The purpose of these experiments is to compare the rates of adsorption between GAC and the zeolites. This is a factor that was not included in my experiments.

Before creating about 70 samples to analyze, I was takes to create two viles of contaminated GAC. One would be shaken for one minute and then other would be shaken for five minutes. The GAC samples had positive results, so we went ahead and prepared the viles for the contaminated samples of GAC and modified zeolites.

These experiments are time sensitive and something I have not done before, so it was fun change of pace. I will unfortunately no longer be an intern at Rice University to see the results, but I am glad to be of helpful use until the very end.

I have dedicated the past couple of weeks to preparation for the research symposium. This week has been more about practicing our deliveries. I prepared a one-minute elevator pitch and received feedback on what I could say to improve it. I have also practiced a slightly longer pitch on my own and will share it with my mentor and another graduate student for them to advise me on what I can improve. Furthermore, I have picked up physical poster for Friday, and I am really proud of how it came out. Comparing the poster, I did at my community college to the one I made during this internship truly shows the different ways I have grown as a researcher.

Overall, this week has been very bittersweet for me. I’m very happy to have been able to participate in an REU that closely relates to my interests, but I am a little sad that it is ending. I’ve met new faces throughout my short time here and learned many things about myself as a learner and as a person. As an undergraduate student highly interested in research, I aim to continue to utilize all the knowledge regarding research and graduate school in education for years to come.

This week we had to quickly run experiments for CaSO4 so that we could compare our results to CaCO3 and have a conclusion to complete the abstract and the poster presentation. Time was ticking and it felt like we weren’t going to make it. We pulled through, but it was super rushed. I wish we would have figured out all the kinks a couple of weeks ago that way we could have ran more experiments. My mentor said that this is an ongoing experiment and not to worry too much about not having a solid conclusion, because research is a never-ending cycle and this way the work that I have been a part of will pave the way for the next researcher.

I’ve been in this building a few times and I just noticed that there is a telephone booth!
The last time I remember seeing one being used was by my mom when I was a kid and it brought on a good feeling.
It doesn’t take quarters, and it’s a digital one but it’s still pretty nice to see!

This week we had time to go over our results from our experiments with CaCO3 and realized that we needed to change the solution since our membrane was deteriorating too quickly. My mentor decided to remove NaCl from our feed solution because he believed that it may be too corrosive for the sensitive membrane. So instead of running experiments on CaSO4 this week, we ran CaCO3 one more time. As it turns out his intuition was 100% right. Not only did this save our membrane, but it also gave a sense of security that the results that we are observing are truly a result of the specific salt we are reporting on. We will be trying CaSO4 next week so that we can have solid evidence for our research and hopefully we can document our findings by the time the presentation is around.

I took a different route to get to campus and this building really caught my attention.
Details are 10/10.

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.

I thought of week 9 as the last “real” week of this program, everyone is talking about wrapping u their poster/research It was very interesting seeing everyone at different paces. I just worked on my poster through this week and never really set foot inside the lab unless it was for the name of a chemical I used or a picture of a tool at the lab. I do feel like I’m going to clean up my viles and glass capillaries next week but I’ll start when Joe gives me the go-ahead. I don’t know if he’d want to use my samples or if someone in the lab would find it useful. It’d be a waste to dispose of it before getting official confirmation. In addition, I realized I’m going to miss everyone in the lab, at first everyone was distant and doing their own things but now everyone talks to me. They are all friendly and super nice. Whenever Joe wasn’t at the lab they would be happy to answer my questions or even ask em questions themselves. It was an incredible experience. Also the “It’s a wrap” event was also very fun, I met 2 new friends who were also just great to be around, it was a good social hangout even if near the end pretty much everyone was gone, I enjoyed going and seeing all the pictures everyone posted and hearing all the separate projects, hurdles, solutions and funny stories everyone had.

One week left of my internship here at Rice University. I have done so much in the last ten weeks. I do wish the internship was longer, because it looks like I won’t be able to finish my research and then I won’t have access to the lab anymore. I did get a lot of research done though, and it’s enough for me to present it.

Most of my week I had spent it finalizing my poster draft, considering the suggestion from my peers, faculty and advisor. I realized that it was difficult to simplify the information on my poster, because I had done so much over the summer. I managed to put almost everything on the poster. The main components, and I got creative and designed my own figures, and plots. That was fun. I learned how to code the scripts and plot them in MATLAB, a computing platform.

With the help of my mentor, I conducted some experiments again to verify the data was accurate,

interpreted the data, and finalized it for my poster. Results and conclusions look good. Now it’s just a matter of explaining my research briefly. I am a little unsure about the technical aspects of my research, so next week, I will spend most of my time going over the articles I used for my research to solidify any gaps in my knowledge. As well as practice the elevator speech and attempt to condense all my research into sixty seconds.

I will say I am a bit nervous but also excited to present at the symposium next week.

-Adrian

During week 8 the main focus was to finish the poster, specifically ironing out the details. What should I add? How do I shorten it out? I struggled a lot with the background and method since it became either too much text or un-identifiable. It eventually became easier for the method since it’s basically adding pictures to a step-by-step process but the background was the more challenging aspect, there’s too much to talk about for BNNT and Nanotubes in general so I wrote everything I thought was cool/important on my notebook and started crossing stuff off or circling them to make sure I add them. Another insanely challenging part was the phase diagram itself, I was very confused about how to do it and it was by far what changed the most. Joe thankfully helped me out and sent me a reference phase diagram he made from one of his papers. It was a lifesaver and I was able to do all of it on my own even if I had to research how to use certain programs in Excel and work around certain limitations, the only thing Joe thought I could’ve improved on it was adding H2SO4 t the top and CSA at the bottom which I did. I was very pleased with it and it was the thing that ate up most of my time compared to everything else. The 2nd hardest part was actually starting the poster, was the font correct? How were the spaces? Is the logo big enough? It was scary since Ive never done anything like it, I was walking on no man’s land, it was almost thrilling. I enjoyed the process an I found it very fun to find alternate solutions and compromise with the limitations of the poster.